Drunkheart

CW FISHER It's not surprising Mel Gibson's an alcoholic. Lots of people are. Some have actually stopped drinking forever, but they're all dead. The rest have to make a daily decision to either stay sober or go back to the good old days, blitzed on Blatz, when life was a dream, literally, and the effect of one's own actions nullified, void. Bliss is the sound of a pop top. Alcoholics who stop making a decision to not drink eventually decide they can have one, but only one -- two tops -- and then push away. Done. Go home, go to bed, wake up, work, fine. Never have another. Or. See how it goes. One day at a time is a great slogan and a fine way to live, but one really bad day can wreck years of sobriety and damage a lot of lives quickly. So it's instructive to watch Mel G. acting like any old drunk on the street, which is exactly what he is. He's played the role so often -- like the I'm-getting-drunk scene in every Lethal movie, that it's hardly a stretch for him or us. Alcoholics, active or not, share certain traits with astonishing regularity. Actives are louder, larger and drunker than others. Nonactives are quieter and smaller than they used to be, but it doesn't take much to fluff up in new ways. Not drunk, just dangerously nuts. Drunks are often dreamers, highly intelligent, creative people who may be overachievers, underachievers and/or both intermittently. Either way they may act as though they have something to prove to someone, or everyone, or maybe just to themselves, or to their dad, or mom, or, hell, the mailman. With some drunks like Mel, it's prove, prove, prove. Some drunks get on that Road to Recovery and make a left at Higher Power. Some may actually begin their ascent into heaven. Sometimes it's just typical grandiosity, which is a big word for big talk that is most often applied to drunks by other drunks, but is sometimes real. Mel, for example, made a grandiose movie about his HP, specifically about his deity's BTK-style death scene, hours of death, forcing his audience to kill Christ again and again! Harder! Jesus Christ, drunks go too far . Drunks like to get sober and keep walking as if nothing happened, but it doesn't work that way unless you know somebody. Otherwise you can do your best and hope that one day society may allow your return. It happened to Mel before. It happened to George Bush. George Bush came back twice! Yet nobody calls George Bush an alcoholic simply because George Bush himself admits to no such thing, except to say he did quit drinking and he credits his Lord and Savior, who's not exactly a "higher power," but God Himself, the one, the only, not so gory as Mel's. George sees himself as a man of God to whom the rules of nature do not apply. And so, therefore, do we. George Bush is not an alcoholic and cannot be described as grandiose, maudlin or brutally engaged in a fight to the finish in his heart with his father. George Bush might have choked on a pretzel once and passed out and hit his head, but that was a pretzel, wasn't even a beer nut. So what if he made the decision to welcome Mexican migrant workers to come share in the abundance of the American Dream because his nanny, the woman, as he described her, who raised him, was Mexican, and the Mexican people are a strong, moral, family-loving people? So what about his insane position on Iraq, which is to stand still and insist we're winning? Winning what? Magically, George Bush is not an alcoholic, but he's one hell of a magician. Some people say he made two planes and three buildings disappear on a single day. A month later it was an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Another trait alcoholics share, especially the unschooled, untethered freelancers: they lie a lot. America is safe because George Bush is far from an alcoholic. Far from it. We should all leave Mel alone and focus on avoiding George. Just don't make him mad. We can all do that until he's out of office, can't we?