No. 1 With a Bulleit

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

I think it was the bourbon. I don’t drink Jack Daniel’s because it makes me fight and then cry. I don’t drink Knob Creek because it makes me vomit then drive. But it was my house, and my party, and a new friend had brought Bulleit bourbon in the prettiest bottle—and I am an American, so I too am slave to packaging. My friend Suparna and I drank the bottle—smoooove, with notes of orange blossom—and it wasn’t one of those cute little ones, either. When we looked in sad befuddlement at our now empty 750 ml, the friend who’d brought it went out to the car and brought in the second bottle he’d picked up for himself. Steve, he was a giver. Suparna and I drank half of the second bottle before we somehow mislaid it. We figured somebody’d made off with it, and thank the good lord for that.

I’ve been in bed for the two days since—not hung over, just easy, resting, and giving my sweet liver its due. And yet somehow, my spirit is filled. I feel better about the world today. I feel more hopeful in our future. Sometimes a good drunk is all that you need.

So the fish will all be gone in 50 years? Thanks to global warming, we’ll be living underwater anyway, and surely we’ll evolve some fins and flippers of our own. Our economy is completely for shit? Then we’ll all have the kingdom of heaven. Barack, baby. It’s morning in America, and I’ve got my Reaganesque shining beacon of hope.

I am a Generation Xer, short-changed and cynical, and Hope is hard for me. I distrust it. I do, after all, read newspapers. I do my best to always Blame America First. (And the Baby Boom second.) But if that Kenyan lady, in her Kenyan mufti or whatever, is the grandmother of the President of the United States of America, then that will be a day of pride crashing and swelling like a Wagner recital, and my heart will stomp and shout.

Our economy? May still suck wrinkly George Bush balls. But Bill Clinton managed to sock away some surplus after the deficits of Reagan/Bush (even if we all knew the tech bubble would eventually pop), and I don’t see why Obama couldn’t do just the same.

I’ve said before the American empire is over. Our products are inferior, our wealth squandered, and our middle class mugged. We do make a very fine bourbon, though.

And then I look through my pessimist eyes at this recession, or depression, that may be soon upon us, and I blame not America first, but me. My consumer confidence is perpetuating this, because, frankly, I ain’t shopping for shit. My glee is fueling the downward spiral of the housing market, causing heartache for the thousands caught holding the bag when the circus music stopped. And yet, it has to happen, doesn’t it? In Orange County, at the peak, 2.4 percent of the population could afford the median-priced house. That’s not a state of affairs we should be propping up, is it? Didn’t Japan have some awful recession, and didn’t they pull out of it? I don’t know. I’m an American, and so I don’t have to. And no, I couldn’t find Iraq on a map, and it’s not because I’m a US American who has no maps. As Phyllis Schlafly wannabe Charlotte Allen points out in the Washington Post, girls aren’t very spatially gifted.

I don’t know. I’m so ambivalent. I’m putting my new, fragile, wee little birdlike hopes in a messianic figure who will turn out to be human, but maybe it’s our hopes that will make things right. When you’re depressed, and you fake a smile, the muscles send electrical impulses to your brain, and pretty soon you feel better. Maybe my gloomy Gus act is, you know, part of the problem. No one wants to drink bourbon with Eeyore. Eeyore drinks his bourbon alone.

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