Man of Vices

One of the problems of being a man of vices is that you tend to feel inferior to your friends, the ones that don’t share your vices. Thus, it is very helpful to find friends who not only share your vices but take those vices beyond where you take them, and thus you seem better. For example, if you enjoy 5 glasses of scotch every night, you need to find someone who drinks 10 glasses every night. Or if you smoke 5 packs a day, find someone who smokes 10. That way you can feel as if you are better than him and a true, life long friendship can form. Unless of course the bastard tries to quite one or both of the habits, in which case you have every reason to convince him to continue, and to sabotage his efforts at every turn. Only then can you have a truly happy, healthy friendship.

Something I’m noticing about myself is that I tend to take things as challenges, even when they are not meant to be. For example, if my teacher advices us to learn something a certain way, or to think about a concept a certain way so that things will be easier later in the class, I’ll automatically try as hard as possible to not learn that concept in that way. I will do whatever I have to do to learn it in another way, even though the teacher says that it will make life more difficult in the future. Another challenge I keep hearing is from those commercials with State troopers saying that if I drive while intoxicated I will be caught. When they say this I want to drink a fifth of Jack and drive around town, and then the next morning calling the state troopers and laughing at them for not catching me. I can only hope that I will be sober enough at that point not to tell them my name and address when they ask.

I think one of the problems with history, or at least the way it is taught, is that it is not taught in such a way for us to learn from our mistakes, at least not U.S. history. Rather, U.S. history is usually taught in a way that makes the U.S. look as good as possible, presenting our forefathers as great men who held and consistently acted on extremely high ideals. Not only can we learn nothing that we can apply to our current situations from this glossing over of history, but it seems, at least to me, to create a demoralization when one realizes our country isn’t anything like what was presented in our history text books and we assume our country as simply gone down hill, when in fact our country isn’t all that different than it was 100 years ago, or 150 years ago. Of course this is all coming from a humble economist who knows very little about history or any such things. Just to make the point though, allow me to quote a few excerpts from a speech by Major General Smedley Butler of the U.S. Marines, who was decorated 20 times and twice awarded the Congressional medal of honor, he served for 33 years: “I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers.” “I helped make Mexico…safe for American oil interests…I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys” “I helped in the raping of a half dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street.” He gave that speech in 1933.

I’ll end with a quote I read on a menu at a restaurant from the man himself Frank Sinatra: “I feel sorry for people who don’t drink, for that is the best they will feel all day.”