Had occasion last evening to look over James Graham's book, *Vessels of
Rage, Engines of Power: The Secret History of Alcoholism* (Lexington:
Aculeus Press Inc., 1994).  Fascinating stuff.  Graham turns Marty Mann
upside-down--i.e., by emphasizing the active alcoholic as *victimizer*
rather than as *victim* in society.  In a particularly succinct
passage, Graham writes:
 
"...sick egos seek *power*, and that means they want control over
others, over *us*.  The eomania, as I will explain, also causes them to
behave destructively.  Compulsive power-seekers with an urege to
destroy are -- it is virtually a definition of the word -- a menace.
Most alcoholics are transformed into evil-doers by this 'disease of the
total personality'; most commit heinous acts during their drinking
years and the evil behavior of some has earned them a place in the
history books" (p. 9).
 
Graham's text, though subdivided into various types of evil-doing
alcoholics, is one long rogues' gallery--wherein the reader is
acquainted or reacquinted with the underlying alcoholism behind (and
presumably occasioning) so many of history's notorious traitors,
murders, tyrants, and even nasty writers.  The latter category--alcohol
authors--is familiar territory that Graham reworks with his narrative
eye glued to all the petty, hurtful, and destructive tendencies and
prose of alcoholic authors.  Stalin emerges at the book's end as the
super-evil and "supreme alcoholic"--and therefore Graham's moral and
paradigmatic capstone of the disease and its carriers.
 
This is a remarkable read for at least two good reasons:  (1) because
it illuminates the potential moral double-edgedness and potential for
opprobrium of even a disease-concept-accepting commentator and (2)
because may represent a new and intriguing bellweather in popular
culture of alcoholism's shifting meaning in a newly more temperate
cultural clime.  There is lots of delicious food for thought at
different levels in Graham's fast-paced and hard-hitting--if not
particularly balanced--attempt to re-vilify alcoholism (or at least
*active* alcoholism).
 
 
--
Ron Roizen
voice:  510-848-9123
fax:    510-848-9210
home:   510-848-9098
1818 Hearst Ave.
Berkeley, CA 94703
U.S.A.
[log in to unmask]