Drunkenness And “The Real You” (August 20, 2006)

You're only yourself when sober.

Within days of Mel Gibson spewing drunken anti-Semitic comments at a police officer, a thousand newspaper columnists invoked the Latin proverb, In vino veritas (In wine there is truth). Their point was that when you're drunk the "real you" comes out, uninhibited by surface formalities and pleasantries that normally cover your core. In this view, Mel Gibson is, at heart, a Nazi - and only his deceptive sobriety kept us from knowing that.

Well I think that is stupid.

Every last one of us will say and do and think abominable things when our brains are disordered by alcohol or dementia or sudden impact. Do those disorders unveil the "real us"? Of course not. My saintly mother lived in fear that if she got Alzheimer's she would say bad words. She never did, but if she had - if in advanced age she began saying for the first time a word she dreaded, the scatological word beginning with "sh" - then I would have been a cruel idiot to conclude, "So THAT was my real mom! All this time I thought she was discreet and modest and gentle, but NOOO. 'In senility veritas'."

Everybody should take into account the fact that our brains can be impaired as easily as our bodies. For all I know, if you got Mother Theresa good and senile and she would start saying, "Screw the poor. They make me want to puke."

When I was in high school a friend of mine collapsed with a brain aneurysm and almost died. As he recovered in the hospital and I visited him there, a mutual friend warned me, "Don't let him talk about girls." This most gentlemanly young man had been saying lewd things to the nurses. Thankfully he got better and the "real" Keith came back. For that matter, "real" men come back every morning when their alarm clocks ring - for in uninhibited dreams of the night, chaste men fornicate.

The inhibitions that we associate with wakefulness and sobriety and health are good and they are real. Even if it is true that they merely "cover a corrupt core," then it is the duty of every good man to thicken that cover, and keep his inner corruptions from emerging as outward disgraces. If you will permit the bawdy analogy, we all stink when we fart, but the "real us" is not the internal gas but the discipline we exercise not to release it in a crowded elevator.

The real scandal with Mel Gibson is that he got drunk in the first place. There is no excuse for that. The biblical rule for Christians is that we may drink, but not to the point of inebriation. Drunkenness opens wide the window to a thousand sins, and either makes us bad or reveals a badness we should have stifled. Be inhibited. Be yourself. Be sober.