Culture » May 19, 2003

Dry Drunk

By Alan Bisbort

Alcoholics Anonymous has a name for someone who is a drunk in every way except for the actual imbibing of spirits. They call that person a “dry drunk.” This is not a judgmental term, nor should this be a judgmental topic in America, where there are, by even the most conservative estimates, 10 million adult alcoholics, and very few families that have not been touched, in one way or another, by this national scourge. This same scourge has, by his own admission, also touched the life of our commander-in-chief.

Whether George W. Bush is or was an alcoholic is not the point here. I am taking him at his word that he stopped what he termed “heavy drinking” in 1986, at age 40. The point here is that, based on Bush’s recent behavior—his obsessive push for war with Iraq, his chest-thumping warning to other “rogue nations” of similar one-sided punishments, his adolescent, vengeful tone with those former allies that chose not to participate in the “coalition of the willing,” even his silly stunt of landing a jet on an aircraft carrier to prematurely declare, at the snap of his fingers (because he says it’s so) that the war in Iraq is over—he could very well be a “dry drunk.” Of course, he may just be an immature bully who will gladly sacrifice thousands of lives to get his way even against the advice of the most respected and mature members of his own party.

Still, Bush’s past battles with the bottle are worth pondering at a time like this, one of the most dangerous in the nation’s history. When a recovering alcoholic begins to engage in what AA calls “stinking thinking,” he or she begins to exhibit the old attitudes and pathologies of their drinking years. These include an increase in anxiety, mild tremors, mild depression, disturbed sleep patterns, inability to think clearly, craving for junk food, irritability, sudden bursts of anger and unpredictable mood swings. According to AA literature, “Boredom and listlessness may alternate with intense feelings of resentment against family and friends, and explosive outbursts of violence.”

Bush said he was a “heavy drinker.” But let’s not be coy here. Anyone who has ever imbibed heavily over a long period of time knows that “heavy drinker” is the rich man’s (or the politician’s) code for alcoholic.

For the record, Bush claims to have stopped drinking for reasons that change each time he’s asked about his substance-abusing past (which isn’t often, thanks to a cowed press). Let’s say he started experimenting with alcohol, as per the national norm, at age 16 in prep school, and he began getting regularly wasted at Yale at age 18. This would mean that Bush drank “heavily” for at least 22 years. We are, then, asked to believe that he went cold turkey after more than two decades of heavy drinking, a nearly impossible feat even for someone, as he claims, who was rescued by God.

———————

Far be it from me to cast stones when it comes to alcohol. I’ve seen the devastating toll alcoholism can take. My brother was an honors student in college when he began drinking heavily (party drinking, as was the tradition at southern colleges back then). By the time he was in his mid-30s, real and dramatic changes had occurred in his metabolism and brain chemistry. Medical experts told me at the time that just 15 years of sustained drinking can do irreversible physical harm of this sort. In other words, even if my brother stopped drinking, the damage would remain. But by most measuring sticks, my brother was a functioning member of society. He held jobs, paid his rent and bills, and made heroic efforts to beat his cursed addiction. He climbed the 12 steps more times than Stallone climbed those steps in Rocky.

Though I deeply loved my brother and miss him terribly now that he is dead, I could not deny the damage, even in his long periods of sobriety, that alcohol did to him. Rather, I could not deny the damage, and I could not bear to watch it happen. I could feel it in my bones that he was up against something stronger than his will and his prodigious intellect. Stinking thinking, like kudzu, simply overtook his mind, and alcohol killed his body.

It is worth reflecting on George W. Bush’s academic history. He graduated from two of the finest institutions of higher learning in this country: Yale and Harvard. He didn’t make great grades, but he graduated, an accomplishment warranting some respect. Many rich, well-connected boys have flunked out.

The question is then begged, and seems to at least deserve some pause for pondering: How did he, at age 56, get so fumble-tongued, incapable of coherently stringing more than two sentences together, snippily irritable with anyone who dares disagree with him or even ask a question, and pointedly ignoring the diminutive, 82-year-old Helen Thomas at White House press conferences (the paltry few he attends) because she wrote unfavorably, and truthfully, of him? How did he poutily turn his back on the democratically elected president of one of our most important allies (Germany’s Gerhard Schröder) because of something one of his underlings said about him? Why is he listlessly in need of constant vacations and rest, dangerously obsessed with only one thing (Iraq’s apparently nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, which must mean that it really was, all along, about the oil) to the exclusion of all other things (including an economy that is slowly sucking the life from the nation as well as trashing the retirement savings of anyone reading these words)?

Why is Bush so eager to engage in violence and so incapable of explaining why?

For drunks to function for any length of time in the world, they need enablers. Congress is filling that bill splendidly right now for Bush, and has been since January 2001, in fact. As BuzzFlash (www.buzzflash.com) put it about the corporate scandals, “For most of his adult life, those people around him enabled Bush’s alcoholism. Now the Democratic Senate is enabling the corporate corruption problem of his administration by not using their Constitutional powers to demand the truth.”

Not only Congress but the nation seems to be watching this happen. No—the American people, knowingly or not, are encouraging it to happen. Who knows, maybe we are all in shock, just as we are when a member of our family does something appalling or outrageous under alcohol’s bidding. The crazy behavior by the administration is so wild and unprecedented, so unchecked and unbalanced and covering such frightening unknown territory up ahead, that it may be easier to look away.

But we can’t look away. George W. Bush needs an intervention. Let’s be his interveners. Let’s raise our sober voices. Let’s ask questions, demand more than temper tantrums and pouting from the commander-in-chief. Let’s do this before it’s too late, and a dry drunk’s dream of glory becomes our national nightmare.

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• Reader Comments

  And what symptoms/characteristics does AA say that a dry drunk manifests:

  “Grandiosity, put very simply, is an exaggeration of one’s own importance.”  Well gee, Bush is the President.  He actually is pretty important.  Would anyone deny more important than a magazine writer?

  “Judgmentalism is mutually related to grandiosity. It means that the alcoholic is prone to make value judgments”

  Doesn’t everybody here do just this?  Or do none of you nor this writer make value judgments of Bush and US policy?

  I am a little confused by “Intolerance leaves no room for delaying the gratification of personal desires” and the claim that

  “Impulsivity is the result of intolerance”

  It appears they are only talking about impulsiveness.  Even if not so, certainly no one here would ascribe impulsivity and intolerance only to alcoholics would you?  If you would, why would you?

  FInally “Indecisiveness”.  I mean come on - which is it?  Impulsive and intolerant or indecisive?  They seem to be mutually exclusive.  AA says “Indecisiveness stems from an unrealistic exaggeration of the negative possibilities of the action ; so one wavers between two or more possible courses of action, more times than not- nothing gets done”

  I thought the complaint was that he was doing something that people have value-judged as incorrect and which they will not tolerate.  Uh-oh - could we all be dry drunks?

  Posted by Nus on May 19, 2003 at 8:47 PM

  Alan Bisbort’s Bush as dry drunk article first appeared in the American Politics Journal on 24 September 2002. Since then, Bisbort has been quoted and requoted. I would have guessed that the anti-Bush voices would have come up with some new material by now, but even Bush critics seem to have abandoned substantive issues.

  Like most cults, AA members play all sorts of manipulative games with each other. One such game includes the use of the term “dry drunk.” Rather than having any validity as an alcoholic condition, the terms are used most popularly in AA to label someone who quit drinking on their own. “Ol’ Bob isn’t in ‘the program.’ He’s just a dry drunk.” It is also used to single someone out in AA who tends to speak their mind. In a bad mood in an AA meeting? You’re just on a “dry drunk” and you had better take a moral inventory of yourself and do some praying and start hitting more AA meetings and get honest with your AA sponsor.

  Another reply to this article aptly asks, “could we all be dry drunks?” The answer is yes. If we are not in AA, we are essentially dry drunks. Addiction medicine is a branch of health care that was created mostly by AA members and people who were fond of AA for whatever reason. So somebody had to start seriously addressing the “dry drunk” phenomomenon. Picture a mad scientist wringing his hands, “Yes, the dry drunk is someone who resists cult indoctrination, and how is it that such a person will react to repeated attempts to break down their natural ego defenses: irritation, judgemental insights into the process, defense of their self-respect and self-efficacy (in AA this is known as arrogance), etc.”

  In any of its uses the term is unfair and unhelpful. It is no more fair or helpful in criticizing Bush. Rather, it accuses Bush of a fabled condition, and provides him with the perfect defense: “They are just making stuff up about me again. How far out are they going to get?”

  Even Bisbort himself has been duped by AA. “Stinking thinking,” that rascally aspect of dry drunkism killed his brother. Did it ever occur to him that AA failed him? After all, most alcoholics who quit successfully do so without AA.

  The nature of AA indoctrination can get pretty fascistic. Is this the way to criticize an administration that seems to have some fascistic tendencies? Just borrow some fascistic concept like “dry drunk” and throw it at Bush? How unpatriotic!

  Posted by Michael on May 20, 2003 at 1:24 AM

  Absolutely OUTSTANDING!  And finally, the bizarre behavior of this idiot Dubya begins to be understood.  We Americans are stupid to put up with this turkey, and Herr Asscroft, too!

  Posted by Alan Taylor on May 20, 2003 at 2:08 AM

  Rings entirely true!  Frightening nightmare our country is in.  Please keep the truth coming…it’s our only hope. 

  Posted by Eva Knapp on May 20, 2003 at 2:10 AM

  Despite the origins or validity of the term, the truth is that alcoholics are often crazy. Some due to damage from years of drinking, some at the outset. Anyone who has loved and dealt with an alcoholic, or more likely a family or office full of them, knows it.

  Alanon members (which is most likely what the author of this piece is or was) use the term dry drunk in another context than the ones mentioned in previous comments: it describes the heartbreakingly common phenomenon of an alcholic ceasing to drink and being none the better for having done so, except maybe physically. Their mental and emotional functioning does not improve at all. They are too far gone.

  I actually agree that AA and Alanon’s philosophies are built on a slippery enough slope to eventually apply to everyone in America or even in the world. However, it’s clear that Bush is not a sane and healthy person. Whether you want to attribute it to alcoholism, a dry drunk, insanity, stupidity, evil… doesn’t really make any difference.

  Humankind has debated the origins of and motivations behind outrageous behavior for centuries. There are no definitive answers as to why, it will vary with whom you ask, but it’s clear something is wrong with this man and the nation has to do something about it. He’s sown the seeds for WW3. I don’t think critiques of AA, valid or otherwise should distract us from that issue.

  Posted by sdgdf on May 20, 2003 at 2:21 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 121 posts.

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