Liquor is quicker, but nothing is more intoxicating than "I told you so"
I can tell right now, just starting out with this sentence that this is not going to be one of my better columns. Everything is lined up against this one. It has bad genes. Its mother drank and smoked during pregnancy. Its dad is in his 60s, and he’s run off to join the circus even before his column is born.
No one wants to read anything I’d say about the Scott Walker recall election in Wisconsin. How predictable would that be? Gosh, let me see, would I have been for him or against him? Now that he is still governor would I have an opinion any different than last week?
All the news this week is like that. Something bad is happening just like it was last week. The badness is still happening. I should have joined a circus when I was 16, why did I wait so long? Now I’m too old to feed the bears. The bears will spit me out.
Here I am almost halfway into this particular adventure, and I’ve decided to make it about the high cost of liquor in the state of Washington. Contrary to the misconceptions of my fans, I don’t guzzle liquor day and night. I guzzle beer. I haven’t even tried to buy liquor since the state stores closed. I’m just going to take the Seattle Times’ word for it. If they say the prices are higher than ever, that’s good enough for me.
At this point what I want to do is to make the rest of this column be a great big “I told you so.” My memory has it that on any number of occasions, I explicitly told all of you, don’t vote for privatization of liquor sales in Washington state, ‘cause if you do you’ll be sorry, capitalism doesn’t work like that, prices will go up, not down. But, ha, ha, you did vote for it. I could put some jokes in here about how stupid that was. In order to do it up right I’d have to go back to old columns and try to find where I said all that and quote myself being right about what would happen. I’m too lazy and depressed to go do that.
That reminds me: Why do they call alcohol a depressant, when everyone knows you drink it because you’re depressed? Just wondering.
Anyway, since I’m too lazy to look my own quotes up, I’m going to do with myself what I always do with everyone else, namely make stuff up and say I said it.
So for example, it was just before we had the vote on privatization, back in Marchuary or Jantember, or whenever it was, when I said “The whole point of the state selling us the liquor is so that the state makes the profit, and the state is us! So what difference will it make if the prices go down? Anyway you cut it the profits are going to go to someone else!”
In 2007, I wrote, “The only thing capitalism is ever good for is making capitalists rich.”
Even in the 1990s, I was opposed to the state privatization of liquor sales. I clearly remember these prophetic lines, written in 1996: “If Washington State ever privatizes liquor, prices will inflate till our eyeses flicker.” So I have been right on this subject for 16 years. If only you had all listened to the voice of reason, mine, and not voted for this terrible law, you could all afford to wash down this column with a pint of domestic vodka for the price of two coffees.