Well I was really reacting to the cannibalism Jeffrey Dahmer as Everyman thing, not the booze thing.
Really, the problems with alcohol come down to two things: binging and social tolerance. Speaking somewhat out of my ass, I think this is because these two things are part of the European peasant experience, historically speaking, and Russia stopped being a peasant country within living memory.
Binging because peasants do not have a whole lot of sources of entertainment and, contrary to myth, spend a lot of time with nothing to do. You have periods of intense work and periods of more or less nothing. So you drink. Tolerance because, well, it's a small community and all that. One of the translators where I work is a chronic alcoholic who is constantly late with his work. However, it is tolerated with a resigned sigh, Russian companies still having sort of a village ethos. Now that I think of it, I don't know of anybody who has been fired where I work in the past 5 years. Not that I know everybody in the company.
--- On Thu, 2/5/09, James Straub <rustbeltjacobin at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Oh yeah. I was shooting for sarcastic self-mockery when I
> wrote that contradictory sentence. Having said that, I was
> still blown away by the article; it seems like mores with
> booze are so different there, it seems dangerous.
>
> In the US, the crazyness has been so big and institutional
> for so long, chauvinism and unsustainability get normalized
> to the public. Under normal conditions. But since the
> financial crisis, things seem to be tearing at the seams a
> little. We're getting some seriously colorful symptoms,
> like the rash of murder/suicides by people financially
> affected, both at the top and bottom of the system. I mean,
> the Santa Claus massacre's the wildest I can think of,
> but they're popping up all over the country in local
> papers. It makes me really, really scared about how well
> our society would hold up under more serious strain in the
> future as other things get worse as well.
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