PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE myself, I am a man of wealth and taste. I’ve been around for many a long year… and while Liam hasn’t been looking I’ve pinched the keys to the blog and I’m fanging it around for a joyride—or at least the closest thing to it you can get between speed bumps and school zones and chicanes and traffic lights in this pissant Nanny State. I’ve got the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson polishing a Smith & Wesson M&P .38 Special in the passenger seat and the ghost of someone who says she’s Janis Joplin in the back. Hunter seems to believe her, and if 66.6% of the car says that’s who she is, who am I to go against a majority? Especially as half the majority is holding a gun. But I digress.

If there’s been as undercooked, half-baked an idea as Dry July in a while I’ve certainly missed out on hearing about it. Here’s some bald-headed self-important too-cool-for-you up-himself quoit sickening on about the moral virtues of funding cancer research and symbolically going without alcohol for a limited period of time. I made it until the tray of “mocktails” arrived at the bar table before I chucked it in, repelled at the sheer wholesomeness, and put James Brown back on youtube. Frankly, I recommend you spend the month doing the same thing.

Look, if you want to give your money away to fund research into a disease, don’t let me stop you. You’ll get a nice tax deduction from it from the Commonwealth come the end of next financial year. It’s just as good for your smug sense of self-worth and, wait a minute, isn’t there a bit of a New Testament lesson about how one’s supposed to behave when they’re giving charitably? I can never be bothered to remember.

More to the point, it’s 2011, and the once all-conquering Temperance movement has fizzled out into this? A social movement that drove reformists, inspired the hopes of radicals, strenthened the convictions of conservatives, not to mention disastrously amended Constitutions, now represents itself through a website sponsored by a soft drink company? The Temperance movement, which in the lifetime of living Australians, forced local governments to hold Local Option votes forbidding the sale of any alcohol at all, has withered away so shamefully? At least the War on Drugs continues violently and absurdly, if only on the other side of the Pacific.

Frankly, in a modern developed country, the idea of a fundraising Dry July is a repellent, pathetic, disgustingly middle-class spectacle, and it should revolt any Australian left who has a sense of dignity and independence. It’s the sign of a degraded culture of consumption that can’t even decide about the social benefits and drawbacks of alcohol, without a PR company conveniently performing a sick minstrel Temperance dance for the benefit of a major corporation.

Even the Christians and Muslims have a sense of reality and perspective about their ritual Lent and Ramadan going-without. It’s supposed to be a general self-directed introspection for a greater religious purpose—Allah, Jesus, or whatever deity the wacky denomination in question wants you to offer up your suffering to—not just flinging a virtual $50 by EFT at a research body who’ll in any case receive Commonwealth funding, and feeling self-satisfied. Martin Luther King even described “self-purification” as a necessary step on the way to righting injustice, and I don’t think he meant replacing rum ‘n’ coke with a lemon lime & bitters.

Drink, or don’t drink. But don’t do it because Adam Spencer tells you to, and for goodness’ sakes, don’t be so nauseatingly smug about doing without beer for a month.

No, I wasn’t planning on stopping, Hunter. Bats? I’ll take your word for them.

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