The Great American Hangover

Everyone who has really gone out and tied one on knows that it's almost never worth it the next morning. You wake up with the five alarm headache, you can't even keep water down. You dig through your pockets and find an ATM receipt showing a withdrawal of $150 from your checking account at 1:30 in the morning, and the total cash in your wallet now amounts to $6 in singles. That doesn't count the sixty or so bucks you'd dropped to that point. All this is shot through with the vague but sinister notion that, probably, you shaved a couple weeks off the back end.

When you boil it down, you have spent a couple hundred bucks to give yourself a really nasty 24-hour stomach virus. Your pals and you, you all realize, should have just picked up a few assorted six packs, staid home and played video games.

I have heard it said here and there that the election in 2008 of Barack Obama was America waking up with a hellacious hangover from eight years of partying ourselves into economic and social oblivion. We were broke 'til next payday, and there was a voicemail on our phone from our best friend telling us that one girl we liked, who was really sweet and smart, who it was going pretty good with up until last night, had left Slapties with some other dude, bro, like, at ten or something. "Never again!" we moaned as we stared at the bile floating in the toilet. We elected a grownup.

The puzzling thing, of course, is that if this hypothesis is true, then why the Tea Party? Why is so much of the country doubling down on the magical thinking that cutting taxes raises revenue and that the United States was founded by people who were, more or less, iron-fisted social Darwinists and also Evangelical Christians?

Why, instead of the Advil, are we reaching for the swill at the bottom of the bottle of Jim by the bed?

I don't claim to know, but I wonder. I wonder if maybe the hangover concept is right, but we have the timeline all messed up. Maybe electing Obama was only that very first trip to the kitchen after we opened our eyes and realized, happily, because we were worried about that, we could still see. We voted, we took six Advil and drank a glass of water. We stood up straight, tested our feet and our stomach.

We pitched forward and barfed in the sink.

This, I think, may be the Tea Party and Glenn Beck and Michelle Bachmann going mainstream. The awful, slow revelation that you ain't gettin' out of this that easy, slugger. A Farmer's Omelet and six cups of coffee aren't going to save you this time. You're going to feel this at work on Monday.

Keep in mind, for a mere mortal a night out lasts, what, six hours or thereabouts? America partied hard for eight years. Do the math. We haven't even put on pants yet.