The Burden of Okiedom

I'm looking at an ad from this week's Newsweek: a full page ad for Zagatwine, showing  a dozen proud bottles standing tall in all their splendor, flanked by a glass of red on the right and white on the left. "Special Offer--12 Top Wines for the Holidays" "Just $69.99--Save $110" Turns out that if you take them up they'll throw in 4 crystal wine glasses. This is an excellent deal which includes wines from France, California, Chile, Argentina, Italy, and New Zealand--8 reds, 4 whites. The "catch," if you want to call it that, is you have to join the Zagat Wine Club which means a shipment every 90 days of a case of wine at $139.99. You can mix them up or have all of one color, your choice.

Sure it's an ad, and sure it's meant to entice, but I will tell you that for years and years now, I've been a wine drinker, a wine lover. Wine is a gift from God, as I like to say, which is why he allowed humans to discover fermentation so early in their history. The case-every-90-days deal would not be burdensome for me and Susan. We would drink their 12 bottles in a month, being generous with the estimate. I'm not sure what we spend on wine, don't think I want to know, but let's put it this way $140 for a case of good wine isn't burdensome. Throw in $10-12 for shipping and you're still talking a case for less than $13 a bottle. I'm pretty sure what we spend now at the Oklahoma state-certified liquor store amounts to at least that much.

Down in the fine print on the ad, way at the bottom, is the notice that the offer is "void where prohibited by law." Can you guess where this is going? In this enlightened state in which I reside, Oklahoma, Zagat and any other vintner or wine merchant is prohibited by law from shipping so much as two bottles into the state. Thirty-one of our fifty states and the District of Columbia, no problem, with shipping in wine or any other liquor. But here, civilized people have to have their moral lives "protected" by the Southern Baptists, not even a majority, but they call the tune to which the legislature dances.  And they have taken upon themselves the task of dictating their own brand of narrow, judgmental and thoroughly right-wing Christianity not only on liquor, but on a host of other subjects--you name it, guns, war, immigration, civil liberties . . .  Suffice it to say that any hint of progressive thought in the realm of civil rights is absent from the lawmakers of this place. (You don't even want to think about their dope laws.)

I'm going to keep my cool here. I am not going to go on a rant about these troglodytes who decide for the rest of us what's acceptable to God and what's not. I will simply observe that it's common knowledge here that the ranks of the alcoholics, not to mention the consumers of demon rum in this state, are just chock full of the same Baptist hypocrites who sing their hymns on Sunday and spend the rest of the week damning the rest of us. Not to mention fencing off the state from almost all of the wine produced anywhere in the world. Damn them!

Update 1: How about this: the word of the day over there on the left is "troglodyte."