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The Biden Hangover

One wild night and 600 days of regret.

In November 2020, the United States elected Joe Biden to the Oval Office in a wild Dionysian reaction to four years of hit-and-run journalism and a pervasive pandemic. For many, it was the party to end all parties and a fitting celebration to bid farewell to a period of history that so imbalanced delicate morality. And yet this dissolute outpouring was not without consequence. Indeed, as is the case with all bouts of heavy drinking, the hangover and regret linger long after the alcohol has left the bloodstream of the body politic.

New banner Perpective 1Americans on the left rejoiced at the removal of the 45th president, drank deep the wine of vengeance, and popped corks on magnums of champagne – as long as it wasn’t Trump Champagne. But as the saying goes: Act in haste, repent in leisure. When the night’s revels gave way to a new dawn, the first intrepid pains of this enduring legacy hangover began to take hold.

Biden Regret Syndrome

With sharp daggers of daybreak piercing the closed lids of the soon-to-be recalcitrant voter, the Biden presidency turned from promises of sunlit uplands to fevered nightmare courtesy of Hunter S. Thompson – full of fear, loathing, regret, and brutal awakenings. Inflation and fiscal folly were soon permanent lodgers in the American psyche, as the ideology of those in power became the prime directive. And even after accepting this big government intrusion, the hangover would still not lift.

GettyImages-1423991273 Joe Biden

Joe Biden (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Rather than provide the suffering masses with much-needed peace, quiet, and time to recuperate, the administration relentlessly bangs the drum of its own perceived success. “As we head into fall, gas prices are down 27 percent over more than 13 straight weeks of declines,” boasts Biden from his oft-errant Twitter account. The dehydrated slumberers in need of fresh water look aghast at this message with the burning indigestion of knowledge in their guts that a man who gains 200 pounds and loses 50 is still 150 pounds overweight. Two and two still equal four.

All Things Come to Pass

As each successive claim from Team Biden insults the recovering gray matter, many are dealing with what famed author Kingsley Amis termed a “metaphysical hangover.” He described such a condition as a soulful malaise that can run in tandem with a physical hangover. Fear not, for as the novelist notes:

“When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a s**t you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is and there is no use crying over spilt milk.”

Six hundred days in, the weary can at least be reassured that the hangover, metaphysical or otherwise, is not a permanent fixture. It is the body’s rejection of poison and an attempt to heal and teach. And yet forces in the Fourth Estate would continue to be the arbiters of both what is true and what is good for the collective soul of the nation. Journalists bask in the glow of fellow media denizens, claiming the mantle of moral authority and the laurels of the grand. Poet Alexander Pope warned of such tainted “knowledge”:

“A little learning is a dangerous thing.

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring;

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

and drinking largely sobers us again.”

As the silly season approaches once more, the temptation to imbibe and cut loose is a tempting proposition. The wise would remember, though, that alcoholism (political or liquid form) is not an escape, merely a temporary refuge as the innate foes of folly muster their forces against you. Or, as Dean Vernon Wormer warned in National Lampoon’s Animal House: “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

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