Word: rum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...calm the spirit, Byron suggested, apply "rum and true religion." Alas for Georgian simplicities. The rum has turned to water, the religion to immersion. Relentlessly, Americans have sought spiritual calm in steam baths, saunas, Jacuzzi whirlpools and hot tubs. Now, in the quest for tranquillity, some of them are dunking themselves, in total darkness and aloneness, for an hour or more at a time in small tanks filled with 250 gal. of 93.5° salt water. Why? To achieve, through "sensory deprivation," surcease from tension, reconciliation with the id, relief from jet lag, hangover, back pain or nicotine withdrawal...
...Harvard, stored in the basement of Houghton Library, shed some light on his character. Although he entered Harvard at the precocious age of 13, he was an undistinguished student. He complained about the "rotten" food and usually ate at local alehouses, where he picked up a taste for rum. Fowler includes in the text some of the drinking songs Hancock composed while at school...
Fowler's efforts at demythifying Hancock succeed, however. Caught up in rum smuggling and the lucrative, although shady business of administering British government contracts, which John inherited from his Uncle Thomas, Hancock was not beyond criticism. At the same time, though, "John Hancock was not the king of all colonial smugglers," the book asserts. Fowler becomes visibly disturbed by such assaults on Hancock's character. "All the charges that Hancock fomented the war against Britain because she cracked down on his smuggling activities are absurd, and completely groundless," he insists...
...centrifugal forces of revolution threatened to tear the nation apart.... In Congress and in the state, he was 'the centre of union' around which a majority always seemed able to coalesce.... He deserves to be enshrined as America's first modern politician. He could win a following with rum on the Common, or jobs at the wharf.... He seems really to have cared about the people he served...
...time Mowat seeks temporary shelter in a blasted hut, and shares his rum with a dying German who got there first, the author is disarmed of illusion and no longer fit to wage war. In a letter to an un named intimate, he writes, "I wish I could explain the desperate sense of isolation, of not belonging to my own past, of being adrift in some kind of alien space." It is the unresolved anger of a soldier whose arms, legs, eyes and genitals are constantly threatened with mutilation...