Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* A Civil War of Drunks

Episode Date: September 4, 2024

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as years of other bonus content at www.patreon.com slash lions led by donkeys. The US military as much as it existed in colonial revolutionary and post-revolutionary times followed the traditions of virtually every other military in Europe and the world. That meaning booze rations. You get alcohol rationed to you. The militia because the US didn't really have an army yet. The Navy, which was the main backbone of the concept of US military at the time, all were issued out gin, rum, whiskey, and occasionally just some good old fashioned

homemade moonshine. S1C1 See, the thing is, if the modern military let soldiers drink, then who else would keep the entire nation's Applebee's open when they're back from deployment? S1C. That is not incorrect. There's a reason why probably the most profit turning things outside of a military base, well it's a few things. Car dealership, strip club, Applebee's. Yep yep. And drinking really shitty bars. Yeah drinking cheap margaritas as soon as you're back from whatever war zone you're deployed in. You know, it really washes down the feeling of immorality in fighting an illegal war.

A five dollar margarita the size of your head. Yeah, exactly. Get those sizzling fajitas, you know, it just makes it all go away. And this isn't just firing strays. I have literally done this. Now, all of this is for a multitude of reasons. Some are practical like morale and also it's safe to drink. Remember water back then would kill you sometimes.

It was not treated. You know, your water is contaminated. At least, you know, if water was mixed with something, your alcohol was mixed with something, it wouldn't kill you. Also, there's a lot of old timey nonsense, like spirits, not like ghosts, of course, but like alcohol. And the only reason why I'm telling you the difference here is we're talking about people in the 1700s, 1800s, but alcohol would keep you warm. It's a cure and a prevention method for various diseases so it was seen as

It'll make them in stop complaining and it will cure them from like whatever weird Victorian era disease. They're catching What I'll do Yeah, I mean it's not like they had other medicine to be completely fair and if you're a shit face You probably hurt less Yeah And as you can imagine this ration is always taken advantage of, and drunkenness is so commonplace. There's a reason why we think of sailors as being virtually pickled in rum.

But drunkenness was seen as an affliction of the lower class. Here we go. The officers are too good for everyone. Exactly. The enlisted, the soldiers, you know, the sailors. This is drunkenness was, you know, their lower class illness. Officers cannot be because, you know, they're gentlemen. They couldn't suffer the effects of alcoholism. They're too refined, too disciplined, too dignified.

Yeah. Except they were probably drinking more than any of the enlisted men. It depends, but by and large enlisted men were definitely an issue when they got drunk, and mostly due to simple numbers, right? There's always more enlisted men than there are officers, and those dudes are always fucked up. A good reason for that is a miserable existence of the common soldier, common sailor, you name it, pure boredom and nothing else to do. So they're gonna get blind drunk to, and this is discounting, you know, doling the edges of the horrors

of war. So like, alcohol had many purposes, all of them bad. It's good for what I held you. Yeah. The, you know, what is it that the Simpson said? Alcohol is the cause of and the solution to all the problems in the world. All of life's problems. Or you get Gatorade and it has electrolytes, which is what plants crave. Yeah, exactly. You don't need water.

That shit's from the toilet. The two, the two base liquids, alcohol and Gatorade. And you can always mix them together. There's a guy that I was, I believe it was at Ford Knox. He had a cocktail, cocktail's a loose term for it. He would mix a bottle of Gatorade. I don't remember the flavor of Gatorade purple or whatever. And then an entire bottle of Everclear together in a camelback. or whatever. And then an entire bottle of Everclear together in a camelback? No, no. That's like how many times we found him just passed out in various places. Like, you know, we don't really have Everclear over here in the UK. What we, we have Ray and nephew, which is a Jamaican Rome, which gets you so fucked up. I mean, that's ever, ever clear is grain liquor. It is fucking awful.

I have shared a polar too from that man's camelback and I wanted to vomit immediately and this dude is just drinking it like it's, you know, just the Gatorade. Yeah. So it's not good news. Yeah. Anyone in the UK will know, because obviously everyone knows Buckfast, but what if there was Jamaican Buckfast, which is called a Magnum. It's a little small drink and they're so fucking potent. Is it just grain alcohol? No, it's like, it's like tonic wine, but there's shit loads of caffeine in it. And they're like, really, and they're kind of like syrupy. So like, so it's kind of like drinking like, remember like kids cold medicine. Oh God.

I mean, to be fair, who didn't get fucked up on cold medicine at least once in their life? Yeah. I'm like the common wisdom is you drink it, it gets you super fucked up with all the caffeine means you can fuck all night. I'll take the word for it. Like we have, we have carnival in a couple of weeks, which is a lot of fun. you super fucked up with all the caffeine means you can fuck all night. I'll take the word for it. Like we have, we have carnival, um, in a couple of weeks, which is, um, it's a big Caribbean

street festival. I suppose the best way to describe it in London happens in nodding hill, which is quite close to where I live. So you have like a lot of a Barbadian, Trinidadian and general kind of Caribbean. So there's a lot of this genre of music called Soca that's played. I just like, everyone is shitfaced at dancing on each other and it's just so much fun. Like everyone, the amount of magnum bottles that you'll just see everywhere. Sorry, I brought my kid's Sudafed with me instead. Now, by the 1830s, the spirit ration for enlisted men was abolished and was instead replaced with coffee.

No, you know, this is the enlisted man's personal 9-11. This all but banned drinking in the ranks. Officers, meanwhile, were still allowed to drink whatever they wanted. The rules did not apply. Then of course, the US Civil War starts in the 1860s Bringing us on target 23 minutes in for today's episode Which is ahead of schedule

What is it that true crime podcasts always say like after like talking for like 30 minutes, let's dive right in Yeah, let's dive right in. Let's dive right in. We're setting the tone. We're setting the tone. Something our show could never be accused of, of anything, diving right in. Maybe after a few bottles of magnum or whatever, who knows? Oh, the last time I drank magnum, it was at Carnival and I had gotten this big two-liter bottle of Don Simon, which was like, had gotten this big two liter bottle of Don Simon, which was like, um, Oh, it's like a sweet kind of lemonade. I got the pink one for anyone knows. And like drank a quarter of it, then fill the rest up with vodka. So drank that on the bus to carnival, then drank

loads of magnums and then was just vomiting for hours. That's fucking awful. I barely drink anymore, so I can't. I got nothing. I do enough of it for like all three of us. That is true. Let's dive right in here. Let's dive right in. Let's take a really glib and joking tone to the mass suffering of people. Hey, to be fair, nobody's getting shot in this episode. I listen, I swear. The ranks are flooded with volunteers and conscripts, you know, the fight the most miserable war in American history so far, I guess I should say so far, and they're all but banned from drinking in a time and a place where I don't think anybody needed to drink more. And I should point out there that at that point in American

history, alcohol consumption was higher than it had ever been, north or the south. It's quite honestly astounding compared to the modern day. According to the Pew Research Institute in 2021, the average American drinks about 2.84 gallons or 10 liters of pure alcohol each year. In the 1860s, that was eight gallons or 30 liters per year. And I should point out here that even in comparison to those old timey drinking levels, the US still pales in comparison to how many people drink today. For instance, in Ireland, it's 11 gallons.

I was literally typing it into Google to get the exact number. Yeah. And Ireland still is a number one. I believe it's like Czech Republic or something. But for American history in the 1860s, people are drinking an absolute shit ton. But what is more important to remember is what exactly they're drinking. Because if we went back in time, I would like to think I've seasoned my insides with years of drinking, being a soldier, and then just being a guy who drank too much for a little while there

That I could stomach most things. I've traveled the world I've drank some fucked up shit But if we drank the shit soldiers in the 1860s were drinking we would die faster than an on kill like an Uncontacted tribes and meeting a white person for the first time