In much the same way I know a lot about the Army from a not terribly distinguished career, I know a lot about drinking from the same grievous perspective. Let me assure you that when your drinking earns you an above-the-fold front page story in the New York Times that jumps to a full page inside the paper, as Rudy Giuliani’s drinking did today, it’s not funny.
my last drink and drug was april 24, 1994. as much as i detest the man and everything he stands for i would have to respect that he has the same right to recovery that i do and if i saw him in a meeting i would have to treat him graciously and if asked to help would be obligated to do so. his denials of his problem are very close to word for word with mine. drunks got no imagination.
i tell people that i see the real america in meetings. the autonomous structure of AA has created one of the purest and most responsive democracies i have ever seen.
but there've also been plenty of meetings I've stopped attending because the "culture" of that particular meeting no longer suited me.
sorry, but some shit is just beyond the pall.
if I saw Rudy at a meeting, I'd stop going. if it was, say, a meeting I was chairing (as I chaired arguably the world's craziest meeting--midnight at the Moravian Church--for a year and a half), I would be civilized. period.
sorry, but for me, there are certain levels of human perfection I'm perfectly okay with never even aspiring to...
No kidding. All my life I hated Republicans and accountants (because they would always bitch if I asked for an advance on my paycheck). I remember the day it dawned on mr that my sponsor was a Republican (not anymore) and an accountant. He still is my sponsor thirty years later. God def. has a sense of humor.
I'd be Rudy's sponsor! Oh yeah!
"Rudy, let's allot the next four years for your eighth step." (made a list of all people we had harmed and became willing to amends to them all, etc.)
Lucian, I am so glad you wrote about this. I read the NYT article yesterday (Thursday in India) and felt truly sad for Rooty Tooty. I remember him so well as mayor of nyc and his public announcement that he was divorcing the wife of that moment. His third wife is now divorcing him. Yes, he has a very lonely life inside that bottle. He was a terrible, vindictive “leader” and shipped hundreds, if not thousands of homeless people away from the center of tourism in Manhattan. He opened the theatre district to the commercial inundation of Disney and jelly bean companies. He placed scanners and police in the public schools, where I worked at the time. But, as a person of deep compassion, I do feel for him. In spite of all his despicable behavior vis a vis dump. Maybe if he does his eighth step as Knox has suggested, he will have a chance to turn his pathetic life around. Let’s hope he even gets to the first seven....
A 12-step program saved my sanity and probably my life. I'm still awed and inspired by the 12 Traditions as well as the 12 Steps, and my copy of the AA 12 + 12 is never far from my workspace.
My brother's claim not to be an alcoholic was that he only drank beer. You can con every excuse in the world to give yourself a pass. And he would put out a case of empty beer cans every morning. I am so grateful I didn't have a tendency to any chemical addictions. Mine are more work-related as in workaholic which also has problems.
Rudy's drinking problem goes way back, at least to his mayoral days+likely before that. After he defeated David Dinkins, in an overtly+despicably racist campaign in 1993, Rudy raced around the city with his crew hitting high end watering holes and cigar clubs, making them NYC's hot spots. His bullying, a signal trait of his sober or inebriated, always got meaner after several drinks. He deserves our sympathy for his desolate condition, but the racist former mayor+lobbyist for the Saudis, Putin, the oxycontin kings, Chevron+terrorists is an irredeemably loathsome figure.
It does not get better. If you're a young alcoholic and treatment either doesn't work for you or you don't seek it, it just gets worse and worse and worse and more and more people are hurt by it.
This is a devastatingly accurate portrayal of alcoholism. I lost my only brother to it. He denied his alcoholism until it finally took him down and I think he had that last moment of truth when he looked it in the eye the final time and knew it had him and he had no power over it. Then he killed himself. It is devastating for a family throughout its course. He went to rehab over and over, we found out later, and on his way home from rehab he would stop at a bar and it would start all over again. Every single time. At least he wasn't in cahoots with the most evil person ever to become president and out for another round of it.
No, you don't. You don't think about it every minute after decades pass but it twists your heart and you know how it hurt your parents, so it's not just your pain. It's like rusted barbed wire around your heart.
Anne, my sister committed suicide in 1977. It was the most unbearable thing I have had to face in my 74 years. She struggled with mental imbalance, drugs and alcohol all of her 24 years. I miss her to this day.
As sad as it gets. He was loaded with talent and brains and could not lick this. And he was a Navy SEAL who went through the training at 30. You'd think he'd have all the abilities to quit the alcohol. But it was stronger.
So who's laughing? I've got a brother who is a drunk, a sweet, decent guy who was once a great musician. Now that's heartbreaking. Rudy is not. You can be a fascist shit and an alcoholic. Rudy was always a bastard, now he's a pathetic drunk of a bastard. It's an ancient, tragic addiction. But I feel sorry for the squeegee guys he dragged around and locked up and for all the other people he pissed on in his overblown career, not to mention the women he went after. Foul creep, and he belongs in jail.
I ALWAYS hated him. even when he was that "deadly effective, crusading young prosecutor," he made my skin crawl.
he always felt like one of those "political" guys in high school who shakes hands with you and you wonder what kinds of places he's been putting his fingers...
I was married to a raging alcoholic who drank himself to death, bringing down everyone around him. It's not at all funny, and the enablers just made it worse. Giuliani should be in treatment, but he is and always has been a fascist and a nightmare, and the damage he has done to this country is profound.
Recall that "America's Mayor" wanted to stop the NYC election right after 9/11---not a very heroic call in a democracy under attack. He profited after 9/11 by setting up an international security firm; he made millions. Tony Blair did the same thing.
I grew up and lived in NJ and in NYC. Recall the mob of white cops screaming "Giuliani time!", and Rudy announcing his divorce from Donna Hanover before he bothered to tell her, among other horrific behavior. Rudy was and is a creep and a racist pig.
Between the lines of the Times story: P1135809 took advantage of Rudy's impairment because it served him well. Just as he did with his alcoholic brother! P1135809's team of incompetent attorneys will try to use Rudy-as-Lawyer as a defense in his Washington trial, and the prosecution will single out Rudy's alcoholism as a reason P1135809 should have known better than to rely on inebriated advice. The prosecution has a strong case: P1135809's older brother, Fred, Jr., suffered the same affliction and P1135809 is more than passingly familiar with the effects of alcoholism. In fact, he and sister Mary, took advantage of Fred Jr's alcoholism to screw him out of his inheritance. Hope all of that emerges at trial, it is a scummy an episode as ever unspooled in a life of scummy episodes.
There is an undeserved tone of compassion for this Asshole that speaks well of you as a sentient being. Before he was a drunk Giuliani was a mean spirited prick that prosecuted jaywalkers and John Gotti with the same zeal, tried to shut down the Brooklyn Museum because he objected to an exhibition and displayed countless examples of racism, self aggrandizing and abuse of power. Most of us have experience with addiction either first hand or with family and close friends. Underneath it all many are good people struggling with a disease. The opposite isn't the rule. I know you probably agree. Just want to point it out.
Ex husband told therapist he didn't have a drinking problem--problem was my perception of his drinking. Finally went to rehab after doc told him his liver enzymes were so high that he would be dead if he kept it up. Went to rehab, did 90 meetings in 90 days and proclaimed himself cured. Destroyed a 35 year marriage and the childhoods of 2 kids along the way. But everyone at the bar thought he was a great guy
I knew someone who was in the same rehab she'd attended six or seven years before. she spent, like, two days cursing everyone out because the second time, they'd actually had the nerve to search her and take away the drugs she'd brought. "how the fuck do they expect me to do rehab without getting high?" was her complaint. I ran into her a few months later and she was definitely not sober.
the idea that people do rehab over and over is about the most sobering thing I can think of.
I'd also recommend ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics). It did me a world of good and that's understating how beneficial it was - and is. I gained insight into how and why my father (who drank himself into an early grave) was what he was. More importantly, ACA helped me understand why I developed many of the quirks, characteristics and habits (A whole lot of "bad defense mechanisims" included!) that vexed me over the course of my life. The help is available and out there, you just have to face up to the fact you need it and you needn't go it alone. For a time, I combined my ACA work with visits to a terrific therapist. She had a cute little sign on her wall, "The Road To Self-Improvement Is Always Under Construction". And so it is.
Great column, Lucian, thank you. And thanks also to your many readers for their fearlessly honest comments. Bless you all!
Thank you Lucian. To everyone here who posted about a family member who died by suicide and alcoholism, my heart breaks for you. My father was an alcoholic who never binged or missed work. He just drank himself to an early death. Alcohol is our most dangerous drug.
The lede graf is superb, as is, really, the whole column. Writing about alcoholism from the outside is never as persuasive as from the inside. Drinkers who never clean up make myriad troubles for themselves, as well as certain others. (Don't ask me how I know this, as I often said as Dear Prudence.)
Compulsions are not easy to offload, so I have great respect for those who could do it. The 12-steppers are brave, in my opinion, because of the admission of powerlessness. That has to be painful to process. (Even to stop smoking, for me, was hell. It took a live-in program at a sanitarium, more than one bribe from my mother, and too many failures before success. And smoke didn't alter my behavior ... just my lungs. So to give up an addiction to alcohol I believe to be harder, because think it makes them funnier, or more outgoing. It is more tied to the presentational self than cigarettes.
Rudy is a very public, if not extreme example of how a person can drink away a career, and of course relationships.)
I can't, however, feel too bad for Rudy. There were other factors besides alcohol that brought him low.
There is nothing wrong with alcohol - just some of the folks that drink it. Nothing even wrong with liking alcohol, either. It's when it starts liking you back that you're screwed. So grateful to get off the stuff 27+ years ago - and still friends with the cop who busted me for DUI 27+ years ago. Biggest favor somebody did for me in ages. Addiction is a disease.
You just know that Trump is gonna throw Rudy under the bus by mounting some kind of inadequacy-of-counsel defense, you know, that he acted on advice given by Giuliani while drunk. I dread that possibility.
Alcoholics (and other addicts) to be precise, cannot see their way out of their alcoholic fog, and and a lot of the time, they won't.
Alcohol numbs your soul to the point where if you're having a bad day, it doesn't feel quite so bad-if you've lost your spouse, job, children, status the pain doesn't ache quite so hard as long as you keep the pain adrift on the waves of alcohol.
It is painful and hard to watch someone who was once a pretty good lawyer/mayor go down the valley of the damned that all alcoholics go-some do climb back up, but for the vast majority of them, it 's a one way street to death.
It would be good if someone would stop and put Rudy through rehab but at this rate he'll be dead within 5 years-once the spiral starts, it's hard to stop it-unless you have someone who cares enough to stop it.
But I wouldn't count on Donald Trump to help Rudy out-remember, his brother Fred died of the exact same cause and Trump called him a loser, then proceeded to steal all of Fred's estate from his children.
Alcoholism is not a funny disease, and having watched my mother die of a stroke from drinking and using medications for 30 years was quite the lesson. Recently a friend of mine's brother died of it, at the age of 54.
Don't laugh at people fighting the demons that drive them to hell. You have no idea what it feels like to punish yourself with alcohol.
"BE" seen -- corrected in last graf.
my last drink and drug was april 24, 1994. as much as i detest the man and everything he stands for i would have to respect that he has the same right to recovery that i do and if i saw him in a meeting i would have to treat him graciously and if asked to help would be obligated to do so. his denials of his problem are very close to word for word with mine. drunks got no imagination.
Ditto.
i tell people that i see the real america in meetings. the autonomous structure of AA has created one of the purest and most responsive democracies i have ever seen.
as true as anything.
but there've also been plenty of meetings I've stopped attending because the "culture" of that particular meeting no longer suited me.
sorry, but some shit is just beyond the pall.
if I saw Rudy at a meeting, I'd stop going. if it was, say, a meeting I was chairing (as I chaired arguably the world's craziest meeting--midnight at the Moravian Church--for a year and a half), I would be civilized. period.
sorry, but for me, there are certain levels of human perfection I'm perfectly okay with never even aspiring to...
You are right. Our better selves need to be reminded.
No kidding. All my life I hated Republicans and accountants (because they would always bitch if I asked for an advance on my paycheck). I remember the day it dawned on mr that my sponsor was a Republican (not anymore) and an accountant. He still is my sponsor thirty years later. God def. has a sense of humor.
I'd be Rudy's sponsor! Oh yeah!
"Rudy, let's allot the next four years for your eighth step." (made a list of all people we had harmed and became willing to amends to them all, etc.)
Lucian, I am so glad you wrote about this. I read the NYT article yesterday (Thursday in India) and felt truly sad for Rooty Tooty. I remember him so well as mayor of nyc and his public announcement that he was divorcing the wife of that moment. His third wife is now divorcing him. Yes, he has a very lonely life inside that bottle. He was a terrible, vindictive “leader” and shipped hundreds, if not thousands of homeless people away from the center of tourism in Manhattan. He opened the theatre district to the commercial inundation of Disney and jelly bean companies. He placed scanners and police in the public schools, where I worked at the time. But, as a person of deep compassion, I do feel for him. In spite of all his despicable behavior vis a vis dump. Maybe if he does his eighth step as Knox has suggested, he will have a chance to turn his pathetic life around. Let’s hope he even gets to the first seven....
A 12-step program saved my sanity and probably my life. I'm still awed and inspired by the 12 Traditions as well as the 12 Steps, and my copy of the AA 12 + 12 is never far from my workspace.
My brother's claim not to be an alcoholic was that he only drank beer. You can con every excuse in the world to give yourself a pass. And he would put out a case of empty beer cans every morning. I am so grateful I didn't have a tendency to any chemical addictions. Mine are more work-related as in workaholic which also has problems.
Rudy's drinking problem goes way back, at least to his mayoral days+likely before that. After he defeated David Dinkins, in an overtly+despicably racist campaign in 1993, Rudy raced around the city with his crew hitting high end watering holes and cigar clubs, making them NYC's hot spots. His bullying, a signal trait of his sober or inebriated, always got meaner after several drinks. He deserves our sympathy for his desolate condition, but the racist former mayor+lobbyist for the Saudis, Putin, the oxycontin kings, Chevron+terrorists is an irredeemably loathsome figure.
It does not get better. If you're a young alcoholic and treatment either doesn't work for you or you don't seek it, it just gets worse and worse and worse and more and more people are hurt by it.
This is a devastatingly accurate portrayal of alcoholism. I lost my only brother to it. He denied his alcoholism until it finally took him down and I think he had that last moment of truth when he looked it in the eye the final time and knew it had him and he had no power over it. Then he killed himself. It is devastating for a family throughout its course. He went to rehab over and over, we found out later, and on his way home from rehab he would stop at a bar and it would start all over again. Every single time. At least he wasn't in cahoots with the most evil person ever to become president and out for another round of it.
How sad for you. A family member never really recovers from their sibling, parent, spouse, or child's suicide.
No, you don't. You don't think about it every minute after decades pass but it twists your heart and you know how it hurt your parents, so it's not just your pain. It's like rusted barbed wire around your heart.
Anne, my sister committed suicide in 1977. It was the most unbearable thing I have had to face in my 74 years. She struggled with mental imbalance, drugs and alcohol all of her 24 years. I miss her to this day.
How very sad.
We never really recover completely.
I'm glad you are able to heal.
sorry from me too. very, very sad.
As sad as it gets. He was loaded with talent and brains and could not lick this. And he was a Navy SEAL who went through the training at 30. You'd think he'd have all the abilities to quit the alcohol. But it was stronger.
I’m so sorry for your great loss and your continuing pain. Thank you for telling us your brother’s story.
So who's laughing? I've got a brother who is a drunk, a sweet, decent guy who was once a great musician. Now that's heartbreaking. Rudy is not. You can be a fascist shit and an alcoholic. Rudy was always a bastard, now he's a pathetic drunk of a bastard. It's an ancient, tragic addiction. But I feel sorry for the squeegee guys he dragged around and locked up and for all the other people he pissed on in his overblown career, not to mention the women he went after. Foul creep, and he belongs in jail.
I'm with you.
I ALWAYS hated him. even when he was that "deadly effective, crusading young prosecutor," he made my skin crawl.
he always felt like one of those "political" guys in high school who shakes hands with you and you wonder what kinds of places he's been putting his fingers...
I'm with you, too!
I was married to a raging alcoholic who drank himself to death, bringing down everyone around him. It's not at all funny, and the enablers just made it worse. Giuliani should be in treatment, but he is and always has been a fascist and a nightmare, and the damage he has done to this country is profound.
Recall that "America's Mayor" wanted to stop the NYC election right after 9/11---not a very heroic call in a democracy under attack. He profited after 9/11 by setting up an international security firm; he made millions. Tony Blair did the same thing.
I grew up and lived in NJ and in NYC. Recall the mob of white cops screaming "Giuliani time!", and Rudy announcing his divorce from Donna Hanover before he bothered to tell her, among other horrific behavior. Rudy was and is a creep and a racist pig.
Between the lines of the Times story: P1135809 took advantage of Rudy's impairment because it served him well. Just as he did with his alcoholic brother! P1135809's team of incompetent attorneys will try to use Rudy-as-Lawyer as a defense in his Washington trial, and the prosecution will single out Rudy's alcoholism as a reason P1135809 should have known better than to rely on inebriated advice. The prosecution has a strong case: P1135809's older brother, Fred, Jr., suffered the same affliction and P1135809 is more than passingly familiar with the effects of alcoholism. In fact, he and sister Mary, took advantage of Fred Jr's alcoholism to screw him out of his inheritance. Hope all of that emerges at trial, it is a scummy an episode as ever unspooled in a life of scummy episodes.
There is an undeserved tone of compassion for this Asshole that speaks well of you as a sentient being. Before he was a drunk Giuliani was a mean spirited prick that prosecuted jaywalkers and John Gotti with the same zeal, tried to shut down the Brooklyn Museum because he objected to an exhibition and displayed countless examples of racism, self aggrandizing and abuse of power. Most of us have experience with addiction either first hand or with family and close friends. Underneath it all many are good people struggling with a disease. The opposite isn't the rule. I know you probably agree. Just want to point it out.
The clincher is Rudi’s comment: “I do not have an alcohol problem. I have never had an alcohol problem.” The final defense of all addicts/alcoholics.
Ex husband told therapist he didn't have a drinking problem--problem was my perception of his drinking. Finally went to rehab after doc told him his liver enzymes were so high that he would be dead if he kept it up. Went to rehab, did 90 meetings in 90 days and proclaimed himself cured. Destroyed a 35 year marriage and the childhoods of 2 kids along the way. But everyone at the bar thought he was a great guy
unfortunately, a very common story.
I knew someone who was in the same rehab she'd attended six or seven years before. she spent, like, two days cursing everyone out because the second time, they'd actually had the nerve to search her and take away the drugs she'd brought. "how the fuck do they expect me to do rehab without getting high?" was her complaint. I ran into her a few months later and she was definitely not sober.
the idea that people do rehab over and over is about the most sobering thing I can think of.
He's not actively drinking anymore, but just as miserable and nasty a f@cker as always. A dry drunk
well, there's always THAT.
I'd also recommend ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics). It did me a world of good and that's understating how beneficial it was - and is. I gained insight into how and why my father (who drank himself into an early grave) was what he was. More importantly, ACA helped me understand why I developed many of the quirks, characteristics and habits (A whole lot of "bad defense mechanisims" included!) that vexed me over the course of my life. The help is available and out there, you just have to face up to the fact you need it and you needn't go it alone. For a time, I combined my ACA work with visits to a terrific therapist. She had a cute little sign on her wall, "The Road To Self-Improvement Is Always Under Construction". And so it is.
Great column, Lucian, thank you. And thanks also to your many readers for their fearlessly honest comments. Bless you all!
Thank you Lucian. To everyone here who posted about a family member who died by suicide and alcoholism, my heart breaks for you. My father was an alcoholic who never binged or missed work. He just drank himself to an early death. Alcohol is our most dangerous drug.
Thank you Ann. He died when I was 12….Sucks is exactly the right word….
The lede graf is superb, as is, really, the whole column. Writing about alcoholism from the outside is never as persuasive as from the inside. Drinkers who never clean up make myriad troubles for themselves, as well as certain others. (Don't ask me how I know this, as I often said as Dear Prudence.)
Compulsions are not easy to offload, so I have great respect for those who could do it. The 12-steppers are brave, in my opinion, because of the admission of powerlessness. That has to be painful to process. (Even to stop smoking, for me, was hell. It took a live-in program at a sanitarium, more than one bribe from my mother, and too many failures before success. And smoke didn't alter my behavior ... just my lungs. So to give up an addiction to alcohol I believe to be harder, because think it makes them funnier, or more outgoing. It is more tied to the presentational self than cigarettes.
Rudy is a very public, if not extreme example of how a person can drink away a career, and of course relationships.)
I can't, however, feel too bad for Rudy. There were other factors besides alcohol that brought him low.
Excellent description of alcoholism. This is very sad. I hope that it raises awareness of the devastating effects of alcoholism.
There is nothing wrong with alcohol - just some of the folks that drink it. Nothing even wrong with liking alcohol, either. It's when it starts liking you back that you're screwed. So grateful to get off the stuff 27+ years ago - and still friends with the cop who busted me for DUI 27+ years ago. Biggest favor somebody did for me in ages. Addiction is a disease.
And treatable. 12 step programs help retire the brain.
As a PMHNP one of my interests is craving management.
Naltrexone can help.
Acamprosate can help.
Topiramate can help.
Baclofen can help.
GLp-1 (ozempic et Al) can help.
Programs plus medication can help.
You just know that Trump is gonna throw Rudy under the bus by mounting some kind of inadequacy-of-counsel defense, you know, that he acted on advice given by Giuliani while drunk. I dread that possibility.
As the noose tightens he will commit suicide by bottle or go to an extended long term rehab center.
The problem i have wirh Rudy and his famous crime fighting days is he left one Mafia family in power?
Alcoholics (and other addicts) to be precise, cannot see their way out of their alcoholic fog, and and a lot of the time, they won't.
Alcohol numbs your soul to the point where if you're having a bad day, it doesn't feel quite so bad-if you've lost your spouse, job, children, status the pain doesn't ache quite so hard as long as you keep the pain adrift on the waves of alcohol.
It is painful and hard to watch someone who was once a pretty good lawyer/mayor go down the valley of the damned that all alcoholics go-some do climb back up, but for the vast majority of them, it 's a one way street to death.
It would be good if someone would stop and put Rudy through rehab but at this rate he'll be dead within 5 years-once the spiral starts, it's hard to stop it-unless you have someone who cares enough to stop it.
But I wouldn't count on Donald Trump to help Rudy out-remember, his brother Fred died of the exact same cause and Trump called him a loser, then proceeded to steal all of Fred's estate from his children.
Alcoholism is not a funny disease, and having watched my mother die of a stroke from drinking and using medications for 30 years was quite the lesson. Recently a friend of mine's brother died of it, at the age of 54.
Don't laugh at people fighting the demons that drive them to hell. You have no idea what it feels like to punish yourself with alcohol.
It's an awful way to die.
Trump ignored his brother Fred on his deathbed. Fred Jr was hospitalized. Trump went golfing instead of seeing him while he was dying.
Mary Trump has a long discussion about Trumps behavior in her book.