In Vino Veritas?
Do the drunks in our lives mean the hurtful things they say?
I mean, it's not like alcohol can just conjure a new person out of thin air. You can pour all the booze you want into a welder from Alabama named Joe, but he's never going to turn into a Jamaican shoe salesman named Bob. Joe is still Joe, however drunk he may be, and whatever he says or does, that's still Joe saying and doing it. There is no alien standing outside the window with a mind-control ray making Joe beat his wife and say horrible things to his kids. There's no ghost of some dead wife-beater that possesses him once the alcohol lowers his defenses. There's just Joe.
So it makes sense to me to think that, when my dad would get drunk and beat my mom, there wasn't some alternate personality to blame, that was just my dad being himself. That he always wanted to beat her up, he just didn't have the nerve unless he was drunk. When he would call me into the living room so he could sit me on the couch and tell me, at great length while he drooled on his shirt, everything he didn't like about me and all the ways my brother and I were disappointments to him (killing time until Mom got home from work and he got to use his fists), I can't get around the conclusion that he must have meant every word. Those words and thoughts had to come from somewhere, and unless alcohol has the power to conjure a brand new person out of thin air, complete with their own feelings and opinions that have nothing to do with the actual person who's been drinking, I just can't brush it all off as "the booze talking."
I believe in the old Roman saying, "in vino veritas" -- there is truth in wine, or "a drunken mind speaks a sober heart." Drunks mean what they say. Booze can't speak for itself, and doesn't have any feelings or opinions of its own. All it can do is loosen tongues and lower inhibitions. So if someone is mean when they're drunk, then they're a mean person, period. And if my dad said he hated us (my mom, my brother and me) when he was drunk, then by far the most likely explanation, to my mind, is that he really did hate us.
Am I wrong about this? I don't like the idea that my dad really felt the way toward us that he, y'know, repeatedly said he did when he was too liquored up to stop himself. Even if he acted nicer when he was sober. Even if he had the nerve to say "I love you" on his deathbed. I can't believe any kind thing he said sober, when I saw how easily the hate poured out of him when he was drunk and had no filter.