The year 1933 was a great one for America. It's considered the point when the country began to recover from the Great Depression and, not coincidentally, it's the year Franklin Delano Roosevelt repealed Prohibition. He was a true man of the people.
In many ways, we're still rebuilding from that national nightmare. Ernest and Julio Gallo started their wine empire in 1933, for one thing. Despite the efforts and sacrificed lives of dozens of freedom fighters, their vile grape still finds its way into the kitchens of provincial housewives all over America, who splash that sickly whimper of a drink into the glasses of their fellow book-club members on muggy Saturday afternoons while they talk about romance novels with stories as trite as their hooch. My liver constricts to think of it. So now mark this day, fellow boozers! Kansas might finally start selling full-strength beer! In 2017!
A Kansas Senate committee has endorsed a bill to allow sales of full-strength beer, wine and liquor at grocery and convenience stores in only six years' time. So that everyone has a chance to prepare themselves for the madness of a state trampled by pink elephants? Buy a gun now, folks.
The real thing isn't entirely illegal in the first state in the United States to enact a total ban on alcohol sales (a dry spell of Sahara-esque proportions from 1881 to 1948, thank you very much, Governors John A. Martin through Frank Carlson, you fucking assholes). You can buy full-strength at liquor stores, but even then, the sales laws are cruelly restrictive and inhumane.
Just because one committee endorsed the bill doesn't mean we don't have to go through a long legislative process where people will actually argue over this - like we don't all know the right answer already - and maybe not even let you buy the good liquor. If it does go through as is, the bill freezes the number of licenses to sell full-strength beer, wine and liquor at 760 until 2017. If one closes, another can get a license.
This is five years after the Mayan calendar has the planet dying - 60 months, 1,825 long and dusty days.
Kansas, you used to be cool. You're always so proud -- justifiably -- that you weren't a slave state. And yet today, my friends Jack Daniels, Jim Beam and Senor Quervo are in chains. Let them go, Kansas. Let my people go.
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