Enjoy This Article Responsibly

I’ve often enjoyed an alcoholic drink or two...or twenty.  If given the same media attention provided to sodden-celebs, such as Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, I might also be roundly ridiculed as a poor role model to youth, lampooned and lambasted for public displays of debauchery, chastised for stumbling out blind and belligerent from one-too-many gin mills.  Other than wearing panties (knee-length boxers in my case) most of the time, the only difference, really, between me and the average Hollywood tippler is attention:  no one’s watching me when I dip my paycheck into the suds; that is, no one but the folks who are making money because of it.  Which is why I find the standard warning label now on all alcohol advertising so hypocritical: "Please Enjoy Responsibly.”  This message strikes me as so crazed and convoluted that I actually crave a shot to help me figure it out.  I'm still stumped.  Does "responsible enjoyment" mean I should merely admire the aesthetics of, say, a bottle of vodka, since after I actually drink some of the stuff I tend to forget the feelings of responsibility (job, bills, etc.) that make me want to have a slug in the first place?  And then there's a television commercial for Stella Artois I recently watched.  A bartender on a train is trying, unsuccessfully so, to pour out a perfect draft of Stella for his thirsty customer.  The problem is the rocking motion of the train does not allow him to create in the glass the right gradient of head and body.  So he leaves the car, the train comes to a dead stop, and he returns triumphantly to draw out a perfect brew.  Then the camera leaves the bar and we see that the bartender has somehow disconnected the bar car from the rest of the train.  The bar car now sits alone, most precariously, on an extension bridge over a jagged rocky bottom below.  The tag line:  “Stella:  Perfection has its Price.”  Yes, it does, responsibility.