If you’re my age or older, you probably remember the most common way to comically portray a man who was very drunk at a party or social gathering was to portray him as wearing a lampshade. I always found it a puzzling image when I was young. Do men do that at parties? Why?
It turns out it’s an old visualization in American and European popular culture, and I think at least some of it is about the rise of a particular kind of private domestic sphere and the sort of sociality that rose with it. There’s a darkness about the lampshade drunk. He’s usually humiliating his spouse, he’s the object of ridicule from everyone else, and he’s often the last to leave the party, to the irritation of the hosts. He’s going to drive home drunk, another thing that was portrayed as being vaguely funny until it suddenly wasn’t funny at all.
The lampshade drunk doesn’t want the party to end because he knows he’s going to pay a terrible price for it—a hangover at best, at worst a deepening estrangement from a partner and a realization that some social group (neighbors, friends, co-workers) think he’s an out-of-control idiot. If home is in walking distance, the walk seems like a terrible ordeal. If it’s a drive away, even worse. In real life, the lampshade drunk often manages to puke before leaving, puke in the car, puke on the sidewalk. By the time the lampshade goes on the head, he’s having a terrible time with a terrible aftermath. And yet he wants, so badly, to act like he’s still having fun. And he wants so badly not to leave, even if the price of staying is getting even more drunk and making the aftermath worse.
Welcome to the end of the party. Are your lampshades comfortable?
It’s the great paradox of our time. We know that we stand on the edge of a world whose climate will be increasingly inimical to the lives we have lived and to the life of the world as a whole. We know why we stand on the edge: it is partly those lives, as we have lived them.
We are getting a clear picture now of what the morning after will bring, is bringing this very moment. Heat waves whose upper bounds, both in length and intensity, are worse in more places than what we built for or expected in the 19th and 20th Centuries, happening with more frequency and for longer intervals of a calendar year. Which in the short-term will drive more people to retrofit buildings with air conditioners, which will drive power consumption that makes the overall problem worse, very likely crashing power grids and depriving everyone of any escape from the heat.
Wildfires that come earlier, stay later, are intense and effectively unfightable. “Floods of the century” that happen every five years, changing the landscape through repeated hydraulic action. Floods that happen where they were thought to be impossible. Mudslides, especially where the fires have burned. Stronger winds from regular thunderstorms, more tornadoes, more hurricanes. Rising seas pushing people back from vulnerable coastlines, soaking inland soils with saltwater. Biting insects carrying pathogens pushing into new locations, molds establishing themselves with new ferocity inside residential spaces. Food webs crashing, agriculture becoming more difficult. Places that are homes to millions of people pushing to the edge of habitability.
I agree with Vaclav Smil and other skeptics: this won’t kill life or kill humanity. But our lives are about to be much more difficult and unpleasant. Our entire built world is designed for the conditions of the 20th Century, not the 21st Century. Problems that could be solved with new infrastructure, with sensible climate change adaptation, won’t be solved with the governments we have, with the oligarchs in charge, with the hedge funds that have laid their cuckoo’s eggs in humanity’s nest. The forms of power that we live with are either too hapless to manage anything but small timid gestures like tax credits and commissions of inquiry and white papers or they are all too willing to watch the vast majority of humanity sink, burn and die, because they have theirs and they don’t need most of us any more.
It’s not just them, though. When you’re convinced it’s all over, when the lampshade is on your head, you figure: it’s as bad as it can get, and there’s nothing left to do. But if you’ve ever been that drunk, there’s often some remnant voice speaking up, saying: there’s still time. Take the lampshade off: it was funny for a minute. Don’t have another drink. Ask your partner to drive home. Drink more water now, while you can. Apologize to the host for having had a bit too much.
Some people manage to do that. They’re still going to have a headache, they’re still going to feel embarrassed, they’re still going to wish they had stopped earlier or maybe never even gone to the party, but it’s all going to be much less worse than it could have been.
Our problem today is that we have some people who think they’ll never be held accountable, and so we let them turn the party into a horror show, because what can we do? And we have some people who think they deserve to suffer afterwards, who know that they’ve sinned and expect to be punished. When you think you’re inevitably going to hell, why stop doing what you’re doing right now? However bad it feels, it’s better than burning for eternity.
There’s only one answer for both, if you’re the kind of person who can manage to take the lampshade off and start sobering up. Pick a couple of big guys to be bouncers and toss the unaccountables out the door. They can’t party without everyone else, since they think the point of partying is acting horribly in front of the rest of us and thinking nothing can happen to them. When you’re done, get a schoolbus (and a sober driver) and have the sinners driven to church—and lock the door behind them, so that they may sober up in one another’s company and contemplate their vision of eternity without distraction.
Then with throbbing heads and regretful hearts, everyone else can begin cleaning up the mess. It’s not too late to get started, even if it feels like it is.
Image credit: Photo by Michael Held on Unsplash
Image credit: "Hey! You left your hat on the bench" by yooperann is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Believe it or not, I actually have been at a party where somebody put a lampshade on their head. It was actually the rugby coach who we were forced to hire for one year (the college cited insurance when telling us we needed to bring in a coach, then next year there was a budget crunch, and they let us go back to being entirely student-run). He was a men's club player from Albany, who was very knowledgable about the game, but also a bit of a lunatic. At the end-of-season party, he did the classic lampshade trick, and also rode down a flight of stairs inside a big trash can, then disappeared into the bathroom for a loooong time only to emerge with his head wrapped in toilet paper like a mummy.
We were very grateful to have the adult supervision that had been mandated by the college.