E-Mail This Article to a Friend DRINK UP A handy guidebook for the Modern Drunkard BY MIKE MILIARD

For lovers of beverages fermented and distilled, these are trying times. Whereas topers and tipplers once ruled the world, now it’s the teetotalers who’ve got the upper hand. The three-martini lunch has gone the way of the fedora. Even the most risqué beer commercials implore that we "please drink responsibly." Fie!

Frank Kelly Rich, editor of Modern Drunkard magazine, and author of the new Modern Drunkard: A Handbook for Drinking in the 21st Century (Riverhead, $14), has had about enough, and he says so straight-up: "This book is about heavy drinking."

But not just any heavy drinking. His is a guide to sousing with style, about resurrecting the golden age of boozehounds, binging, and bacchanals. It’s about extolling John Barleycorn’s many virtues and rallying the "large — and largely scattered — tribe" of dedicated dipsos and debauchees who are so vital to a healthy republic.

"A lot of the lessons of our grandfathers were lost in the ’60s, when everybody turned to pot," says Rich from Modern Drunkard’s Denver offices. "Generations of knowledge disappeared.... Kids learn to drink in frat-house basements, at keggers, and they have no idea how to behave. How to treat a bartender. What to drink. A lot of kids these days are drinking these drinks our grandfathers wouldn’t dream of drinking, these alcopops, and these fruity, Zima-style drinks. When’s the last time you saw a 21-year-old kid ordering a Scotch?"

Rich’s handbook overflows with valuable counsel. There’s an itinerary for the perfect lost weekend. A meditation on the Zen of drinking alone. A glossary of new Buzzwords for Boozeheads ("barf-lies n. post-vomiting affirmations that you will never drink again"), and a list of 40 Things Every Drunkard Should Do (Get drunk with your father ... Try absinthe ... Eat a pickled egg from the big jar.)

Its rapier wit and ribald good humor help dispel a common misconception about habitual boozers. "Look at all the smart people throughout history, and they’re almost to a man heavy drinkers. Whether it’s a statesman or a poet or an artist, if you look at the old days, all the great icons were drinkers. Bogart. Hemingway. Jackie Gleason’s another one. That guy was in the bag every day of his life, and he still managed to create one of the greatest shows on television. He lived life on his own terms, exactly how he wanted to live it. How many teetotalers live that exciting kind of life?"

So what the hell happened? Rich, a novelist and former Army Ranger, blames political correctness for this killjoy culture of "nannyism," even citing Mothers Against Drunk Driving for their chilling effect on drinking culture. "I respect MADD for their original idea, but now they’ve turned into a full-on prohibitionist organization, and they’re actually attacking alcohol itself." It’s all part of a cyclical push for prohibition, he says. It’s happened before, and it can happen again. "This time they’re doing it more slowly. They’re more wily about it. Drip by drip."

Most frightening, even as alcohol is increasingly marginalized, is that it’s simply supplanted by other drugs. "Now the pharmaceutical companies are pushing all these things like Zoloft that just do the things a couple beers after work used to do. But that seems to be what society wants nowadays. They want you to go do your job at the office or the factory, then come home and take your pills and get up in the morning and repeat the cycle, till you’re dead."