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Wednesday Jenna and Barbara Bush went at it again, hammering back forbidden brew-skis. As midnight hit sleepy Washington, Jenna and Barbara were "sucking down Budweisers and chain-smoking cigarettes," the Washington Post reports. And a nation watches silently. Was this illicit binge to blur the ever-present hum of a forbidden lesbian incest -- lips wrapping around welcoming glass mouths, tongues seeking hungrily for that luscious French kiss of beer... Or just the all-American antics of two college women on the wrong side of their 21st birthdays.

Oh, so much more. Guzzling glorious mead meant braving the District of Columbia's harsh sentencing guidelines -- mandatory arrest and jail time. Jenna and Babs have now joined America's proud tradition of rebellion, hoisting their freak flags high and marching in the town parade of history's outcasts -- pioneers of excess following their wild wild hearts....

But can we truly fathom the depths of this lurking all-American depravity? Primal urges suddenly breaking to the surface, hot blood pumping uncontrollably -- the freak twin offspring of a venal milquetoast office-holder... Maybe the only way to comprehend it is by channeling some tortured 19th-century hillbilly -- a lusty son of the soil, abandoning his frontier wife and children to explore dark mysteries of the American soul.

The forgotten voice sounds once more as America summons from its nether-world: the ghost of Sherwood Anderson.

"For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write.... The grotesques were not all horrible. Some were amusing, some almost beautiful...

Crossing dizzying swirls of history and humanity, the ghost of Sherwood Anderson shimmers across the ages. Lawfulness and indulgence, righteousness and forgiveness, the fathers we wished we'd had and the fathers we wished we'd been. Impossibly, incomprehensibly, half an answer begins to form....

It was the young thing inside him that saved the old man....

And suddenly our nation's alcoholic President takes his stand beside the boy he used to be -- standing shoulder to shoulder with the oppressed libertines who've gone before. The troubled lesbians and the secret incestuous lovers. The poseurs to honor, and those all-American drunks who are both humble and noble. And somewhere across the fruited plain burble warm words from the ghost of Mark Twain.

"God bless the drunks and the children, and the United States of America."

Like a noisy bar the night fills with barely heard echoes. Drunkeness is its own mystery, with its own readily apparent answers. Maybe it's the something young inside us all that embraces the ever-enticing brew of hops and fellowship, a nation of glorious crackpots with their booze-fueled dreams

As the spiritual seance ends, the drunks of Mark Twain echo through the twilight...

"One man said it was getting towards the long days and the short nights now. T'other one said THIS warn't one of the short ones, he reckoned.

"And then they laughed, and he said it over again, and they laughed again...."

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