I found the Official Vermont (Area 70) AA website . Pretty much what you would expect - the Official AA websites tend to be pretty, well … they look like what you would expect if you had put together a web-site in 1935. I guess I am used to this presentation, even have a fondness for it.

Reading the Big Book, you run into this quite a bit, the old language, references, slang. I get a kick out of it, enjoy it, as this book, this program is as much a product of the times as it is the result of anything else. But then again, I’ve read a lot of Sinclair Lewis, and so have a context, even if it is perhaps distorted picture of the time, as novels can be.

And possibly not quite the right time. Babbitt came out in 1922, and was a contemporary novel. But, you can hear that good old boosterism coming through in some of the language of the Big Book. And you can hear, from a different perspective, Lewis’s critique of society at the time, of the attitude that success in business had a virtue to it. You can see this critique in Wilson’s writing as well, though it is focused, necessarily on the alcoholic, the fact that we are drunks suckers for this attitude, and the fatal limitations to this attitude as the basis for a sober and contented life.

It is easy to imagine George Babbitt living in the same town as Dr. Bob. In fact, they probably would have run in much the same circles. And, for both, a solely material basis for living proved disastrous. Babbitts struggle did not involve a descent into the hell of active alcoholism, but it did involve a struggle and a death of sorts. I wonder what the conversation would have been had the two met, and Dr. Bob tried to give George the ’spiritual toolkit’ that he and Bill W. stumbled upon as a way out. I can only imagine, but the language, well, the language would have been straight out of the Big Book.