Hangovers are a good thing.

They confirm your liver is still working, which is important in one's short- to medium-term survival strategy.

Livers are grossly underrated internal organs. They trundle away, doing whatever it is that livers do, but the moment they lose interest in their job, you drop dead.

Yet they gain scant recognition.

This critical piece of kit is not mentioned in romantic poetry. Where have you read: "When I gaze into your limpid eyes, it sets my liver a-tremble"?

If you used that as a pick-up line you would probably get hit.

And why is it that a brave person is lion-hearted, and not lion-livered? After all, the lion would be pretty feeble without a robust liver.

A coward, though, is lily-livered. How a flower can have internal organs of any description is for the inventor of this subversive phrase to explain. Would a brave person be lily-hearted? Why should a kind person not be soft-livered?

Then there are lungs and kidneys.

But that's not the point. The point is the many benefits of hangovers.

The greatest of these is that they automatically instil a sense of guilt. Even if - and this is a big if - you can remember every single thing you did while poisoning your body in so pleasant a manner, you always wake up feeling guilty.

OK, you are not mingling limbs with a Nigerian hooker, you haven't been robbed by ravening hordes of street kids picking over your comatose body, and you didn't get involved in an armed confrontation on the stairs to your flat with alien Long Street drug dealers.

But there is that gnawing sense of wrongdoing that goes with the disgusting mouth and dulled brain like eggs with bacon.

One's behaviour might be exemplary, with one small exception, but the guilt is inevitable.

This leads to one of two possible conclusions: the drinking of alcohol is intrinsically wicked, and hence the guilt; or, there is nothing wrong with the drinking of alcohol, within broad reaches of reason, and so booze triggers a genetic guilt trip programme.

The first proposition is clearly absurd and one must go with the second alternative. This makes sense.

Long Street's finest upstanding drug dealers go to Bob's seething bar and bistro, not to ply their trade, but to spend their legitimately-gotten gains. They are prudent, and never drink enough to get a hangover, and thus never feel guilty.

Tony Yengeni said he was not guilty and shouldn't have been jailed in the first place, and one must trust a man of his integrity. Fortunately, his correctional supervision requires him not to abuse alcohol and so he is safe. No hangover, no requirement to revisit that not guilty certainty.

George Walker Bush is now tee- total after a youth of gleeful substance abuse, and so he faces no danger of a hangover. The free world can breathe more easily because of this. No booze, no hangover, no genetic trigger, no guilt, no change of policy.

Where would all peace-loving people be if the greatest president the United States has ever been blessed with were to have second thoughts about his progressive and principled policies? Iraq, his greatest Middle Eastern invention and a beacon of democracy and decency in the region, would go to the dogs.

Those cursed terrorists held in such humane conditions in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere might be brought before the courts.

As everyone knows, the phrase "sober as a judge" is ironic, so they might appear before learned men with hangovers and a sense of guilt, who will free them to wreak their wickedness on the world. Nor would we have the eager sense of anticipation of a pre-emptive strike on Iran.

This merry life we have known since 2000 would be no more.

And so we must seek solutions. One of the answers is not to drink or to do so in sufficient moderation so that we never have hangovers, not even on New Year's Day or when the Proteas beat Australia.

This freedom of guilt among the proletariat, though, would not work in the broader interests of society.

It is one thing for the great, the good and the drug dealers to be without scruples, but quite another for ordinary people not to have a good dose of guilt.

It is our responsibility to have at least one hangover a week lest we lose the desire to work and make things right. So drink and be merry, eschew Nigerian hookers like a pandemic, and avoid damage to your life by steering clear of their Russian counterparts. Stay clear of street kids and never pick fights with drug dealers.

Wake up once in a while with bad noises in your head, strange things before your eyes and an overwhelming sense of guilt. It is your duty, unless, of course, you are a Bush or a Yengeni.

Stent is a freelance journalist (mike.stent@inl.co.za).

With acknowledgement to Michael Stent and Cape Times.