Bushwhacking young boozers

If the recent brouhaha with the presidential progeny proves anything, it’s that Americans are boobs when it comes to booze.

Nabbed May 29 after trying to procure proscribed potations from a Tex-Mex joint called “Chuy’s” in Austin, 19-year-old twins Jenna and Barbara Bush were cited two days later for various underage entanglements with laws designed to prevent those under 21 from sipping the sauce.

Predictably, Mothers Against Drunk Driving applauded the “restaurant staff and law enforcement officers involved … for taking action to potentially prevent injuries and save lives.” Always keen to pump the cause, in a May 31 press release MADD jumped on the bullhorn: “The reported alcohol-related incident involving President Bush’s daughters only underscores the fact that no family – whether average American or national celebrity – is immune to underage drinking issues.”

What issues?

MADD is of the opinion that underage drinking is deleterious to the youth of America, that younkers and alcohol are spirits not to be mixed lest their innocence be shaken and stirred. “Alcohol is the No. 1 drug problem among our youth, killing 6.5 times more young people than all other illicit drugs combined.”

What’s interesting, though, is that MADD makes no distinction between the use and abuse of booze. If you’re under 21, it’s abuse – period.

This is an opinion that baffles most of the world, and me.

On a visit to France, New York Press columnist Christopher Caldwell celebrated Bastille Day with friends in a small Normandy town. “My friend Guillaume ordered a panach? for his 11-year-old son,” recounts Caldwell. When Caldwell asked Guillaume what panach? was, he answered, “It’s half beer, half lemonade,” observing, “You must have something like it in the United States.”

Caldwell explained that, no, the U.S. has no such thing, that we “prefer to drink just beer.” Thinking there was a misunderstanding, Guillaume responded, “I mean for kids.”

Europe does not have the same alcohol hang-ups that haunt the goody-two-shoes of the New World. Teen-agers across the Old World have no problem legally procuring booze. Wine is regularly given as gifts, imbibed in families, served at restaurants, and enjoyed in any number of other contexts and situations, along with beer, ale and other more-potent potables. Alcohol is viewed much less the poison and much more the pleasant, refreshing and sustaining substance that it is.

Since all you have to do to create alcohol is crush a few grapes and leave them alone to ferment with the yeasts already growing on their skins, Billy Sunday’s worst nightmare is probably the world’s first-discovered psychoactive substance. Wines made from other fruits are equally as easy to make, and the same is basically true for beer; have a little accident with moisture and barley in the bakery and ale’s well that ends well.

I speak from experience, as I’ve brewed beer for almost five years and my father and grandpa have each made a hobby of winemaking over the years; others in our family have likewise turned their attentions to fostering fermentables from time to time. Despite the rants and raves of MADD and the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement, “the fruit of the vine” is a completely natural and wonderful substance, given by God to gladden the heart of man (Psalms 104:14-15).

Regardless of the facts that booze has been with man since the dawn of Creation and that nearly every civilization and nation on Earth has come to grips with its use and abuse, America shows remarkable immaturity and knee-jerk imbecility on the matter.

Rather than acknowledging the reality of alcohol and the desire of people to imbibe its beneficence, America has oft-sought to control its consumption by legislative fiat rather than the societal and cultural traditions that have governed its use from the earliest days of elbow tipping and mug lifting. Starting with Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and weaseling all the way to President Herbert Hoover’s Noble Experiment and beyond, prohibitionists have proved, if not their ignobility, certainly their infantilism.

Upon the enactment of Prohibition, Billy Sunday cheered from his pulpit, “The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent.”

As the unfolding years made clear, however, Hell just sublet to gangsters, bootleggers, corrupt cops, speak-easy proprietors, hypocritical politicians and jake-trotting inebriants whose brains were permanently buggered from poisonous booze procured from feckless sellers too busy profiting from Prohibition’s inflated markets to care about “quality control.” (If that sounds a lot like today’s drug war, it should; fundamentally, there’s no difference.)

Whatever their extremes before The Great Dry Spell, the nation’s drinking habits were at least regulated by social norms, cultural controls and laws that protected bibbers from getting bum sauce. Those factors were obliterated with the onset of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act.

Reading the speeches, letters and papers of Prohibition’s pontificants, pundits and applauders, it’s clear that the Volsteaders failed to make the same distinction that MADD fails to make today – use and abuse.

The French obviously know the difference, which is why Caldwell’s friend feels fine ordering a drink for his son. He knows he’s not abusing alcohol; he’s simply enjoying it. If Guillaume Jr. were tossing back shots of Scotch like everybody’s favorite Kennedy, no doubt dad would not egg him on. Instead, father – whether conscientiously or not – is teaching son to drink responsibly.

Considering his soaking wet past, George W. Bush may be a little less qualified to teach Jenna and Barbara about overindulgence than Guillaume, but there is nothing in the recent press accounts of the Bush twins’ crash at Chuy’s to indicate they were intent on getting blotto. They simply wanted, as millions of other Americans over 21 and under, to wet their whistles and enjoy a drink.

At 18, we consider people like Jenna and Barbara old enough to drive tanks, shoot foreigners and operate high-power weaponry while decked out in nifty uniforms. If, however, they try to operate high-power shot glasses, they might get a far-less nifty uniform – an orange jumpsuit. Having a few previous run-ins for the same shenanigans, Jenna might actually face such a fate.

No doubt remembering the sort of scrutiny under which the Bush daughters are presently being eyed, Ron Reagan Jr. recently leaped to their defense. The real story, he said, has nothing to do with “something as mundane as trying to buy beer with a borrowed ID, something that happens 10,000 times a day in every college town in America. The story is the media’s inability to resist the lure of ratings and circulation.”

Close but no chardonnay. The real story is the ludicrous age limits – something about which Ron Jr. should know since they are his dad’s fault.

Demonstrating the same prohibitionist moxie that made his drug war such fun for dealers and petty users alike, President Reagan chucked any respect for states rights and regional policymaking out the window and ramrodded the national age-21 limit down the throats of the states by threatening to withhold highway funds if they didn’t comply. According to the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act, any state that neglected to hike the age limit to 21 would be denied 10 percent of federal highway dollars each year it failed to lock saloons to young drinkers.

Beyond the sterling example of animosity for state/federal separation of powers, Reagan’s antisauce scheme also showed animosity for common sense. There is no denying that many young Americans enjoy bellying up and impersonating Boris Yeltsin, screwdriving themselves into schnockersville. But age limits do not make this any better; as researchers have pointed out, in fact, they probably worsen it.

Dean of admissions at Swarthmore College Carl Wartenburg, quoted in the December 1995 issue of Reason, is convinced “The law makes alcohol a forbidden fruit and encourages underage students to drink.”

Speaking as a botanical expert of the forbidden fruit, Morris Chafetz, chairman of Reagan’s own Presidential Commission on Drunk Driving, advised, “By making [alcohol] a ‘don’t,’ we actually make it a ‘do.'” Not that Reagan cared much what Chafetz had to say. According to Dan Levine in the Aug. 24, 2000, Hartford Advocate, Chafetz was the commission’s Lone Ranger gunning to keep the age-18 limit. Didn’t help much.

By highballing the drinking age, underage drinking is not stymied; it is merely driven underground. This is the worst thing that can be done. Drinking should always be out in the open, where fellow drinkers – preferably intergenerational – can check the excesses of other drinkers. When Caldwell’s friends went to the pub to order drinks, the whole enclave went – the extended family, kids and all. In situations like this, kids learn from parents and uncles, cousins and siblings how to hold their liquor, and what happens to those who do not, since overindulgence is frowned upon and carries negative sanctions in the social group.

This is exactly the way to regulate drinking according to Norman E. Zinberg, clinical professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of Psychiatric Training at The Cambridge Hospital. Lamenting the fact that “our culture plays down the importance of the many social mores, sanctions, and rituals that enhance our capacity to control the use of intoxicants,” he stresses five factors that help encourage moderate, responsible use of alcohol:

1. Drinking in a social group is differentiated from drunkenness.
2. Drinking is tied to dining and “ritualistic feasting.”
3. Drinking does not exclude either gender or any age group, whether particular individuals in the group drink or not.
4. Drinking is separated from escapism.
5. Drinking in the group is encouraged if responsible and punished if irresponsible.

This is not to say that a guy can’t have a gin and tonic while by himself after work – only that he should show the same level of restraint that he would if his grandma were sitting on the stool next to him with a half-pint of peach lambic.

Unfortunately, our present rules on drinking do not encourage these sorts of social controls. By making booze verboten for kids, they tend to congregate and drink together to avoid punishment from older rule-sticklers. And remember these are kids who have typically – thanks to the law – not had the benefit of learning responsible drinking habits from superiors and elders; thus, they tend to have many bad drinking habits, which are reinforced by their fellows who share the same sorts of dysfunctional habits.

This is a recipe for social disaster, and the hair of the dog that MADD keeps harping about, praising nonsensical laws, and ridiculous enforcement only makes things worse.

David Hanson, professor of Sociology at New York State University, Potsdam, has studied alcohol abuse on college campuses for a greater period of time than people must be alive to legally imbibe. His analysis is that while parents aren’t typically thrilled to inculcate proper drinking habits in their children because any underage drinking habits outside the home are illegal, still, there’s no place like home.

“Children follow in their parents’ footsteps,” says Hanson. “What they learn in the home has more impact than what they pick up from friends or at school.” The trouble is the laws promise to regulate the behavior of kids, freeing their parents from the trouble of teaching. The result is that kids still drink, only now do it in destructive environments, learning destructive habits, and all the while fostering a destructive loathing for the law they flout with every tip of the bottle.

Jenna and Barbara Bush demonstrated amazing stupidity by trying to illegally purchase liquor two years before fake IDs are unnecessary. When the world is looking at you, minding your pints and quarts is the – to use a popular Bush family word – prudent thing to do.

Another prudent thing would be to abandon this futile and absurd attempt to squelch all teen drinking as if it were all bad, and instead free up families to properly educate youth about how to use booze without abusing it, have a glass or two of the good stuff without getting tanked, and enjoy God’s good gifts without profaning them.

After all, it’s for the children.