I realize it's been fully a week since I felt like I had anything to blog about at all. There's lots going on, but I just haven't felt like I had anything particular to add.
I still don't, but I am feeling irritated today, so I'm just going to resort to a rant. The subject of the rant will be bad behavior related to alcohol.
Whose bad behavior? Not the drunks, of whom there are noticably fewer these days. There's a great deal less drinking, smoking, and fighting in America, which most people regard as unmitigated improvements. I'm not sure we couldn't use a little more of all three.
I am entirely sure we have gone too far in trying to curb these activities. Last night I took my wife and family to dinner at a local restaurant. I ordered a pint of Guinness with my burger. The waitress carded me.
"I'm so sorry," she apologized as she did it. "I have to card absolutely everyone. My parents come in here, and I have to card them too."
She's right, of course. The law now requires it in Georgia. No one could possibly mistake me for a teenager trying to sneak a drink, but even were I 75 years old I should have to show my identification. There is no need for it to enforce the laws against underage drinking, as only borderline cases really require identification. There is no need for it to enforce the laws against serving people who are already intoxicated, as your age is immaterial if you're obviously drunken.
Rather, it is a pure form of harrassment. The intention is to make having a beer seem like a dirty activity, something of which society is rightly suspicious. I find that plainly offensive. Drunkenness is surely bad, but beer, as David Allen Coe used to say, is good for you.
This absurd treatment has surely had some positive effects. I understand that DUI-related deaths are down these last few years, as the anti-drinking movement has managed to push the acceptable blood-alcohol level down in most states. I'm not even sure what it is in Georgia now; it seems like it changes ever year, although always only in one direction.
Not that further gains aren't possible. Britain is enjoying a 48% decline in alcohol related violence in its rowdiest party town. The cost of such a decline?
Customers entering the town's six main late-night drinking and dancing joints were being asked to register their personal details, have their photograph taken and submit to a biometric finger scan.Fingerprints. And a mugshot. Just for walking in the place.
But hey, it works, right? Sure it does. 48% drop in alcohol-related violence -- can't argue with that.
Except, I think, by looking at what these things do to us as citizens. It makes us accustomed to a level of control that is unfit for a free people. It makes us learn to accept the idea that it is perfectly right for the government, or its appointed agents, to examine us in whatever detail it may wish, at any time.
I want to be able to sit and have a beer in peace, without the government leaning in from Atlanta to demand my papers. I don't think it's wrong for people to have a pleasant smoke, so long as it's not in such an enclosed area that other people can't get away from it if they like.
Joel Leggett and I once had a good exchange on the topic, starting here and ending here. Joel reminded us of John Wayne, in The Alamo, who said that in a Republic people could "be drunk or sober, however they choose."
Kim du Toit once posted a fine essay asserting that, "I want men everywhere to going back to being Real Men. To open doors for women, to drive fast cars, to smoke cigars after a meal, to get drunk occasionally and, in the words of Col. Jeff Cooper, one of the last of the Real Men: 'to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth.'"
As we should. There are benefits, in some cases, to the nanny-state approach. Those benefits are undercut by the fact that they make it harder -- and make it seem, to some, shameful -- for a man to behave like a man.
To hell with that.
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