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took one of those oaths, which was not to write about the Bush ladies,
but one aspect of their drinking affair is underplayed, which is
the sheer idiocy of the law.
We all know
that up until the counter-Woodstock anti-alcohol putsch of a generation
ago, drinking was permitted in most states after age 18. What seemed
simultaneously, our lawmakers resolved a) to forbid drinking until
age 21, and b) to permit voting at age 18.
Begin by acknowledging
that alcoholism is the worst of our national curses. About 20 percent
of Americans who drink, drink too much, and about 5 percent become
alcoholics. They do things like destroy family life, run over people
while driving automobiles, aim pistols at their wives' lovers or at
their wives, and commit suicide, sometimes belatedly. And it is also
true that if you put off drinking until age 21, the chances that you
will never drink increase — which stretches out into a hopeful
moral: No booze till 21 means no booze everywhere.
But those projections
are not airtight, so that the most that can be said is that it pays
to postpone alcoholic intake until a little supplementary seniority
is there to contribute a better perspective than you have at the
earlier age. Certainly the perspective of Jenna and Barbara was
off. To have slipped a drink when, it turns out, AP, Larry King,
MGM, 60 Minutes, and Jim Lehrer were all staring at them
from the corner of the restaurant shows an immature perspective,
to be compared with an amateur bank robber.
But attempts
to legislate on the basis of a prudent projection of the incidence
of alcoholism are themselves misplaced acts of legislative/moral
energy, because to choose one is glaringly to ignore that which
you did not choose, which is, of course, tobacco. The statistics
here are very firm. If you don't smoke until age 21, the chances
are 90 percent that you will not smoke ever. And nicotine addiction,
though it doesn't cause mayhem, does cause frequent and painful
death.
Now the argument
against enforcing the rule against teenage smoking (it is a "rule"
only in that in many states teenagers aren't permitted to buy cigarettes)
is that it is quite simply impossible. Who is so brave and so dumb
as to stand up in front of a battery of policemen instructing them
to bring into court anyone with a cigarette in his/her mouth who
can't prove that he/she was born before 1980? The move to repeal
the constitutional amendment against drinking was fueled substantially
by the national despair over its enforcement, and derivative gloom
over the implications of wholesale resistance to the integrity of
laws, let alone constitutionally specified laws.
The idea of
eliminating booze from campus life is an abstraction akin to the
idea of eliminating rising costs by wage-and-price controls. Moreover,
where efforts to do it are employed, the results can be comic. Invited
to be the speaker a year ago at the annual celebration of the Yale
Daily News, I stipulated that my sole condition was that I be
served wine during dinner. Three years earlier my son had been the
speaker and almost all the guests and editors decided to do a binge
drunk that evening, so that when he got up to speak, nobody was
conscious enough to listen. This resulted in an op-ed in the New
York Times and shocks and quavers at Yale, eddies from which
were rippling when I made my appearance. My hosts decided to handle
the law by serving wine to all present who were over 21 (about 30
percent), fruit juice to the others. But of course there was a back-of-the
bus feel to this plan, so that, in the event, no wine was served
to anybody; which meant that students had to leave the banquet hall
before having their beer.
Princeton handles
the no-booze-until-21 law by the wonderful expedience of simply
ignoring it. At their fraternities (everybody at Princeton belongs),
they can have their beer and wine and the police do other things.
Perhaps most
of the time in Austin, Texas, the police do other things, and it
is legitimately argued that the Bush ladies were simply dumb and
provocative to ask for margaritas, let alone to produce other people's
I.D. cards to disguise their ages. But whatever one might intone
about the relative responsibilities of children of public figures,
still the offense for which they were arraigned is better commentary
on the misbehavior of the law, than of the two violators of it.
There are plenty
of sanctions one can come up with against student drinkers who overdo
it, and the reports a few months ago on binge drinking bring these
to light. The Bush ladies have proved not much more than that modern
life confirms that sexual equality means also that girls will be
girls. Maybe when the two Bush sisters reach a venerable age they
will be given honorary degrees by the University of Texas for having
brought to focus, in the year 2001, the silliness of this particular
blue law.
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