Driven to Drink
This morning I am going to make a glittering generality and develop it into a theorem and end up with the fact that urban imbibers have a distinct advantage over suburban and rural imbibers. That advantage is that in order to enjoy some of the best food and drink in the world all they have to do is walk to it. The use of mass transit makes the imbiber even nobler.
The early moons of my friendship with beer were passed in the rural state of Vermont, USA. These times were also spent on the campus of a "dry" university. Needless to say the limits of both university and state regulations regarding the obtaining and consumption of beverage alcohol were tested.
This rite of passage was made necessary by the good folks who brought us Prohibition and its impish offspring, the hash of local and state laws governing beverage alcohol. This has created a social environment where wine, beer and spirits are viewed as drugs to be consumed in an emergency (while dining in a restaurant with out a drive-through window) or in mass quantities while grilling meats and smoking cigars, or is it smoking meats and grilling cigars, I can't remember. In the later case it is a matter of wallowing in all the bad things of life; animal protein, saturated fats, tobacco and Satin Himself - beverage alcohol. Usually, in this case, there is usually no real need to worry about participants driving motor vehicles while under the influence. Most celebrants can be found, sound asleep, dreaming of future events, not soon after the last of the comestibles have been consumed.
The point of this diatribe is to lament the position my motor vehicle dependent friends find themselves in. I am not condoning the consumption of mass quantities of beverage alcohol and then operating machines of any kind. I am lamenting the fact that most municipalities, towns, villages, hamlets, and communities have law enforcers that are well aware that any restaurant in their jurisdiction is on a public or private road and that is the only way to get to that establishment. They also know that folks go there to eat and drink. And finally they know that those folks will get in the motor vehicle and be liable for an inspection at the discretion of the officer in charge. (Leaving a restaurant is "probable cause" to suspect driving under the influence of a controlled substance.) This means, quite simply, that a roadblock on Friday and Saturday evenings in the vicinity of any restaurant is going to effect customers. What this says to the adults that live in this environment is that they are always going to have to gamble that one more glass of beer, wine or spirits will put them in financial and legal jeopardy (not to mention the effect on their car insurance).
This brings me back to my earlier points on the effects of Prohibition. Until beer and wine are welcome guests on the dinner tables of families in this country there will always be the thrill of the forbidden about beverage alcohol. What am I saying! Until there are families sitting around dinner tables again and talking to each other there will always be the thrill of the forbidden to seek. If that thrill is beverage alcohol, and that were the most evil thing I faced in my life I would consider myself the luckiest man in history. We all should.
Cheers!
Peter LaFrance
( peter.lafrance@beerbasics.com )
