Ah, Youth!
Admittedly, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer set the tone by pleading with journalists not to barrage him with questions about how Bush, as a parent, was handling his daughter's misdemeanors. But the press should have been smarter than to fall for that curve ball. Had the president been more graceful and shrewd, he would have seized the opportunity to set an example both as the parent of a college student and as a political leader.
The Bush girls' recent brushes with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission are not just familiar to many an American family; they are a perfect illustration of our nation's hypocritical, even schizophrenic attitudes toward college drinking. Consider this for classic irony: Mr. Bush freely admits to drinking his way through Yale with impunity. Yet, were Jenna to be charged just one more time in Austin, she might become subject to a statute signed by her father which could send her to jail for six months.
When my sister and I were teenagers, my father used to regale us with stories of his first year at Stanford University, a place where not much rain fell in '36, but where beer and bourbon apparently flowed freely. The night before his biology final, Daddy got so drunk that he passed out during the test and ended up flunking the course.
“Ah, youth; ah, drink; ah the delightful mischief of college life…” he seemed to be reminiscing when he recounted the adventure to us.
“Ah, college finals before college grades mattered,” I would think, longingly.
The Pendulum Swings
My father was born the very year of Prohibition, so had lived the great majority of his youth under the Liquor Laws when he entered college. Not surprisingly, alcohol was to him a veritable symbol of freedom, extravagance, and fun; the dissolute college life was an elite ideal to which he, a child of middle class parents, openly aspired. In 1936, the drunker you were at college, the more respectable your parents' financial resources and social position. Nobody who was working their way through school during the Depression could afford to take freshman biology twice.
When I went to Berkeley in the Seventies, things were different. By then, the proud tradition of college boozing transcended class barriers, and was less about sophistication and revelry than about insecurity and despondency. My Dad liked his Stanford drinking buddies — found them interesting people. Many became lifelong friends. But I never hung out with those of my sorority sisters who drank a lot, because I found these girls too often dull and troubled.
In the intervening years between three generations of freshman binges, so much has changed, not the least of it being a pendulum swing back toward the marginalization of alcohol consumption in public life. Indeed, there is a temperance movement abroad of late which looks very much like the moral panic that bred Prohibition a century ago.
Drinking ages have been raised. College students caught sneaking alcohol are whisked off to “awareness” programs where they learn its evils, perform community service, and must promise to reform. Instead of enforcing alcohol-related laws in prudent ways, the municipal police in college towns set up “zero tolerance” policies and sting operations, while politicians sign bills to throw underage people who purchase alcohol into jail.
What Did W. Say to Jenna?
Curiously, however, there is the other side of the coin: Private university administrators, afraid to impose rules not everyone is going to obey, sequester self-proclaimed goody-goodies in “drug and alcohol free” dorms, thus increasing the appeal of alcohol and even upping the binge ante in the other dorms. And then there are parents, trying as patiently as they can to help their children negotiate the fine line between adolescence and adulthood while avoiding arrest or, God forbid, a lawsuit.
I hate drunken, disorderly, and reckless conduct as much as anyone. I saw a college friend at 17 suffer delirium tremens, and will never forget the experience. But I cannot help thinking that it is far from moral turpitude when a 19-year-old woman who already has the right to vote resorts to ordering a Margarita with a fake ID. It is rather an act of defiance against laws that unreasonably deny reasonable adult pleasures to people in other ways deemed by the state to be of the age of majority. Indeed, it would seem to me far more reprehensible if that same woman, as a patsy in Austin's Operation Fake Out, would order the Margarita and then turn the bartender in for serving it to her.
So here is my appeal to you, Mr. Bush: Tell us what you said to Jenna. Is college-age drinking a matter of so much urgency that we need special police operations and Draconian punishments for it? Do you regard alcohol consumption in general as a matter of morality or propriety? How seriously do you regard your daughter's misdemeanors? Because, Mr. President, no matter how private you want to be, it matters how statesmen view legal indiscretions committed by family members. Indeed, it would be insensible for public-office holders to make or defend laws they and their families would have no intention of obeying.
(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)
