On Facebook, Radley Balko earlier linked a news item with a headline I consider downright dirty-looking:
Police Invoke the Spirit of Butt-Chugging to Try to Derail Wine in Grocery Stores
I really could have done without that, OK? But it’s not just one news item. It’s one they want repeated everywhere, and CNN has joined in on the butt chugging action just as I’m sure countless others have.
There is a persistent belief among those who know best that the way to stop a new trend is to yell about it loudly, and make as many people as possible aware of it. The police in Knoxville seem to believe that the butt chugging problem is caused not by disseminating the idea far and wide in the news media, but by easy availability of butt chugging products. If wine is made less available, they believe, the less of a butt chugging problem there’ll be:
This is hilarious. Apparently we’re supposed to believe that there’s some huge amount of young people in Tennessee who would love to butt-chug but, for some reason, they can’t go into a liquor store, so they are refraining from butt-chugging until they can shop at Kroger? Like there’s a bunch of college students who are all, “Oh, I was going to butt-chug, but if I can’t use my Kroger card, forget it”? I mean, how does Chief Rausch even say this with a straight face?
How many instances of butt-chugging made the national news last year? One. And it happened in a state without wine in grocery stores. I mean, if we look around and see that all the states that had wine in grocery stores managed to avoid national embarrassment through frat-boy butt-chugging, doesn’t that argue in favor of wine in grocery stores?
I’d be willing to bet that the number of these incidents will increase dramatically now that they’re busily spreading the word. Of course, it could be argued that I’m helping them right along by linking this nonsense. I’m willing to concede that I might be guilty of a little hypocrisy here, but in all honesty, I doubt I have tender young readers who will say, “Whoa, dude! Guess what I just learned on Classical Values! Where’s my rubber tube so I can try it out?” Sorry, but I don’t believe I have that kind of influence, and if there are any readers who are actually that foolish, it certainly is not my fault and they would have been much more likely to see it in places other than this blog.
What I do find interesting (and hence this post) involves the thinking that availability of something causes the misuse of it. I think a good case can be made that precisely the opposite is the case. If wine were for sale everywhere, including to minors, I think it would lose a lot of the “naughty” allure. You tell kids (or adults, for that matter) that they can’t buy something, and they’re going to start thinking about how to get it. Making things harder to get only generates workaround methods of getting them, or even ways of stretching them out and making them last longer, along the lines of more bang for your buck. If a bunch of kids have only one bottle of wine and it isn’t easy to get more, it might just occur to them that butt-chugging is the way to optimize what they have. There may even be a law of economics involved. At any rate, I don’t think easy availability is necessarily the culprit here.
Furthermore, if the enforcement classes keep trying to make fermented beverages less and less available, I can see another interesting consequence emerge. Thanks to the Internet, sooner or later, some of the more savvy kids are going to figure out something else that has been known for thousands of years, and which is a common method for obtaining alcoholic beverages in places where they have been made harder to get. Like the Mideast. Or like prison.
This recipe for prison punch (he calls it “inmate brew”) caught my attention recently, because the guy who made it is no slouch; he is a savvy and popular YouTube brewer. He says that you can make a remarkably decent wine with just cranberry juice cocktail, raisins, sugar, and plain old yeast, and if you have the time it’s quite an entertaining watch.
What is to stop a kid from doing that? Nothing that I can see. No special equipment is needed and all the ingredients are available at any grocery store for purchase by anyone without regard to age. Alcohol can be made “easily available” by the yeast. Minors might not be allowed to drink it, but I see no way to pass laws preventing the yeast from providing it to them.
Of course, the more young people wise up and realize that alcohol is easily manufactured by an organism that cannot discriminate on the basis of age, the more likely that laws will be passed cracking down on the “easy availability” of yeast.
Hey don’t laugh.
(I sometimes wish we could do something about the easy availability of foolish laws….)
Comments
6 responses to “The invocation of the spirit”
Perhaps it’s a case of reporters projecting their own college misadventures.
After all, they must have done *something* in college. They certainly didn’t acquire any critical thinking abilities, so I suppose it’s possible our beloved reporters and reporterettes acquired some seriously righteous butt-chugging skills.
Perhaps the phrase “ink-stained wretch” needs an update for the 21st Century?
Huh.
Here in the Northwest, there’s beer and wine in grocery stores [and liquor, in WA – not to mention, oh, CA and AZ].
Somehow there’s no massive epidemic of Alcohol Abuses worse than in Tennessee, as far as I know.
“I sometimes wish we could do something about the easy availability of foolish laws”
We had what we thought was a solution for that. Worked pretty well for a century and change. But I suppose nothing lasts forever.
But the laws around alcohol truly are serious contenders for the title of “stupidest”. (I live in Indiana. Where it is legal for grocery and convenience stores to sell alcohol. But illegal for them to _chill_ it. Who — other than, of course, a lobbyist for the bars and the dedicated liquor stores, to whom that restriction doesn’t apply — could possibly think THAT makes any sense at all? Your corner gas station can sell you beer, ice, and a styrofoam cooler without fear of the law, but if they put the beer cans in the ice before they sell it to you, they’re criminals.)
Illegal to chill it? That’s right up there with it being illegal in NYC to walk an alligator down the street on a leash (oh yes it is – I have no idea if it’s illegal if the alligator is not on a leash…).
My best guess is that if it isn’t chilled, they think no one is going to drink it till they get it home and into the fridge – or freezer?
I’d like to introduce them to a ton of people living in Thailand who pour their beer into a glass with ice in it. (I was SHOCKED – that waters the beer. But it also makes it cold.) Heh.
Oh and, btw, I don’t EVEN want to know the details of butt-chugging. I suspect my imagination is enough. No thanks.
P.S. I’ve long since announced that I will vote for anyone (dog catcher on up and anything from communist to theocrat) that will promise to devote their first term to REVOKING laws instead of passing new ones.
[…] thing that in a recent post about inane laws I would say that I “wish we could do something about the easy availability […]