Zero tolerance for “profiling”? (The final victory of absolute lunacy.)

For some time, I’ve been puzzled over a growing, annoying trend. Increasingly, I get asked for my ID to buy alcohol. I’m 58, have gray hair, and no one on this planet who has even a quarter of a brain would imagine for a moment that I might — even possibly — be under 21. Yet more and more clerks ask anyway, because they are forced to. (Sure, they often give me embarrassed looks when they ask, because no one likes having to act like a clueless idiot.)

I had assumed that the problem was that management didn’t trust employees to have either enough brains or enough common sense to recognize painfully obvious facts. But that didn’t satisfy me, because no one that dumb should be trusted with handling cash, making change, etc. Was it maybe that the increased, numbing, TSA-style bureaucratization was taking over everything?

No, not even that. The answer was staring me in the face on the front page of today’s WSJ, and it is even more irritating.

It is part of the war against something called “profiling.”

Seriously. Even in my wildest fits of satire I couldn’t have made this up.

“Anybody who thinks I’m 31, let alone 21, is clearly brain-dead,” says Nick Peters. He is 61, a consultant, and has to show his driver’s license at bars in Adams Morgan, a northwest Washington neighborhood thick with bars young people go to. “They all have a zero-tolerance ID check,” he says. “But, good grief, look at me! This is mental anguish!”

A prime place to dig for the sometimes-tangled roots of the card-the-codgers phenomenon is Blockheads, which has a bar on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The manager, 33-year-old Vicky Contreras, was at a table there one afternoon, doing the accounts.

“We card everyone,” she said. “It’s procedure. You can’t ask for ID from young people and not old people. That’s profiling.”

At the bar, Yulenny Severino had just inspected Lillian Baker’s driver’s license and put a large margarita in front of her.

“We don’t discriminate,” said Ms. Severino, who kept her own age to herself. Ms. Baker, who admitted to being 56, said, “I could be your mama.” She added: “I come in here all the time. I had to get used to it if I want one of these nice cocktails.”

So it’s “discrimination” to recognize as an obvious, self-apparent fact that someone is waaaay over 21?

Sorry, but if that is discrimination, the inmates have taken over the asylum. Permanently and completely.

No wonder the country is in such trouble.

MORE: As a practical matter, are there any ideas on how to retaliate? Now that I know the reasoning, I’m thinking of maybe asking to speak to the manager each time I get carded, and telling him I will never patronize the place so lacking in common sense again. If enough people did that, they might worry.