Keeping them honest, but without Anderson Cooper's tact or reserve

Well, friends, we made it to the other side.  As I write this safely sipping my custom-mixed Bloody Mary, I am grateful another dark time has passed.  Labor Day is over, and with it the iron fist of martial law too shall unclench.  What's that?  You didn't realize we were living in a V for Vendetta-esque police state for the past few weeks?  What's that?  You never saw V for Vendetta?  Children of Men?  Or 1984?  How about Judge Dredd?  No?  Well, the remake is coming out soon.  (Most.  Necessary.  Reboot.  Ever.)  The point is, they all have authoritarian-type, er, authorities in them.  Just like we had here in the real US of A for nearly a month.  Didn't you notice the public service announcements on TV, radio, the Web, billboards, those giant light-up road commission signs counties buy just to announce slogans on, and probably in newspapers, if anyone still read those?

See, a print ad is kind of like a video, only it doesn't move.

Judging by these spots, you would probably conclude the USA was candidly announcing their intention to launch a campaign of oppression worthy of an '80s futurist dystopian political sci-fi novel.  At first, I just dismissed these as the product of my particular state's overzealous approach to crushing any kind of alcohol-related merriment or tomfoolery, like the Puritan at an Irish wake.  But then I noticed nothing in the ads specified my state, and I actually paid attention to what they were saying, more out of polite curiosity than anything else.  I gathered that the purpose was to scare me straight and/or shitless come Labor Day weekend.

I have a number of quibbles with this video.  First, not to debate semantics, but those aren't actually "excuses" so much as "tactics to avoid detection," but nice try with the English.  Second, who the fuck thinks wearing a hat or not has any effect on their driving proficiency or level of conspicuousness?  Third, doesn't that guy with the hat and Jew-'fro look like a young Adam Sandler?  Weird.

Before any of you jump to the wrong assumption, I am not some sort of anti-authority anarchist, nor one of those people whose playlist endlessly loops "Cop Killer," "Fuck tha Police," "Killing in the Name of," and similar odes to angry stereotyping.  I don't rage against the authority the police represent, though I am wary of any ordinary, average human being empowered disproportionately.  And, don't mistake me, I am not advocating drunk driving at all.  As a matter of fact, I have even discouraged it in an article extolling alcohol.  But I am opposing campaigns based largely on fear, exaggeration, and lies.  Are more cops going to be on the roads in the weeks before Labor Day to build a subconscious public paranoia that may possibly slightly reduce the number of intoxicated drivers on said holiday?  Yes, if only because it's easier to hit quotas and make up municipal budget cuts with fines.  Is there some federal directive mandating a stealth operation coordinating every law-enforcement agency nationwide to catch any and every borderline-inebriated driver, as their media blitz suggests?  Of course not.

You see, because I paid attention in government and civics class, I know the USA is not a unitary democracy, where all power flows from the top (federal government) on down to the local level like the droid control ship in The Phantom Menace.  In Great Britain, for instance, all of the police forces, from the quaint, stick-wielding county constabulary to London's badass Mossad-like metro cops, draw their authority directly from and indeed exist at the whim of the central government.  Thus, if Queen Elizabeth decides it is now criminal to spread compromising photos of the Second String King, Prince Wanker Fratboy, no one further down the chain of command is in the position to argue.  Or something like that.  Parliament might be involved.

Obviously, Her Majesty made no such decree: that's the
front page of their #1 national newspaper.

Here stateside, on the other hand, we have a federal system that reserves an awful lot of powers for the individual states.  You may recall we squabbled a few times over this issue. And even though the side that said, "Yes, actually, the federal government can tell you it's not cool to treat other human beings as property anymore" won that war, we still let states and even their smaller constituent municipalities decide for themselves what is and isn't legal on a lot of issues.  So, when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a federal agency, tells us there is a massive, coast-to-coast, inescapable dragnet of super-cops being deployed explicitly to crack down on drunk driving, I can call bullshit.

For starters, none of you look remotely like this.

Bureaucratic realities and red tape aside, where did the funding for this crackdown suddenly come from?  It is a logistical impossibility, given that most police departments are presently operating on annual budgets slightly less than that of The Blair Witch Project.  I happen to live in a state where some counties can no longer afford to have more than one state trooper on active duty at a time.  One.  In some extreme cases - the very rural ones where the main crimes are meth production, bestiality, and terrifying combos thereof - our staties may be expected to "patrol" two counties at once.  Right.

He only operates in Detroit.

Did you get a multi-billion-dollar boost in funding to pay dozens more officers?  Do you suddenly possess Predator-style camouflaging technology, à la the PSAs inundating the airwaves?  Or do you have a magic drunk detector that works like a radar gun?  Then how precisely are you going to be more effective now than you were two months ago?  For the love of the L'aaaw (as Judge Stallone would say), the actor playing a cop in that first PSA says it won't matter if you are committing no traffic violations, driving defensively, and being the All-Around Inconspicuous Motorist of the year, he'll still pull you over.  In other words, it literally doesn't matter if he has absolutely no material probable cause established or even reasonable suspicion, he'll just know you have been drinking and bust you.  Seriously?  I would like to see you defend that in court.  That's the kind of crap public defense attorneys, not to mention the legal system, love to spend hours on.

"Yeah, I can't find any precedence for 'spider-senses tingling' in this state . . ."

You know what's a lot more likely?  Some council of spin doctors in the NHTSA knew that, generally speaking, most police forces try to step up their presence around Labor Day, completely independent of each other and based solely on the simple fact more semi-functional retards drink heavily at that time, and decided to wag the dog.  "Let's just tell the people America turns into a militaristic police state around major drinking holidays!  The ad campaign is way cheaper, easier, and more constitutional than actually doing that, and it may theoretically produce similar results!  As long as it's for the greater good, we can lie our asses off!"

While we're on the subject, let's dissect those ads that unilaterally declare "Buzzed Driving is Drunk Driving."  Well, not to nitpick or naysay, but no, it's actually not, that's why we coined another term to describe it.  When the law decided to legally define what drunk means, it had to lay out specific terms that are verifiable for enforcement.  In all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Guam (as the NHTSA proudly proclaims, like some pompous, know-it-all dick telling you how many chapters his fraternity has), that means you can be charged with driving under the influence/operating while intoxicated if your blood-alcohol content is .08 or above.  So, it stands to reason, if your BAC is lower than that, you are not technically drunk, in the strict legal sense, just "buzzed."  Win.

But by now I am used to this sort of fudged thinking being used for the purposes of intimidation and furthering a narrow social agenda.  As someone who has gone through the process of being "rehabilitated" for an "illness" I didn't have, I can vouch for the levels of bullshit they attempt to get away with.  Aside from mandating treatment for alcoholism based on one incident in the first place, the methods of said treatment are laughably transparent.  Among other things, they tried to simultaneously claim that alcoholism is nothing short of a hell-sent scourge, a civilization-threatening epidemic worse than porn, and that less than 50% of "people" drink at all, ever.  As they showed us the widespread, multifarious live-destroying effects of booze with shocking statistics, they also told us that in fact most American citizens don't ever touch a drop.

Pictured: The majority of American drinkers (and, presumably, my whole social circle).

No qualifications, no explanations, no provisos.  Because, you see, they want you to feel the alienation of social stigma, that what you are doing is not what the majority is doing, and don't you want to fit in, you dangerous weirdo?  The old Reefer Madness campaign springs to mind.

Well, sorry, you can't have it both ways.  If a catastrophic wave of drinking is the first sign of the Apocalypse, you can't also tell me almost nobody but me is doing it.  For the love of Bacchus, god of spirits, probably 80% of the adults I know drink.  Maybe not daily or even weekly, but they aren't teetotaling boors either, and what are the odds I just happen to know so many exceptions to the rule?  Sure enough, when I called out the instructor on these statistics, asking where she got them, who collected the data and how, and even what definitions they used to describe "people," I was met with flustered, indignant, and meaningless responses.  My treatment/indoctrination center could not provide a single parameter, specific, or source for the studies.

"Raise your hand if you've never drank alcohol!
All right, that's our focus group done, case closed."

Even as a college student who spent most of his statistics and research methodology classes sketching new uniforms for Captain America, I could tell someone was probably not being entirely honest, massaging the numbers to fit the desired outcome.  I smelled propaganda.  It is a classic media-spin technique, almost on par with "Just Making Shit Up."  Because, obviously, if you are comparing the number of drinkers to the overall population of the country, including millions of children, the numbers are going to skew against the drinkers, but that number is statistically irrelevant, or "fucking useless as a butter knife at a soup buffet," to use the expert parlance.  At the end of the program, the instructor had to admit everything came from a generic data bank that provided no details whatsoever about the studies it purported to represent.  Win again.

It is something I have come to expect in this nation, where drinking is starting to be demonized as a crime in and of itself, a shameful vice that needs to be weeded from our society, despite society arising from alcohol production, as I have pointed out before.  Remember how well that Prohibition thing worked out?  It has reached the rather ludicrous point where a CNN contributor asked whether it is acceptable, ever, to give a minor even a sip of alcohol, including in her article this quote:

"If parents have a liberal idea about alcohol, kids may get the wrong message," says Dr. Vivian Faden, director of the Office of Science Policy and Communications at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism at the National Institutes of Health. "Underage drinking can lead to injuries, fatal car accidents, risky sexual behavior, and there's also potential risk to the developing brain."

As opposed to the day you turn 21, when magically all of these negative side-effects vanish, as proven by the perceived necessity of the scare campaign I outlined at the start of this post.  Remember when your negligent parents let you taste their $9.00 table red and you became a hopeless, lifelong addict?  Of course you don't, you braindead degenerate drunkie.  That's because even minute amounts of alcohol introduced to your delicate physiology before majority, an arbitrary legal definition, target your brain like neuron-seeking missiles, turning you into a maladjusted booze monster by age 20.

Because you can never have "just one," kids.

Or so some would have us believe, despite the fact human beings have been drinking for thousands of years, and up until a few centuries ago, most did so on a daily basis from childhood onward.  These are the same people who wrote the health questionnaire I had to fill out at one of my doctors' offices.  It asked which best described my alcohol consumption:

(1) Never drink.
(2) Drink on special occasions.
(3) History of alcohol abuse in my family.

I am not even kidding, that is what it said.  Seriously.  Judge much?  And this was a hand-specialist's office.  I felt a strange tingling in one of my fingers right then, specifically the middle one.  All personal umbrage aside, this sort of blanket generalization is offensive to common sense and simple truth.  When your redefinition of something is so out of whack with reality, it is an affront to intelligent thought.  In yet another article (this one has a nice, dumbed-down video, too), CNN's Alina Cho pointed out how the latest revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - the standard psychiatric handbook for what kinds of crazy people are - is changing what "addiction" means, broadening its scope to the point that 40% of college students could be classified as alcoholics and as much as 60% of the population suffers from some form of abusive indulgence and/or dependence.

Would an alcoholic waste all that perfectly good rum?

Pornography, tanning, shopping, and even gaming are all potential fixations requiring professional diagnosis and therapy under these guidelines.  And why not?  It lets impulsive fuckwits write off their self-destructive behavior, maybe getting some pills or pity in the bargain, while the placebo-pushers line their pockets with extra green for supplying treatment.  Just to be clear, these are the definitions that will be officially accepted by the government and your medical insurance provider, and we all know how accommodating they are.  Can you see how this brand of grade-A anal leakage might make me sociopathically distressed?  At what point does someone raise their hand and say, "Um, wait, what?  Are you sure the problem isn't how we define 'the problem' here?"  Wake up, America, before someone tells you that you need prescription medication to do so.

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KP, out.