An idea as dead as last night's stale beer Signals
By John McKinney
August 27, 2008 | 02:55 PM Waiting to board the ferry for Bridgeport the other morning was an eager group of foot passengers, cheerfully bound for a day of high excitement. These folks, accompanied by their priest, were the good parishioners of a local church, and they were headed for the Indian gambling hell at Foxwoods, or was it Mohegan Sun? (Is there a difference?) A day of tilting with slot machines, roulette wheels and craps tables was in the offing, proving an old theory of mine — let good churchgoers get their feet wet with bingo in the parish hall basement, and soon enough they'll be buying lottery tickets and heading for casinos, big time, where the devil himself deals blackjack. Ah, well, where's the harm? And doesn't hope spring eternally in the human breast? Every citizen hereabouts is familiar with the story of the local orthopedic surgeon who won $8 million from an Atlantic City slot machine, after he'd been kicked out of the craps room for lighting a cigar. Heartwarming stories like that keep the customers coming. All that is needed, as the slogan goes, is a dollar and a dream. The United States is often dismissed by those haughty, dissolute Europeans as the most puritanical nation on the planet, yet in truth we love our vices as passionately as anyone else. Who, after all, created Las Vegas? And we love our alcohol. We cherish our God-given right to take a seat on a bar stool and order a beer and a shot, as Sen. Clinton did so affably and often during her fruitless campaign for president, wanting merely to be accepted as one of us. But so far, the right to call out "Pour me a Bud" in a licensed establishment is reserved to those of us 21 years and older. Now comes a movement, spearheaded by the presidents of some 100 American universities, to lower the legal drinking age to 18. In a turn of logic that may be incomprehensible to anyone without a doctorate in philosophy, the universities argue that lowering the drinking age will result in less drinking. Less "binge drinking," anyway, which the colleges describe as students under 21 knocking down five or six shots of booze in the dormitory before going out for an evening. If they can't be served in a bar once they enter, the reasoning goes, they simply get high as kites before going in. There are academic studies, if you can believe, purporting to show young people actually drink less after they turn 21 and can obtain alcohol legally. Right now, there are signatures on a petition by 123 university presidents, from such institutions as Duke, Ohio State, Dartmouth and Tufts. The key to lowering the drinking age is the federal government, which will reduce highway safety funds to any state that permits drinking by persons under 21. Notably, neither Stony Brook University nor any Long Island college has signed on. Politically, the issue already seems as dead as last night's stale beer. Mothers Against Drunk Driving is raising a ferocious ruckus against it, and so far no elected official has stood and cried, "Wonderful idea! Bottoms up!" During my own wastrel youth, New York was the only state in the union allowing drinking at 18. Whether this was good or bad, my compatriots and I merely regarded it as further evidence New York was the best place to live. To visit, say, New Jersey at the age of 19 or 20 and be refused service was regarded as a cruel insult. Drunk driving of course is the overriding issue here. When I was young, alcohol-related fatalities in these parts were fairly rare, one reason being there was so much less traffic on the roads at night. Bars in those days were compelled to close at 1 am. Today, they can legally stay open until 4 am, which has always seemed preposterous to me. Very little that is good happens after midnight; certainly nothing good happens at 4 am. Bar owners may see the college presidents' idea as money in the bank. But it has about as much chance as one of those casino-bound parishioners coming home rich. As far as I've heard, none has.