FREE JENNA!

A Joan Of Arc, Burning On The Pyre Of American Puritanism

FORGET about the Senate or Californian black-outs. This summer, there is
only one story in America: the attempt by two 19-year-old girls, the
president's daughters as it happens, to buy drinks in a Mexican restaurant
in Austin, Texas. This was Jenna Bush's second alcohol-related offence in
just over a month in a state that imposes mandatory prison sentences for a
third offence. She compounded her crime by using a fake ID to try to buy
her margarita--and by encouraging her goody-two-shoes twin sister, Barbara,
to join her in flouting the law.

"Margaritagate" has launched a national debate about everything from
journalistic ethics to teenage stress syndrome. Some of the ghastly
"doctors" who take over TV screens at moments like these have even blamed
George Bush (he gave up drinking through cold turkey, rather than
encouraging his entire family to "work through" his drinking problems with
him). But there has been no national debate on the one subject that is
crying out for reconsideration: America's absurd insistence that people
cannot drink until the age of 21. Most other countries allow people to buy
alcohol at the age of 18. Americans can marry, breed, abort their unborn
children, pay taxes, appear in pornographic films, fight for their country
and even vote at that age. But buy a margarita with your Mexican mush, and
you could end up in the slammer.

The original faggot-tosser on Jenna's pyre is easy to identify: Elizabeth
Dole. As transport secretary in the early 1980s, Mrs Dole hit on the idea
of linking federal highway grants to raising the legal drinking age to 21.
Sadly, even states that are supposed to take freedom particularly
seriously, such as New Hampshire (motto: "Live free or die") decided to
take the cash. But Jenna is not just the victim of the bossiness of a
transport secretary (and failed presidential candidate). She is also
swimming against two currents in American life: petty puritanism and a
pathological obsession with safety.

America rightly thinks of itself as a country conceived in liberty. But it
is also a country that was conceived by puritans. Again and again, these
days, puritanism seems to be trumping freedom. No country treats smokers
(or indeed tobacco companies) with such petty vindictiveness as the United
States. As for safety, America seems to have convinced itself that the
world is an astonishingly dangerous place, and that the only way to keep
these dangers at bay is to regulate even the most trivial bits of
behaviour. Hence the need to replace standard playground equipment with
"safer" alternatives, such as one-person see-saws and transparent tubes to
crawl through. And where else would photocopier toner come in packets that
warn you not to eat the contents?

Of course, defenders of the current drinking laws argue that they have
saved thousands of lives. But if raising the drinking age to 21 makes the
roads so much safer, why not raise the age to 31? Or 51? Or ban alcohol
altogether? After all, it worked so well in the 1920s. Certainly,
drunk-drivers should be penalised severely. But there is no sillier use of
the police's time than trying to criminalise a substance that has
lubricated student life since universities were invented. And there is no
simpler way of advancing liberty in America than to bring its drinking (and
smoking) laws into line with common sense.

Let Jenna Bush party on. And let America rise up in revolt against all the
petty princelings of puritanism, before every aspect of social life is
criminalised, pathologised, regulated or legislated out of existence.