Camille Paglia is just weird. I was prepared to consider her argument for doing away with the requirement that people be 21 years old before they can legally purchase alcohol, but she just used her space to write an incoherent rant. The sole point she made that has any salience is that other countries seem to do better at avoiding the problems associated with alcohol consumption by making it less of a taboo for children. Other than that, though, her argument was very uneven. I don’t think youngsters are using more pills today because they can’t sit in a dive-bar at 19 and drink Pabst Blue Ribbon. I don’t think doctors are overprescribing medications because kids aren’t drinking enough. I don’t think the fact that people are having traffic accidents while texting is in any way an argument for letting teenagers buy vodka.
I don’t understand why she manages to make a living as a writer. Everything she writes is stupid. Maybe we should consider lowering the drinking age, but she certainly didn’t make the case for it.
Learned long ago that life is too short to pay any attention to Paglia. If she ever gets anything right, it will be for the wrong reasons and smarter and easier to read thinkers will have gotten there long before she does.
The sole reason Paglia makes a living as a writer after a 20-year career of such nonsense is that she tells straight white guys with money and power what they want to hear. It’s a nice gig, if you’re a sociopath.
This also explains the strange, if sad, careers of Alan Keyes, Herman Cain and Ben Carson.
I just wish as a white dude, I could make a living off telling someone what makes them feel better about themselves.
Rule one of dealing bullshit: Don’t get high on your own supply.
More about the racist murderer in Kansas – Ex-KKK Leader Was Given a New Identity Years Before Shooting.
…and used as an informant? …but hateful ways continued.
Ratted out his KKK/etc. associates that participated with him in criminal activities before his arrest in 1987. Did a couple of years time and then a new identity to protect him against any of his old buds that might have been gunning for him after he ratted on them. (How the Reagan/Bush Justice Dept. rolled.)
Feds seemed not to have any interest in him after that. SPLC managed to pick up on his activities and follow him over the years. But the FBI prefers to focus on left-wing and Muslim activists.
Paglia is a hack, but I consider this pretty solid:
If you really think an 18-year-old isn’t mature enough to weigh the consequences of having a beer with dinner, then they’re certainly not mature enough to make snap life-or-death decisions in some faraway country or accept possibly life-long financial burdens.
Given what we know today about brain development and maturation probably shouldn’t be able to do any of that or operate a motor vehicle until age 25.
Maybe we need laws to keep old people from drinking. Or old writers, anyway.
What are you trying to do, give Peggy Noonan a stroke?
It used to be that advocating eliminating laws was transgressively exciting. Now it’s a knee-jerk occupation for folks with writers block and a near deadline.
The Wikipedia says that Camille Paglia is still a professor at University of the Arts, Philadelphia. She didn’t make money from this opinion piece. One wonders where she is going with this piece.
As to the fundamental “libertarian” premise of the article, it is time to re-examine laws intended to protect people from their own bad judgement. All sorts of reformist laws that were put in place in the post-Civil War period are ripe for that re-examination.
Social control occurs both through culture and through law–something that moralists of all persuasions ignore in their rush to get the law to ineffectively control other people’s lives.
Europe never had the Prohibition movement the US had or the post-Civil War PSTD drunken frontier and rural batterings of women. Europe never had nascent feminism show up as farm-area and suburban church-women organizing temperance and prohibition organizations and Calivinist ministers (including Baptists) preaching against alcohol like they now do against “the homosexual lifestyle”. Europe never had feminist prohibitionist frontier radicals take to local bars with an ax. Or the cultural reaction of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Rider macho culture and legal prohibition. Or state dispensaries of alcoholic beverages or state liquor wholesaling or state monopoly on liquor sales. (Except as one of the royal family’s own industries.)
Europeans look at alcohol and alcoholism differently than Americans do.
Camille Paglia wants us to become more European, dignified, and no doubt refined. And control our vices through cultural opprobrium instead of corrupt laws.
The idea that MADD’s succeeding in upping the age to 21 caused an increase in 18-21 year-old drug use is just looney though. It did create a “you’re old enough to enlist to kill people but not out enough to drink booze” cognitive dissonance in values very much like the discrepancy between voting, draft eligibility, and drinking ages did in the Vietnam War era.
After the Republicans and preacherites are out of power long enough to have a rational conversation about this, maybe we should as a country have a rational conversation about this. But thinking that it will reduce use of other drugs is a fantasy.
The late, great Molly Ivins had Paglia pegged years ago, lol: http://grigr.com/2011/09/i-am-the-cosmos/