Michigan Week. It starts on the third Saturday of May, the prettiest week of the year in Michigan: flowers blooming, grass green, weather temperate. Michigan Week has been going on for 50 years. My hometown has had the honor of being its “Kickoff City” for the past 45.
So what does the Michigan Week Kickoff City do?
Lots of things, mostly on Saturday: a parade, carnival, food booths, sidewalk sales, arts and crafts vendors, historical displays. All day Saturday the downtown highway is closed to traffic while people stroll, shop, ride, eat, mingle.
The celebration is orchestrated by the Chamber of Commerce. It used to take place at the local high school, but the Chamber switched this year to downtown. I asked the Chamber Director about the change, and she excitedly listed the advantages.
When she finished, I added, “And the state law that prohibits alcohol on public school grounds is moot. Will you have a beer tent?”
“Oh,” she said, “people can get a beer at the Michigan Week Dance.”
The Michigan Week Dance takes place at night, on the outskirts of town. It is wholly detached from the main celebration.
Some people just don't get it. They tend to view drinking as a separate activity and, always, a thing you do where the general public can't see you.
“If you want to drink, you can go to a bar.”
“Or you can go to the Dance.”
“Or you can just stay home” (preferably in my basement, I suppose).
This is hardly the first time I've seen drinking pinched and pushed to the corner of public life. I could give many more instances from my hometown, but perhaps more telling are the liquor laws for all of Michigan.
As a business attorney, I've run across a variety of restrictions under Michigan law. For instance, people may not bring their own alcohol to establishments where food is sold. People may not have open containers of alcohol on public streets (no walking to your neighbor's with an open beer). There is also, of course, the general restriction on the number of available licenses in a geo-political area, making bar licenses as costly as small homes.
The message? Drinking is fine, if confined. Acceptable, but kinda scorned. In their book, Drinking in America, Mark Lender and James Martin properly referred to modern America's attitude toward drinking as “The Age of Ambivalence.”
I believe this attitude toward drinking is Puritan-like. I say that with no exaggeration or polemical intent.
Puritanism is fundamentally the denial of the goodness of creation. It finds the source of evil in material things of pleasure (tobacco, alcohol, art, and so on), rather than in the disordered human will to misuse good things.
This is the worldview that pushes drinking to the corners and closets. We accept alcohol because the failure of Prohibition told us we must live with it, but we still think it's bad. We are still afraid of it, accepting it about as well as the South accepted former slaves after the Civil War. Legal, but segregated.
The funny thing is, all this restricting and confining increases alcohol's abuse.
When you make something a taboo or even semi-taboo, people are drawn to it. Johnny Cash never did time in prison, but he wanted people to think he did. They say the surest way to drive certain girls to a cad is to point out he's a cad. Call a film anti-Semitic and people will flock to it.
Censor drinking, and its charms increase. In the words of novelist M.C. Beaton's Hamish Macbeth, “When drinking is made a sin, the only point in drinking is to get drunk.”
By denying the innate goodness of drink, the conventional thinking increases its abuse by increasing its allure. As a teenager and then young adult below legal age, bars struck me as an inner sanctum, a place of mysterious privilege. When I first gained access to them, I felt like I was entering sacred ground, temples that called for much worship.
Want to consider an odd juxtaposition? Place the rowdy beer commercials (the old Coors Light sort) next to the liquor restrictions listed above. Push alcohol aside, pinch it, confine it. Then: Get drunk, get wild, get outrageous. Our culture marginalizes alcohol and then boisterously celebrates it. A Martian landing here would surely be puzzled by the bifurcation.
Those in favor of the current arrangement would presumably tell the Martian that we must restrict drinking because of the behavior depicted in Coors Light commercials: “You see, that's what happens when Earthlings drink, so we must restrict it.”
But they'd be wrong. The Coors Light commercial is what happens when drinking is pinched and pushed to the corners, encouraging people to latch onto it when they get the chance, like sailors on leave.
So what do I suggest?
Before I answer that, let me tell you about my brother. He rarely drinks, but whenever I have visited him over the last twenty years, he has almost always had beer in the refrigerator. I once asked him why.
“Well, I like to have it for guests, but the real reason is so my kids don't think beer is unusual or some sort of taboo.” He understands the well-known phenomenon that teetotalers are more likely to raise children who abuse alcohol, so he keeps a six-pack around to normalize it. “To get my kids used to seeing it.” At times, he has even made himself drink a beer in front of his children.
That's my proposal for society: Normalize it. Make it public. Don't let it be rare and hallowed; make it plentiful and normal. Give me a shot of rum on the street, a glass of wine in the mall, a McBeer at my kids' favorite restaurant. Make it flow like water, and it'll be as exceptional as water.
Still subject to abuse? Sure, all good things are; only Puritans think otherwise. And we should punish the abuses. But make drinking itself normal.
The approach isn't novel. Almost 100 years ago, one of the greatest English writers of all time (and pre-eminent drinker), G.K. Chesterton, repeatedly advised the same thing. Consider these words from a 1906 article in the Illustrated London News about pubs, “Any policeman will tell you, any man who knows the big cities and the small streets will tell you, that the worst places are always the most private. In the long run the best way is not to send a file of police through these places. The right way is to send a file of the public through these places…. Here, as often happens, the middle course is the un-safest. Either have everybody in public-houses or have nobody in them. Either have public-houses so public that they are like cathedrals, or have them so private that they do not exist.”
In our Age of Ambivalence, we've adopted the middle course and we've had abuse and excess — of both the teetotalling and drunkard varieties. We tried the extreme course of Prohibition and that didn't work. I think it's time we considered the other extreme.
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the editor of The Wednesday Eudemon, a contributing editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine. You can view his work at a www.ericscheske.com .
