Intoxication

There hasn't been enough information disseminated yet about Bush's Supreme Court choice John Roberts for me to make a thoughtful kneejerk condemnation. He holds his legal opinions very close to his vest, though obviously they are conservative in nature and don't make the Roe advocates very comfortable. By the same token, his experience certainly qualifies him. I choose right now to throw up my hands and hope that his Harvard education at least imbued in him enough humanity not to go the harsh activist directions of the extreme conservatives on the bench. This is the other shoe falling after Bush's election, and we just have to survive it. Let's hope he's more a Kennedy than a Rehnquist, or at least a Scalia with a sense of decency.

Meanwhile the world shakes with a new wave of terrorist bombings in England and Egypt, but our big feature in the L.A. Times today was about a study asserting that the most popular alcoholic beverage in America is no longer beer, but red wine. This was pretty startling, actually, if one judges by the exposure of brews on the airwaves and in billboards in ballparks. Of course for reasons unknown there has been an advertising ban for as long as memory holds on any liquor besides beer. This arbitrariness is consistent only with the other seeming arbitrary attitudes that allow legal liquor but put marijuana and cocaine users into the category of dangerous criminals. (And why not? Doesn't marijuana cause 40,000 deaths a year on the highways, and cirrhosis and liver deterioration, and drunken brawls and broken homes, whereas nobody ever got killed smoking a bottle of bourbon!)

But let's get out of Topsy Turvy land, in other words the real America of inverted and irrational values, and try to understand how red wine suddenly took primacy over beer in the Heartland. The article gave some credit to the movie "Sideways," which seems ludicrous. The last popular movie to have any lasting cultural effect was ""Love Story," which caused the naming of an entire generation of girl babies "Jennifer." It can hardly be the influence of the Hated French, whose preference for claret and merlot, etc. was projected onto John Kerry with the connotations of effeteness and antiAmericanism by the brilliant Republican strategists who foisted the Swift Boat Liars and other insults upon our population and are now being rewarded with John Roberts and the Iraqi insurgency.

The purported health benefits of red wine could have some influence on this new preference, but since when have Americans chosen a food for its salutary effects on our sytems? Americans don't drink alcohol to feel better; they drink to feel high. In most bars I'm sure that beer is served far more often than wine; it is cheaper and more filling. All right, restaurants probably push their wine lists before their beer selections, which are shunted down to the bottom of the menu. And when there is a big festival to be celebrated, such as July 4th or Super Bowl Sunday, it seems that the beer flows a lot more readily. Drinking a rare burgundy during the third quarter seems practically unpatriotic (and we can expect a Constitutional Amendment about that soon enough).

One reason beer has been so dominant in our society is that it is Anglo-Saxon in origin, stemming from the breweries of England and Germany, whence our heartier ancestors emerged. Wine is a product of the sunnier climes, such as the grape regions of the Mediterranean, where the ethnically questionable Latinate people enjoyed a subtler, less caloric drink. The waves of the southern Europeans long followed those originally from the northern climes who first settled and colonized our continent. The resistance to the influence of the Romantic cultures is slowly breaking down, mainstreaming their beverage choices.

Also, it's possible that many more women figured in these latest surveys, and I may be wrong but I assume that women prefer the more subtle and variegated flavors of vino. You sure don't see a lot of gals chugging down the brews like the simian morons in Bud Light commercials or wearing face paint and cheese hats in Lambeau Field. There is a patina of civility to the imbibing of wine that is not part of the beer-guzzling experience. Perhaps for the interests of our floundering society, this shift is a hopeful sign.