Frank Bruni is a New York Times columnist who wrote about alcohol. Bruni likes to drink: "I'm not about to abandon my white Burgundy or gin martinis." How does Bruni drink? I suspect moderately, in a way that he seems to find enjoyable. This style of drinking is likely to prolong his life and extend his mental functioning — which is the result of moderate, healthy drinking, according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010, a U.S. government publication.
But Bruni is on a jeremiad against alcohol, prompted by Whitney Houston's death. He doesn't mention the Guidelines in his column on alcohol — probably doesn't know about them. Perhaps he — like many readers of this post — mistakenly doubts its conclusions, perhaps thinking that the alcohol industry forced such views into the Guidelines. Except, research indicating the benefits of moderate drinking has appeared for decades, but such information was forcibly kept out of the Guidelines due to political pressure.
Sidebar: Dear Reader — can you guess which region of the country this pressure came from? Hint: in many Southern states, abstinence rates are close to fifty percent, while in ethnic, Northeastern states, around two-thirds of people drink (in many European countries, the rate is 90 percent). Oh, by the way, health rankings correlate positively with the percentage of drinkers in a state.
All right — the main political force who wanted no mention of potential benefits due to drinking was South Carolina's senator Strom Thurmond, an arch segregationist. I sense that Bruni, who is gay, would on most other matters not agree with the late, great, Southern powerhouse.
As to ethnic groups which already have the most negative attitudes and highest abstinence rates, the group in which Houston was reared, Southern Baptists, are at the top of the list.
Yet, despite himself drinking, most likely in a health-inducing way, Bruni says only negative things about alcohol. Most critically, he feels we simply haven't done enough to identify the evils of drinking and that we should be conducting public information campaigns to demonize alcohol:
But I can't recall much alarm about drinking's other perils [aside from drunk driving]. From antismoking ads, I have pictures of blackened lungs and amputated fingers seared into my memory. From antidrug ads, I remember an egg in a skillet as a metaphor for a brain on amphetamines. Where's the analogous image for the ravages of too much booze?
Bruni obviously missed — and misses — Temperance. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, temperance lectures, writings, songs, sermons, confessions described the evils of alcohol in the most dire terms -- as inevitably leading to the grave, jail, and mental institutions. I have on my wall an eight-panel set of prints called "The Bottle," from the book "Temperance Tales," written and illustrated by George Cruikshank, which depicts James Latimer taking a nip from the bottle, losing his job, being thrown out onto the streets, neglecting an infant daughter who dies, assaulting and killing his wife, ending up in an insane asylum while his surviving children become a prostitute and dandy.
The last panel (remember, all of this takes only eight panels) pictures the children visiting their insane father in the asylum, and notes that The Bottle "has brought the son and daughter to vice and to the street, and has left the father a hopeless maniac" -- as well as causing the deaths of their sister and mother. Is this sufficiently negative imagery of the ravages of alcohol?
Then, there was national Prohibition for a dozen or so years, which in a sense ended temperance by making it into the law of the land. How was that for Bruni? What reflections does he have on why no continental European country — say, Italy, Germany, France, Greece, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands — ever enacted prohibition, or had a temperance movement? Is he aware that no other Western country restricts drinking to those who are 21 years of age and older?
In other words, the country that already has the most negative image of alcohol, the most restrictive drinking age and similar policies (we could devote a whole other column to blue laws in the U.S. that forbid sale of alcohol on Sundays, laws that punish adults for giving alcohol to children, and on and on), has the negative alcohol consequences that Bruni details.
So, the question is, if he feels his personal drinking practices are good, but that drinking is bad in America, is the solution for encouraging better drinking practices that we project more alarming images of alcohol across the country? Was that how he learned about alcohol? Should we have more restrictive laws? Say raise the drinking age to 25? Ban alcohol sales on weekends, not just Sundays, or Sunday mornings? Convey more negative information about alcohol to kids in school (although that hardly seems possible)?
In fact, although there are still a remarkable number of dry municipalities and counties in the U.S., primarily in the South, the trend has been to loosen these restrictions in recent decades and years. Would Bruni recommend that we reverse this trend?
For, you see, in a strange chicken-and-egg situation, the individuals, groups, and countries with the worst images of alcohol, and the most restrictive alcohol policies, are the ones with the worst patterns of drinking (primarily binge drinking) and the worst drinking consequences.
Ironic, isn't it, Mr. Bruni?
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P.S. Let the peasants drink water: describing a big meal at a fancy restaurant Bruni, formerly the Times' restaurant critic, said he and the writer who succeeded him at the position began to eat "once we had finished our martinis and white wine and had moved on to a bottle of red. . . ." How about showing that as an ad?
