Tara Reid "socializing". Well at least she's not driving...-->

Glenn Reynolds agrees with James Lileks on the following:

It’s the birthday of Rudy “Rudolph” Perpich, governor of Minnesota. Among his notable accomplishments: he sent the National Guard to calm down the bitter Spam Strike of 1986, and he signed the law that bumped the drinking age up to 21. It’s a cliché, yes, but it’s still a reasonable argument: if the state will trust you to herd strikers with a rifle when you’re 18, why won’t they trust you with a beer?

I never liked this old chestnut much. Unlike the two authors in question, I have children in this age range. All I can say is that the idiocy of adolescence does not magically disappear at 18, 21 or even 25 years of age.

18 year old soldiers aren't sent autonomously with their weapons to the picket line either--they are under the command of men generally in their thirties, when a little wisdom has finally penetrated the gray matter and the more impetuous impulses have moderated.

Having said that, I don't think the modern extended adolescence and all its attendant foolishness is uniquely a good reason to keep alcohol out of the hands of these morons (said affectionately kids...I was once a moron too...). The underlying problem is that Americans largely don't know how to drink. They don't appreciate the savor of good beer or wine, or even spirits. Small wonder really--most of them think corn dogs are a taste sensation.

No, the drinking culture is about getting drunk.

My European second cousins are in their early twenties and have been drinking moderately since they were twelve or so. Aside from drinking with friends to engender a little gemutlichkeit, alcohol is a compliment for good food. Their experience stands in stark contrast with what I witnessed as youth--my friends passed out in their own vomit or so gone that they only way you could enjoy their company is if you were similarly wasted.

Surprisingly to some, my experience made me a teetotaler, although I do cook with wine and enjoy a nice, non-alcoholic beer (which doesn't seem to exist in this country...). Why not just indulge moderately? Well, there just doesn't seem to be a moderate setting on North American drinking culture with rare exceptions. Twenty minutes into any social occasion, everyone is three sheets to the wind and there is an extraordinary temptation to follow along.

Something about inebriation just takes the social out of social drinking.

Increasingly, I'm meeting more and more people who share my views and don't have a religious proscription motivating their abstinence.

You mix this country's drinking culture with the immaturity of extended adolescence, and you get a volatile mix that produces DUIs and dead people. If you could change the drinking culture, you wouldn't need a legal drinking age, or at least not a very high one. Failing that, a legislator's responsibility would seem to leave little choice but to postpone the party until an adult sensibility has more fully set in.