Drunken Public

3/28/06

I haven't been really pissed off in a long time. With Bush's approval ratings swimming somewhere around the low water mark, Dick Cheney shooting an old man in the face, crooked Congressmen being indicted left and right, and reruns of John Doe back on the air, you'd think I'd be a pretty happy guy. And I was. It had been a long time since I'd been really, ravenously annoyed by some piece of news concerning the erosion of personal freedoms. Except that abortion thing in South Dakota. And the wire-tapping crap. Oh, and people being arrested at political rallies for wearing dissenting t-shirts. Okay so maybe it hasn't been all that long but I came across a doozy today, ladies and gentlemen. This one really hit me where I live because it concerned one of my favorite pastimes. Namely, pouring large quantities of spirituous liquors down my gullet.

I don't know why it took me so long to notice this little gem, but last Wednesday the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission announced it has been sending undercover agents into bars around the Lone Star State in order to route-out and arrest people who are...drinking in bars. Specifically, people who are drunk, in bars. That's right; in Texas it is illegal to be publicly intoxicated, and the TAB Commission's Carolyn (pronounced "tea-totaler") Beck stated that just because you are in a perfectly legal establishment performing the perfectly legal act of drinking, doesn't exempt you from the law. Sweet mother of crap I think I might throw up.

Agents recently performed the hard-hitting task of going undercover to trick drunken patrons into admitting to being inebriated, whereupon they slap them in handcuffs and drag them down to the station. This is the law enforcement equivalent of fishing with dynamite; it's just cheating. Thirty six bars were "infiltrated" and thirty people were arrested for public drunkenness.

"Chip-on-her-shoulder" Beck had this to say: "We feel that the only way we're going to get at the drunk driving problem and the problem of people hurting each other while drunk is by crackdowns like this."

Do you hear the same thing I do, or have I gone stark raving insane? This project is like staking out a gun and ammo shop for someone to buy a firearm, then just shooting them in the eye because they might use it in a crime. I think Ms. Beck has perhaps watched Minority Report too many times. It's rather like her own version of Future Crime, if it were run by snapping turtles with a few extra chromosomes.

Beck, donning a red arm band with some crazy, squiggly black X on it, said her next plan is to set up bear traps in all the state parks to keep people from poaching, and removing all the knives from the state because sometimes people stab each other. Okay I made all that up, but man, this is really wonky. Sometimes I just want to grab someone and shake them until the cops come and haul me away to a nice, padded room where I can look forward to horse tranquilizers and 1000 volts of electricity running across my brain. I can thank my lucky stars that I don't go to Texas unless I lose a bet or something.

I guess it's also a good thing I rarely drink in bars. Usually I'm imbibing at home. Alone. . . With the lights off and hardcore porn playing in the background.

What was I talking about?