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Meanwhile, each year sees 1.2 million incidents of
alcohol-related violence — including some 22,000
premature deaths — while those lucky enough
to live are responsible for 40 per cent of all emergency
hospitalizations.
Particularly worrying, too, is the news that the
number of young, professional women drinking in excess
of the “safe limit” of 21 units of alcohol
per week has more than doubled.
Naturally, someone’s to blame for such shenanigans.
As Rob Hayward, the chief executive of the British
Beer and Pub Association, helpfully suggested: “We
need to get to the root causes of what motivates a
significant number of people who think it is acceptable
to go out on a Friday or Saturday night, drink in
excess, and indulge in antisocial behavior.”
And this week a whole host of shifty-eyed suspects
was paraded before the jury. First came Tony Blair
with his Home Secretary, David Blunkett, announcing
a five-year plan to crack down on antisocial behavior
and heralding “the end of the 1960s liberal
consensus on law and order.”
Yes, according to the government, the Sixties —
that era of permissive, ultraliberal fecklessness
— was responsible for what Mr. Blunkett called
a “breakdown in terms of discipline …[and]
a little bit of ‘anything goes.’”
Thus, the logic runs, the rampant liberalism of flower
power is entirely to blame for society’s lawlessness,
the lack of respect for authority, and our inability
to do much more than knock back a bottle of Jack Daniel’s
each Friday night.
The kaftan crowd was predictably appalled, throwing
their morning toast at the radio when Mr. Blunkett
appeared on Monday morning’s Today show, and
penning blustery ripostes in the following day’s
papers. Mysteriously giving the Seventies a pass —
polyester shirts, disco fever, and the grim memory
of nationalized industry apparently not enough to
drive an entire generation to drink — indignant
baby boomers laid the blame squarely with the Eighties,
that trumped-up decade of Reagan and Thatcher, power
suits and power lunches, and Bright Lights Big City
enterprise, opportunity and greed.
But why stop there? What of the Nineties, with its
boorish celebration of unfettered hedonism? Think
back to the boozy arrogance of Oasis, whose failure
to find any “action” was fine because,
after all, they had “cigarettes and alcohol.”
Recall the pissed-up antics of the Absolutely Fabulous
girls and the laddish lifestyles celebrated in such
magazines as Loaded and Maxim and on television’s
Men Behaving Badly. Surely the class of 2004 came
of age in the era of Carrie and Samantha, Noel and
Liam, Patsy and Edina, the Sea Breeze and Cosmo Girl,
the alcopop and the lad mag, and rest of the past
decade’s self-indulgent, feckless, and solipsistic
culture.
But why binge drinking should be so demonstrably
British is the trickier question. After all, drunkenness
is nothing new — it has always existed and it
affects all nationalities. Yet, look across the Channel
and you’ll see alcohol treated as part of a
wider gastronomic culture, and as part of family life.
In France, Spain, and Italy, people drink purely for
the pleasure and the taste. Glasses of wine are carefully
chosen to match meals and, rather than gulping them
down like there’s no tomorrow, people nurse
them all evening. Across the continent, too, children
are encouraged to enjoy wine.
Indeed, family life is paramount — continental
Europeans tend to head home after work to spend time
with their families, rather than launch a post-work
pub marathon with work mates.
So when Mr. Blunkett pointed out that the “breakdown
of families and the distancing of ourselves from each
other” has contributed to disaffection with
society and our resorting to alcohol, he tapped into
one of more distressing elements of British culture.
For we have become an atomized people, ill at ease
with ourselves and adrift in our great cities, divorced
from our families and kept afloat by ever greater
amounts of personal debt. And, as a Danish friend
of mine said to me last week, perhaps we Brits get
hammered because we just can’t think of anything
else to do. Her remark put me very much in mind of
Byron’s despair in Don Juan, that “Society
is now one polished horde/Formed of two mighty tribes,
the Bores and the Bored.”
Where we go from here is anyone’s guess. The
regulatory board that monitors advertising standards
has said it will clamp down on ads for alcohol that
are deemed too “sexy.” Meanwhile, the
government is considering extending pub closing times
— the theory being that people try to cram in
as many drinks as they can before eleven o’clock
at night. Yet most binge drinkers lose track of time
well before they get chucked out the pub.
In truth, it’s a more complicated problem than
one that an extra hour down the local will ever solve.
George Bernard Shaw said that alcohol is the anesthesia
by which we endure the operation of life. What on
earth, then, has happened to the British way of life
that makes it so difficult to endure, save for the
anesthetizing power of the bottle?
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