Prius owners are always demanding more legislation against drink driving, but an advantage of living in America is that if you are too trashed to drive home, your 15-year-old kid can pick you up from the bar. The only problem with this is that we Americans love reckless driving too much to let anyone else take the wheel. Drink driving is one of our great illegal freedoms. Actually, it’s called ‘buzzed’ driving in the States, and as we like to say, ‘it’s only illegal if you get caught.’
Driving while intoxicated is about the rights enshrined in the Constitution
Justin Timberlake was caught indeed in the early hours of Tuesday morning after a policeman in the Hamptons saw him swerve between lanes and blow through a stop sign. Timberlake had been at The American Hotel and claimed he’d only had a single martini, hardly enough to put a grown man over New York state’s limit of 80 mg of alcohol to every 100 mL of blood (a little less than four pints for a man of his size). He refused to do a breathalyser test and was arrested. ‘This is going to ruin the tour,’ Timberlake reportedly said.
In America we can have areas where you’re free to loot liquor stores and shoot fentanyl, but you’re not allowed to drive drunk in the Hamptons. On Wednesday, the singer Billy Joel, who’d had his own car troubles there, was questioned by reporters outside The American Hotel after lunch. On a winter night over 20 years ago, he had dined there before ramming his car into a tree on the drive home, the first in a spell of three crashes in less than two years. Joel insists there was no alcohol involved in any of the accidents but has publicly spoken about his struggles with substance abuse. After telling the reporters cryptically, ‘Judge not lest ye be judged,’ he sped away on a green Vespa.
Perhaps better advice would be, ‘Let he who is without sin among you cast the first stone.’ A 2021 poll found that only 43 per cent of Americans admitted to drink driving, which is lower than I’d have thought growing up there. Based on my own anecdotal evidence, nearly everyone who lives in America and can drive a car has driven under the influence before (and absolutely everyone who drives a F-150 pickup has).
Yes, it’s wrong and bad and dangerous. But the cupholder is the exact shape of a beer can. Perhaps part of our predilection for driving drunk has to do with our humongous, gas-guzzling, supersize-me monster trucks. As P. J. O’Rourke wrote in How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink, when something bad happens in a big car, like steamrolling over a bunch of kids, it happens very far away: ‘It’s like a civil war in Africa; you know, it doesn’t really concern you too much.’
If you ever go to a tailgate party in America you will immediately understand that cars are designed with drinking in mind, ideally in a parking lot surrounded by plenty of other people drinking in their cars. The door of the boot forms a perfect little awning where you can enjoy the shade while drinking a cold White Claw straight from the cooler. The key is filling the cooler with more than enough booze, so that it’s still heavy enough not to shift around in the back when you swerve home.
On average, Americans drive around 50km each day because there’s almost no other way of getting around. Our public transport, where it exists, is useless. You think there’s a night bus in the Hamptons? Even if there were, I would not be riding a bus if I were Justin Timberlake. The point of being famous is that you don’t ride the bus. I once took a 12-hour overnight Greyhound (aka Walmart-on-wheels) up the East Coast. When we stopped for an hour to change drivers in Richmond, Virginia, a deranged man shadowboxed in front of my face. I looked the place up in the news and saw that two people had recently been shot and killed inside the station. I’ll take the boozer-cruiser, thank you.
America’s infrastructure is designed to minimise physical activity as much as possible because we don’t have a public healthcare system, so it doesn’t cost the taxpayer if we’re fat and have weak hips. If you want to get anywhere, you have to drive. If you want to get home from the bar, you have to drive drunk. So nobody wants to walk anywhere because there’s a high chance you’ll get pulverised by someone’s grill plate. And because nobody wants to walk anywhere, nowhere gets made walkable.
Very little of America is bicycle-friendly, either, so we don’t have the option of riding a bike home drunk, which is also a crime but a less catastrophic one. Anyway, there’s nothing more suspicious than a grown man on a bike, except maybe a grown man on a children’s bike. It means he’s had his licence taken away for doing something bad like taking drugs or failing to pay child support. Or getting caught drink driving.
Most of all, driving while intoxicated is about the rights enshrined in the Constitution. Cars are America’s ultimate symbol of freedom. You can fly the stars and stripes outside of your home, but on a car you can sport a bumper sticker that says ‘STOMP ON MY FLAG AND I’LL STOMP ON YOUR ASS.’ In the land of the free, you can drive anywhere you want, be anything you want, do anything you want, and you should be able to be a little sloshed while you’re doing it.
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