Pubdate: Mon, 06 Nov 2000 Source: Wall Street Journal (US) Copyright: 2000 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Contact: 200 Liberty Street, New York, NY 10281 Fax: (212) 416-2658 Website: http://www.wsj.com/ Author: David Frum, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of "How We Got Here: The 70s" (Basic Books, 2000). WHEN DRUNK DRIVING WAS COOL Don't let anybody tell you we live in a permissive society. True, radio stations happily broadcast songs that would once have cost them their licenses. But tell an ethnic joke or toss a cola can into a plastics recycling bin and the disapprobation of society falls on you with a force that would have impressed Cotton Mather. And as for alcohol, well, George W. Bush has just received a sharp lesson on how far and fast opinions about that have changed. On Friday, the "Today" show devoted a segment to an earnest examination of the report that in 1976 Mr. Bush was fined $150 and had his license suspended for driving under the influence of alcohol. "Today" is broadcast by NBC -- the same network that signed Dean Martin to one of the most lucrative contracts in the history of television, as host of a variety show held together by the running gag that Martin was too drunk to stand. Martin smoked on the air, too. The show wasn't cancelled until 1974. Moral spasms come and go in cycles. In the 19th century, temperance had been regarded as a crusade every bit the equal of abolitionism. Indeed, it was often difficult to tell the two movements apart, since the preachers who led both movements constantly analogized the South's enslavement of black bodies to alcohol's enslavement of the drunkard's soul. Yet by the 1920s, both abolition and temperance had come to seem faintly comical: Up-to-date history books championed the Southern view of the Civil War and Reconstruction, while up-to-date journalism celebrated booze and mocked Prohibition. For the next half a century, boozing was glamorized by Hollywood and indulged by the authorities. When Frank Sinatra called for "one for the road," nobody thought he was inviting fans to engage in civil disobedience. Alas for Mr. Bush, at the time he was following the Chairman of the Board's advice, America's mores were shifting radically for the second time in a century. Americans had ceased worrying so much about their souls after World War I; after Vietnam, they began worrying a whole lot more about their bodies. The federal government took over the job of regulating ladder construction. States adopted compulsory seatbelt and helmet laws. The country was convulsed by food scares. And in 1980, a small group of women in California organized the most effective temperance organization the country had seen since Prohibition's repeal: Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Within a decade, drunk driving had been transmuted in the American imagination from a foolish indiscretion to a violent crime. Nobody can dispute that MADD was right. Thanks very largely to that organization, U.S. highway fatalities have declined steadily and sharply. Mr. Bush himself signed legislation stiffening Texas's drunk-driving laws. He has also become America's best known teetotaler. Nevertheless, Mr. Bush now finds himself on the wrong side of a grand cultural shift. All of which would be easier to bear if Al Gore were not at the same time benefiting from a cultural shift in the opposite direction. Back in 1976, pot-smoking was regarded by most voting-age people as a vastly more serious offense than drinking and driving. Lying was even worse -- Jimmy Carter won the 1976 election by promising never to do it. Yet in this same election season that has been convulsed at the last minute by Mr. Bush's DUI incident, the American media have shrugged off reliable information that Al Gore was speaking untruthfully when he acknowledged only occasional marijuana use in the 1970s. In fact, according to one of his closest friends at the time, for a prolonged period after he left the army, Mr. Gore was a heavy and regular toker. But that, of course, is completely different. After all, many of the same formerly young people who rolled their eyes at Dino still chuckle at the memory of Cheech & Chong, whose pothead comedy "Up in Smoke" was one of the big hits of 1978. Mr. Bush's problem with the media isn't that he got stoned in 1976 -- it's that he got stoned in what they regard as the wrong way with the wrong kind of friends: with booze not marijuana, with jocks not hippies. But who knows? That may turn out to be the reason that the rest of the country forgives him. - --- MAP posted-by: Don Beck