On the Right - Jenna and Barbara, Honorary J.D.'s.

NEW YORK, JUNE 5

We took one of those oaths not to write about the Bush ladies, but one aspect of their drinking affair is underplayed, which is the sheer idiocy of the law.

We all know that up until the counter-Woodstock anti-alcohol putsch of a generation ago, drinking was permitted in most states at age 18. Simultaneously, our lawmakers resolved a) to forbid drinking until age 21, and b) to permit voting at age 18.

Begin by acknowledging that alcoholism is the worst of our national curses. About 20 percent of Americans who drink, drink too much, and about 5 percent become alcoholics. They destroy family life, run over people while driving automobiles, aim pistols at their wives' lovers or at their wives, and commit suicide, sometimes belatedly. But those projections are not airtight, so that the most that can be said is that it pays to postpone alcoholic intake until a little supplementary seniority is there to contribute a better perspective than you have at the earlier age. Certainly the perspective of Jenna and Barbara was off. To have slipped a drink when, it turns out, AP, Larry King, MGM, 60 Minutes, and Jim Lehrer were all staring at them from the corner of the restaurant shows an immature perspective.

But attempts to legislate on the basis of a prudent projection of the incidence of alcoholism are themselves misplaced acts of legislative/moral energy, because to choose one is glaringly to ignore that which you did not choose, which is, of course, tobacco. The statistics here are very firm. If you don't smoke until age 21, the chances are 90 percent that you will not smoke ever. And nicotine addiction, though it doesn't cause mayhem, does cause frequent and painful death.

Now the argument against enforcing the rule against teenage smoking is that it is quite simply impossible. Who is so brave and so dumb as to stand up in front of a battery of policemen instructing them to bring into court anyone with a cigarette in his mouth who can't prove that he was born before 1980? The move to repeal the constitutional amendment against drinking was fueled substantially by the national despair over its enforcement, and derivative gloom over the implications of wholesale resistance to the integrity of laws, let alone constitutionally specified laws.

Perhaps most of the time in Austin, Texas, the police do other things, and it is legitimately argued that the Bush ladies were simply dumb and provocative to ask for margaritas, let alone to produce other people's I.D. cards to disguise their ages. But whatever one might intone about the relative responsibilities of children of public figures, still the offense for which they were arraigned is better commentary on the misbehavior of the law, than of the two violators of it.

There are plenty of sanctions one can come up with against student drinkers who overdo it, and the reports a few months ago on binge drinking bring these to light. The Bush ladies have proved not much more than that modern life confirms that sexual equality means also that girls will be girls. Maybe when the two Bush sisters reach a venerable age they will be given honorary degrees by the University of Texas for having brought to focus, in the year 2001, the silliness of this particular blue law.