MARK STEYN:: Dog-Whistling Past the Graveyard – NRO
By MB Snow at September 2, 2012 | 12:40 am | Print
SEPTEMBER 1, 2012 4:00 A.M.
By Mark Steyn –
American racism is starting to remind me of American alcoholism. At the founding of the republic, in the days when beer was thought of as “liquid bread” and a healthy nutritional breakfast, Americans drank about three to four times as much as they do now. Today the United States has a lower per capita rate of alcohol consumption than almost any other developed nation, but it has more alcoholism support groups than any other developed nation — around 164 groups per million people. France, which drinks about 50 percent more per capita than America, has one-twentieth the number of support groups. The French and Italians enjoy drinking, the English and Irish enjoy getting drunk, and Americans enjoy getting drunk on ever more absurd stigmatizatory excess. At Walmart they card you if you “appear to be under” — what is it up to now? 43? 57? And the citizenry take this as a compliment: Well-preserved grandmothers return from failed attempts to purchase a bottle of wine with gay cries of, “I was carded at Costco! They’ve made my weekend!”
via Dog-Whistling Past the Graveyard – Mark Steyn – National Review Online.
