Political correctness is an attempt to discard the burden of our ancien regime. Hunting, Scouting and heterosexual marriage belong with the list of PC sins, because they imply the old, hierarchical society in which the masculine and the feminine are elaborately distinguished. By contrast, drug-taking and "recreational" sex have acquired the character, despite their dangers, of innocent pastimes. For they "challenge" traditional values and encourage the kind of social fragmentation that makes hierarchical communities impossible.
Where does drunkenness stand, among the do's and don'ts of political correctness? Some anthropologists place it in the list of sins, as so much of traditional patriarchal society seems to depend on a certain illusion-filled tipsiness. Others, observing the appeal of drunkenness to the young, and the ease with which it can be combined with sex, drugs and rudeness, allow that drinking might, after all, be an innocent recreation, with beneficial side effects in the form of broken windows, offended residents and a general disruption of the old bourgeois order.
The issue is of growing importance in America. Prohibition was the most spectacular attempt (9/11 apart) to impose minority values on the moral majority. It didn't work; but it set an interesting precedent, showing how, despite a constitution designed to protect it, the American way of life can be criminalised by the nannies. The fear is arising that drunkenness will be targeted again, not as an offence against holiness (which God forbid) but as a form of political incorrectness. For drunks tend to be men, and tend also, when in the grip of their distinctive passion, to show off their forbidden sexuality.
The macho response to this threat is contained in a striking new journal called the Modern Drunkard, a copy of which was recently thrust into my hand in a Washington bar. The journal relates how a party of innocent rednecks, all dressed as Santa Claus, was broken up last Christmas by truncheon-wielding traffic policemen, even though none of the drunks was remotely capable of driving home. It contains an inspiring interview with the Emperor of the Hobos, "Soup Bone" Balmett, who has puked his way from jail to jail across the continent in pursuit of his constitutional rights. And it offers useful advice on the forgotten art of staggering, in an article that makes it abundantly clear that drunkenness really is understood by American beer drinkers as the last remaining way of letting the masculine - or at any rate the male - hang out.
Which reminded me of the virtue of wine. Unlike whisky or beer, wine is as likely to feminise as to masculinise the drinker - a point illustrated by Titian and Rubens in their figures of Bacchus. Getting drunk on wine may be PC after all. Phew!
