Dear Chuck Moss: You aren't funny, your parable was lame, and your sense of logic is atrocious

by: Eric B.

Thu Jul 12, 2012 at 10:30:57 AM EDT

Chuck Moss appears to think of himself as a funny person. He says things that probably make him laugh to himself, because they satisfy his self-image of a funny person.

Talk about your big tents! Inside a Barnumesque Big Top could be Epcot's Polkaland. Rows and tables and folding chairs ring a portable wooden dance floor. Leelanau may be Michigan's wine and hops mecca, but at the Cedar Polka Fest, your choices are Budweiser, and Budweiser Lite. Outside the tent is the sleepy sausage capital of Michigan. Inside are music, dance, merriment, Budweiser, sausage, more Budweiser and more dancing.

This is funny in the same way that an uptight white, middle class, suburban guy can talk "street" when he's trying to relate to urban youth.

He goes on to say that he had a conversation with the door man about checking IDs on his way in. The conversation never took place, or at least I'd hope it wouldn't. If you've ever seen something like this take place (or, as the kids in the barrio say, "go down"), it's the world's most awkward, painful, longest couple of minutes ... the cheap asshole using the reality of some simple servant's life to make an illustration about their worldview. Even if the servant agrees, it's enough to make him and everyone watching uncomfortable. His point is that you have to prove to someone selling beer that you are who you say you are and that you're older than 21 years old, and that this part of the transaction doesn't tamp down excitement or participation in the merriment and drinking of Budweiser.

First things first. Buying beer is not a right. Buying beer isn't enshrined in the Constitution, nor was it an idea that was ever central to the founding of this country. In fact, if memory serves me right, there was a period in there where they actually made it illegal to buy and make beer, and that they might have even written this into the U.S. Constitution. Voting, on the other hand...

Second, his entire story is stupid. Really. We're supposed to believe that this simple doorman's experience is supposed to inform public policy. Well, guess what? The doorman ain't trying to buy beer. The doorman exists to enforce the rules ... and, by the way, those rules are entirely the product of the festival.  State law on the subject is that the vendor and/or retailer's duty to make a "diligent effort" to establish someone's age. If they look at IDs or employ a Vulcan to do a mind meld, the law is silent on specific means to accompish it (i.e., that sign that says it's a state law to card everyone who looks under 35 is lying to you). So, there is that.

As to the underlying idea ... got a parable of my own to relate, if by parable you mean something that actually happened to me last year. The kid was doing a sleepover on a Friday night shortly after my birthday, so I decided to spend my night how I normally spend my nights, drinking heavily and falling asleep early. I picked up a bottle of whiskey from Meijer and went to pay for it.  The clerk was a lady who just two weeks previously had sold me rum. She went to punch in my birthday so that the U-Scan machine would unfreeze itself, and noted that my drivers license had expired. I don't own a car, by the way, so the only reason I have to update my drivers license is for work, where I do drive. And, to buy booze, since the lady told me she couldn't sell me the whiskey, because my license was no longer valid.

I've been "legal" now for 20 years. I realize I don't look 41, but I sure as hell no longer look like I'm 18, or even 20. The Meijer clerk full well knew this, because she'd sold me rum two weeks before this happened. But, she said her hands were tied by state law, and so did her manager when I asked to talk to that person. At Meijer, they won't sell you alcohol if you're drivers license is expired by a week, even if they know that you're legally entitled to purchase alcohol, because they think state law forbids them from selling alcohol to middle aged men with expired drivers licenses.

Did this suppress whiskey turnout at my home that night? No. I went to another retailer. If I were registered to buy alcohol only at the Mt. Pleasant Meijer, which is the equivalent of being registered to vote at city hall (my precinct), I would have been shit out of luck. Not because I'm unqualified under the law to purchase alcohol, but because the shithead responsible for managing the transaction was poorly trained. Let's apply this to the idea of voting, which is a Constitutional right. Haphazard enforcement of alcohol consumption laws is one thing. Whiskey is probably bad for your health in the first place, and Michigan's laws on it are lax enough that if one retailer won't sell it to you there's probably another who will. So, really, the only people hurt that afternoon was the Meijer family, who saw sales take a $16 hit because their employee training program is designed to shield them from poor decisions by stupid employees. But, you don't get a second chance to vote, and you can't take your voting business to the next precinct over. If your precinct employees err on the side of caution, your right to vote is taken away due to bureaucratic failures ... and remember, Republicans are the people constantly whining about government bureaucrats taking away people's rights.

To sum up, voter fraud is a non-existant problem, no matter what Magic Frank says. Solving that non-problem by requiring identification creates a barrier to exercise a right by imposing bureaucrats -- bureaucrats who the Republicans who want to empower are the same people Republicans bitch about constantly for "unaccountable exercises of government power" -- in between someone and their ballot. They claim this won't suppress anyone's exercise of a franchise, using as an example an identification scheme that has created a haphazard, patchwork of enforcement based mostly on the impression of undereducated clerks who are trained to not think but rigidly follow rules. Also, Chuck Moss isn't funny. He's not even clever.