The trouble with breathalyzers is not that they are sometimes inaccurate. It is that they are often accurate; and an often-accurate machine is like a crack-pipe to the bureaucrat: he takes one hit and looks up, eyes like pinpoints, overjoyed to have a mechanical means of determining justice—0.08% means drunk.
I have just returned jetlagged from Australia, a beautiful country where 0.05% means drunk. It is not so strict as Algeria, where a driver is deemed deadly at 0.02%. It is not as pacific as the Cayman Islands, where a man can cruise into the sunset, his blood carefully composed of 0.1% aperitifs and 99.9% man, loudly singing the third verse of his islands’ national song: “Away from noise of cities, their fret and carking care…”
Not that blood-alcohol is the thing to know or to care about regarding Australia, where a man is woken up by magpies and the air smells sweet with eucalyptus and all the world seems to live at the end of something—of Christianity, it sometimes seemed. But the acceptable blood-alcohol limit of the Antipodes was what I learned while being graciously transported from city to suburb, when my Perthian driver was stopped at a checkpoint and made to blow down a little tube by a lady-cop in “high-vis.”
After the British (who drink more), Americans are the worst tourists in the world. The only places that have unequivocally enjoyed our visitations are Normandy in the ’40s and the moon in the ’60s. We have the same prejudice as all peoples, in that we compare everything foreign to our home country—but with this difference: we have spent a hundred odd years exporting and broadcasting and CIA-couping and army-basing and factory-moving our empire to the broad reaches of the world. All men, it is said, leave home to find themselves—Americans do so literally. We find Michael Jackson in Morocco, Coca-Cola in Cameroon, and we are as baffled by the youth of Australia using the slang “Ohio” to indicate (I think) a mood as we are by our own children doing the same.
How could I have avoided comparing America-at-home to America-in-Australia? I marvelled at the minor variations in the layout of their suburban sprawl, at what ornamented their strip malls, at what condiments went on their Big Jack Burger, on what they thought the choice of Kamala Harris indicates about the leadership of the Democrat party—which, in Australia, is a thing more thought about than their own politics, a repetitious and barely televised Euro-style liberal consensus with a religious commitment to keeping houses impossibly unaffordable.
So it is with shame that I confess my first thought upon being stopped at a random breathalyzing checkpoint was: “But this is unamerican.” Well, yes—it is. But I am grateful for the experience. I had become unconsciously sour in my attitude towards my own people’s tradition of dealing with drunk driving. I mean the field sobriety test. I mean the cop with no script. I mean the guy with the hat looming over your Honda Accord who says, drawing on every psychological association you ever made in the formation of your superego, “You been drinkin’, son?”
The sun is setting on so many sour things that look rather sweet in the dying light. I have thought of corporate boxstores, “Well, at least it’s somewhere you can really meet someone.” I have thought of awful, loutish boyfriends, “Well, at least they’re not AI chatbots.” And in the light of Australia’s mandatory breathalyzer checkpoints, I have found a fondness for the field sobriety test, in which a bullish man with three guns asks you to get out of your car and stand on one foot.
There are machines the use of which is the demonstration of the replaceability of the user. Because of them, there are now disciplines—like lawyering and writing essays—in which the thing keeping the human around is the need to have someone to blame for a mistake. The breathalyzer seems like one of these machines. It reduces the functionary who holds it out to an analogue technology lingering in a digital age. Once we’re buckled into self-driving cars, Australia will undoubtedly save itself millions in salary costs by automating the entire process. A gate, a tube: blow below .05 and the gate opens; if you’re above, your car will park you off the side of the road for seven hours while your speakers play the testimonials of drunk driving victims. Blow high enough, and it’ll drive you to the station; higher still, and it’ll drive you off a cliff called “Drunky’s Drop” by all the locals.
The trouble with breathalyzers is that they only analyze the breath of man, and not the breath of God—which is man’s spirit. They register the measure of beer in the blood, never the measure of the man who drinks it. A couple of drinks certainly sets the flesh at war with the spirit. But it is a war, not a victory, and the spirit might yet win.
I mean that there is drunk and there is drunk, a subtle difference that can be discerned by God, angels, and people with the habit of justice—not machines with the habit of false positives. There is the man conscientiously clenching his every innard to keep himself and others safe at .06. There is the man who is no less impaired at .08 than a sober man with the difficulty of being 78. There are people who are silly and careless at .02 and would be rather helped by getting to .04 in order to get serious. There are persons and circumstances; but machines know of neither, and we never paint with a broader brush than when we paint by numbers.
The blood-alcohol limit is not so much an example of liberal science as of liberal sovereignty: The Clinton administration forced all of our American states to maintain a nationwide arbitrary limit of .08 lest the feds refused to fund the construction and maintenance of their highways.
How I wish some state had rejected the devil’s bargain! Highways are at least half as much a cause of drunk driving as drinking. The trouble is not simply that men drink and drive but that they live in a world in which they must drive in order to get drinks. A bottomless margarita available at an Applebee’s only reachable by driving in a nation that punishes driving drunk? Come, now! Instead of enforcing a maximal limit of alcohol in the blood, we may with equal reason and better cheer have required a minimum number of bars-per-neighborhood. Walking home on a cloud of Coors with a song on one’s lips is a pleasure increasingly purchasable only by the privileged—by urbanites who can afford to rent in a walkable city and techies living in thoughtfully planned neighborhoods.
Could we just take a tipsy bus-ride back from the bar? Largely: no. Public investment into the highway and the car-world came at the expense of public transport. Now, being drunk on a train, tram or omnibus is as far from being a convenience to the man in his cups as it is from being seen as something romantic—or at least bohemian—by American culture. It is barely distinct from being criminal. It is entirely indistinct from being homeless.
Instead, we all have to pretend to not know what we know (and what the diversity of national blood alcohol limits obviously shows): that drunkenness, unlike gender, really is a spectrum. Every industrialized nation-state, having spread the world out into landlocked little islands of home, work, and commerce, has spent millions on propagandizing their people with some version of the messaging of America’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: that “buzzed driving is drunk driving.” But it’s not—that’s why it is called by a different name.
America can often be an ugly place, but the field sobriety test is a flower of its field, one that it took me a 16-hour flight to Sydney to see from the proper distance. It is an artful recognition of that great grey area between “drinking” and “drunk,” between lifting one’s spirit and drowning it with spirits. It gives a free man a fighting chance. You’ve had your drinks. You swerve, or fail to signal, or speed, and you’re zipped off to the side of the road by flashing lights. At this point, as in the critical moment of the fairytale, one of the boys in blue, like some uniformed troll or gnome or sphinx or giant, makes it clear that you’re doomed—unless you can pass Three Ordeals.
These are mythical tests. What, exactly, constitutes success, remains cryptic during and after. You must walk in a line, turn around and walk back. You must follow the light like a hawk with your eyes. You must say the alphabet backwards. You must touch your fingers, one by one, to your thumb, numbering them as you do. You must stand on one foot and count to thirty. I would not be surprised if I were asked to solve a riddle or shoot an arrow through the holes of twelve axe heads. For what is tested is not the amount of alcohol left in your blood, but the amount of control left in your soul. What is observed by the stern power of the state is not a chemical no one can see but a straight or a wobbly walk that no one can fail to see. It is the spirit that is tested by the sobriety test, not the letter—and most certainly not the number. It is a test of the man.
But the field sobriety test has a misleading name. For the cop who administers it is under no delusions as to whether or not you are sober. You pass—mysteriously—but he’ll never say, “Congratulations, you have proven you are sober.” He says, “Stay safe, drive carefully out there”—because he knows you are not sober. You are drunk, but he has tested the manner in which you are drunk, and in doing so he has remained a man, capable of judging you with prudence and mercy and with respect to person and circumstance. Perhaps more people have died than otherwise would have had all our police officers followed scripts and minded the machines (as the judges to whom they send our sorry cases do, assigning sentences by code)—I don’t know. But police forces without the habit of making free and honest judgments have been, historically, deadly. If we fear the man who makes a bad call, we should tremble when men have no calls to make: only scripts to read and numbers to obey.