SORDID TALES by Edwin Decker

On the surface, Oktoberfest in Germany looks like your typical, American, county fair. Only it's much larger. Six million people visit Oktoberfest over 16 days. There are five times more rides than your typical county fair. Also different is the accessibility of alcohol. The promenade has several beer and schnapps vendors where you can buy a drink to go. Then there are the world famous beer tents.

Despite the readiness of alcohol, Oktoberfest-Munich is largely regarded as a family event. It is the German opinion that families and alcohol can coexist peacefully and responsible drinkers need not be quarantined from the promenade. Not like San Diego festivals, where drinkers are confined to these secluded, stark internment camps we laughingly called “beer gardens”-where there's nothing to do but stare through a chain-link fence and wish, wish, wish you could enjoy a coldy out there, where the people and the rides and the bands are.

But that's just crazy talk.

There are 14 major beer tents at Oktoberfest-Munich. They are the huge, huge, hugest tents you've ever seen. Each one seats about 8,500 people. From outside, they look like airplane hangars. Inside is like a two-story warehouse with rows and rows of cafeteria-style tables and benches and thousands of people from all around the world having a fantastic time.

Inside is a wondrous place: 10-piece Bavarian bands play German folk tunes perched on stages some 20 feet high. Inside is a wondrous, magical place: Buxom waitresses incessantly carry by hand a dozen one-liter steins to your table so you never, ever go dry. Inside is a wondrous, magical, mystical place: Everyone at your table is standing on the bench and singing and clinking steins and staring out at all the others in the tent who are standing on their benches singing and clinking their steins. Inside is a wondrous, magical, mystical, mythical place: Whole chickens appear from thin air. Pretty Austrian girls come up to talk to you for no reason at all. And for one short moment in time, everything is just good, good, good with nary a speck of bad in sight.

And so it went inside our tent, the Hofbraeu Festhalle.

Three tables down was a group of three teenagers singing and drinking beer. I watched them and was pleased to observe their good smiles. At another table a man was letting his 6-year-old son sip from his stein. The boy looked happy and healthy. I walked over and sat across from the father. We talked. Nice guy. His wife was sitting on the other side of the boy, smiling, as the child took another sip. Nice lady. Certainly not the parental monster some Americans might've considered her. Dad was no monster either. But if you were to heed the words of MADD, or the American Church, or any other of our uptight puritan right, you might've believed these parents were abusing their son.

But any moron with half an eye could see these parents love their boy every bit as much as any MADD mother loves hers.

It got me to thinking about how we've got it all wrong. The American prohibitive approach to youth and alcohol is absurd. Consider this: Over the years, I've been to hundreds of European drinking establishments. I've drunk in countless Paris cafés and sipped Sambucas all through Rome. I've inhaled great bales of weed, legally, in the coffeehouses of Amsterdam and chased it down with gorgeous Heinekens. And now, on this most recent jaunt, visited dozens and dozens of pubs in London, Füssen, Berchtesgaden and Munich, and not once, all through Europe, did I ever encounter an I.D. checker. They don't even have a legal drinking age in Europe.

So does that mean Europeans don't love their children as much as Americans do? Or maybe Europeans realize something we don't: that when you fervently deny youth access to alcohol until the age of 21, guess what happens on their 21st birthday? They can't get to the bar fast enough. Then they drink until their guts come up, and they drink the next day until their guts come up, and that's the manner in which they'll drink for the next five years-because they weren't eased into it.

A few weeks ago, I rode along with the minor-decoy sting operation of the San Diego Police vice squad. I watched firsthand as they sent a 19-year-old minor decoy into a Gaslamp Quarter restaurant bar and busted a young/new bartender for serving her. What was the bartender's crime? Accidentally serving a beer to a 19-year-old. Oh my Christ! 19 is old enough to drive, old enough to breed, old enough to war-but not old enough to drink a goddam Budweiser?

It's insanity.

Clearly, our culture of prohibition is not working. Teen alcoholism, teen suicide, school shootings, teen sex assaults-we are the world leaders. So why do we continue with this absurd policy? Because American puritan tight-asses hate alcohol and its users so very, very much, that they conjure up this “It's for the children” mantra. Then, if you oppose them, you are branded as a hater of the youth.

“Hey everyone, Decker is against the legal drinking age! He must surely hate the children. Just like those filthy krauts who let minors drink in beer tents. Oh, the humanity! Somebody has got to put a stop to that. We must launch a preemptive attack on Germany-for the children! Call the President! Launch the marines! Release the hounds!

Whatever.

E-mail ed@edwindecker.com and editor@SD citybeat.com. Visit www.edwindecker.com.