Our intrepid correspondent turns 21 this Monday. In the last moments before the weekend, the last moments before drinking loses the rush of illicit excitment to which he has become so accustomed, the last moments before all hell breaks loose, our Guy pauses to think, to reflect, to enter a strange and very different world, a world in which a Guy, a Guy, well ... a Guy walks into a bar ...

So a Guy walks into a bar. He looks, you know, 19. “ID please,” says the Big Bouncer. Human identity? Well, yes and no. They don’t ask for your “identity.” They ask for your “ID” which is an entirely different thing; it is a piece of plastic, the cheaply made symbol of an identity you don’t feel like thinking about right now. And that is a human identity which is shaped by a nonhuman power called law. (A law which is, in turn, shaped by humans. Strange.)

So the Big Bouncer stares the Guy down. The Guy looks highly un-nervous, precisely because he is highly nervous. Then the ID Swiper, aka the ID Sniper, swipes. (He isn’t really a Sniper, but his swiper thingamajig looks like it could kill a small animal.) The Swiper is swiping and the music is pumping from inside, and our Guy is sweating. “To get in, or not to get in?” is the question in this moment of the revolutionary wager. To get in: ecstatic revolt against law. To not get in: a misdemeanor. Crushed by law.

Our Guy is sweating. Not on his forehead, but, like, in his … pants, or something.

“Will the Bouncer look at me? It isn’t really me! Oh no! Maybe I shouldn’t have done this! That last bar was more lenient — their bouncer can’t even see! Ahhh! Oh no!”

Victory. This piece of plastic swipes, baby!

But we’re not done. Now the Swiper changes his identity. He’s like a chameleon. Now he becomes the Reflector and he reflects the ID under a black light. More in-pants sweat. The main question has become this: holograms, or no holograms? Hologramz. Entrance. Glory.

But my story has digressed from that ubiquitous opening line — or, it has taken so long to happen, this “walking into a bar,” that we already forgot what was happening. At any rate, the joke lost some steam, but it’s cool. We’ll get it back. We always used to say this in soccer when the highly superior public schools would score the first goal. “We’ll get it back,” I’d tell the guys. Of course, this isn’t soccer. This is a really anxious game of ID-ball. Identity is the ball.

Identity as a ball, or a plastic card. The plastic card that enables you to drive is, of course, the very card that enables you to drink. Which is to point out that drinking and driving are linked in the heart of the law itself.

Our Guy walks into the bar; or, at least he makes it past security.

“I didn’t know you were from Illinois,” says a friend from class at a nearby table, having seen the ID under the hologram. Illinois, huh? Our 19-year old New Yorker doesn’t sweat, though, no way! He’s over the border, amigos and amigas and policías.

“I’m not,” he declares triumphantly.

This is our guy-who-walks-into-a-bar joke. Only it has lost that coal-mining feeling, where the Guy just plain old walks in and has a beer. Our new version of the joke runs much deeper, because it plays out perhaps our deepest conflict of all: the dialectic of life and law. And we have 20 years to explore one of the funnest (and also more tragic) ways of spending a Saturday night. And it isn’t about drinking so much as it’s about kicking the shit out of that oppressive force of law. It’s sort of nihilistic, and sort of childish. If, by childish, you mean under 21.

There is something tragic about this ritual of rebellion — most vulgarly, death by people who misinterpret this point that the same piece of plastic tells the world that we can both drink and drive. That doesn’t mean you should do it!

There is a deeper question, though: what is happening to our identity when we forge it all the time, or at least valorize the culture forging identity — like immigrants sometimes do — to get in to the hotspot, be it a rich country, or just a strobe-lit Level-B? Seemingly we usually drown this question in booze, but if we think about it, the forgery is not only tragic. We just have to think about it in relation to the law it is breaking.

Law is a human endeavor to make human life more livable; but bureaucratic, regulatory regimes, which include the Western democracies, have given law almost an independent character, wherein it doesn’t only regulate interpersonal relations, but it regulates our bodies, how we think of them, what we eat. It is law on steroids, perhaps, bursting out of its human clothes and morphing into an automaton, armed with surveillance cameras and scarcely opposed by our human public, which is sleeping, dreaming, cooing to itself about its achievements of democracy and freedom.

Think of those pickup truck commercials. Vast, empty desert, and two Ford F-150’s ready to duke it out on the open road … but not until the traffic light changes. That’s law on steroids.

It’s only natural then, that with our culture of hyper-regulation comes its dialectical opposition: in this case, the euphoric practice of teen drinking, which even J-Kwon knows is “very bad.” But he has a fake ID, though. (Double negatives are also “very bad,” but hey ...)

And the parents are mad. It makes perfect sense that due to practical concerns, most parents don’t want their children to be there when the cops show up. But most of us aren’t parents yet.

So for now, we’re privy to this secret, taboo piece of truth, which is not so secret at all: the official is always in contact with the extraofficial. Law breeds crime (for “crime” would have no meaning without law!); and the modernist project of national governments to bring their societies to submission (even when they are voted into power!) is ruthless, but has not fully succeeded. Because it can’t. We have, then, not exactly a human voice, but a phantom bureaucratic automaton who must stoically order: “Regulate! Regulate! This is the FDA and the prophets!” And if we’re still alive deep inside, we run the red light.

In closing, I bid you wish me the happiest of 21st birthdays this Monday. Only, if you want to party, come Sunday. It will never be quite as awesome after that. And as for those deeper questions, maybe our newly minted legal drinker, our postmodern guy-who-walks-into-a-bar, will heave learned something. That is, human identity can be forged, but better for it to be asserted! He would then walk out of the bar, and into politics.

Jeremy Siegman is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at jsiegman@cornellsun.com. Cosmology on the Rocks appears alternate Fridays.