Dig out your zoot suit, and someone thaw out Brian Setzer and his orchestra. Thanks to the Ames City Council, every night is going to be Roaring ’20s night from here on. Its time has obviously come, our economy is on the wane and we could easily be on the verge of collapse, so there’s no better time for us to go ahead and turn to an old friend — prohibition.

Let me explain something to those less politically astute students, which is to say all of us that didn’t go to the City Council meeting, which is all of us except one or two. The City Council, doing its best to represent the true interests of the three people in Ames who have nothing to do with the university, have moved a bill banning “liquor buffets” on to its third read, where it will undoubtedly pass, making such specials go away like smoking in restaurants during “family” hours.

This is because “liquor buffets” pose a threat to the public health. Why?

Because they don’t like you drinking. Things they don’t like are therefore “threats to the public health,” regardless of just how personally you do your drinking and regardless of how non-communicable your drinking is. So you don’t have to wash your hands after you go to the bathroom, but you definitely need to stop drinking cheap drinks.

Keep in mind that I have no problem with the City Council having no real student representation, unless you count a nonvoting member as representation. That’s our fault, as it will continue to be every time we all either choose not to run (though the four-year term makes that difficult), not to vote or choose to vote absentee from our home while Ames reaps the census goodies that we offer. That is our fault, and therefore, we’re at fault for the City Council wanting to ban our existence for the sake of the “public health.”

My problem is that they just don’t get it. Putting an end to drink buffets won’t make the drinks any more expensive or difficult to acquire. Now bars will be encouraged to just charge a slightly lower cover and every drink will be a coin, so that once you’ve paid your eight bucks to get in, you’d still better drink until they won’t serve you anymore. Or once they crack down on that, bars will just pretend they’re in Utah and become private clubs with “memberships” that consist of you waiting outside the bar and asking a “member” to sponsor you while you slip the bouncer $5. Or even cheaper still, you drink at home, where in order to preserve the “public health” you’re served by yourself, who happens to be the last bartender who would cut you off when you’ve had too much. Whew. Public health be praised!

In order to take care of the drinking epidemic that they’re about the unleash on the city by forcing us to pay less cover for specials like penny pitchers or just simply drink at home where the drinking is cheap, there will be only one answer: Prohibition.

Sadly, I don’t think any students at Iowa State really remember Prohibition since most of us had no hope of even being gametes at that point, but Prohibition was an excellent thing. It ended excise taxes on liquor and beer, and speakeasies were far more interesting than today’s bars. Even better still, it gave an opportunity for entrepreneurship in the form of organized crime. And when has Iowa needed entrepreneurship more than now?

Our Small Business Development Center lost a great deal of funding in the recent budget crunch, and it can’t afford to help everyone. But rum-running and bootlegging are small-time industries. Everybody with a bathtub can become a gin manufacturer. It’s a job that has high pay, the opportunity to travel, thrilling police chases and all sorts of fringe benefits that I probably can’t even think of. The Jazz Age spawned some of America’s best writers, artists and leaders, and now we just need to bring it back.

So forget what you thought was retro. Disco is dead, the war in Vietnam is over and those “ban the bomb” marches just look out of place when ballistic missiles are the threat.

No, the only retro we need is a nice 18th Amendment sort of retro that will allow us to speak easy and engage in all sorts of entrepreneurship in order to celebrate the opening of the new Gerdin Business Building next year.

As a voice of no student beside myself, I can say I’m down with the retro groove you guys are pushing. I hear it, and I agree. Prohibition’s time has come, because making drinking look that much more illegal just glamorizes it even more.