(Above: Oktoberfest in Seaside Heights; you can't drink on the beach there, but you won't lack for opportunities inland.)

I imagine you saw that scrum involving a Philadelphia woman and the Wildwood police that went viral on the internet.

It got thousands of comments on the nj.com site. The commenters seemed to be evenly split on the question of who was in the right and who was in the wrong. (Please don't comment on that here; see note below)

One thing I didn't notice is anyone asking why on Earth anyone would want to sit on a beach that is patrolled by police with Breathalyzers.

And I mean that "on Earth" literally.

On my various surf trips I have been to beaches all over the world, from Byron Bay to Biarritz. I have never seen one patrolled by the police using high-tech devices to determine if the beachgoers have been consuming one of the four sources of energy for the human body - which are carbohydrates, fat, protein and alcohol, if you're keeping score.

I'm tempted to say that's the sort of thing you would see in a communist country. But I've been on surf trips to communist countries as well. In Cuba you can drink on the beach. Heck, they even have beer vending machines on the streets.

I also visited a beach in Nicaragua when the Sandinistas were in power. They might have been Soviet-style communists. But they didn't send la policia with Breathalyzers to determine whether anyone was drunk on the beach.

They would have been surprised if you were sober. A sober American might have been seen as a Contra spy, so I did my best to allay any suspicions.

The other question that remains a mystery to me is why people sit on the beach in the first place. When summer comes, I see these people trooping past my house with vast stores of equipment designed to keep the sun off them, everything from sunblock to beach umbrellas.

Well if you don't want to be in the sun, why go to the beach?

I'll go there to surf or to take my dog for a run. But those activities are best enjoyed when there is no one else around. Fortunately that's five-sixths of the year at the Jersey Shore.

As I said, I can't understand why anyone would want to sit on the beach doing nothing; it somehow seems counter-productive.

But then there are those two months when the beach is mobbed. I don't like crowds. But if I'm forced to sit in one, I certainly do not want to do so without a cold beer or two at the ready.

In February I drove down to Florida with my sailing buddy the Captain. We towed a U-Haul and then I helped him set up a condo he'd just bought not far from the beach in Jupiter.

It was hard work ripping up old carpet and so forth, but afterward we'd bike down the beach with a cooler. There were no police patrols. People were doing all sorts of things for which they'd be hauled to the hoosegow here in Jersey.

Better yet, there were no lifeguards, at least none that I could see.

Here in the Garden State, the powers-that-be are of the belief that the ocean, which is unguarded for most of the year, turns on Memorial Day into a deadly force.

Their theory, near as I can deduce it, is that once the water turns warm, people will be lured to their deaths in the waves.

A beer vending machine in Havana; imagine seeing one of these here in the Soviet State of New Jersey.

Well the water's a lot warmer and the waves are a lot bigger down in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I called a friend who lives in Rodanthe the other day to ask if they have lifeguards there.

"What are lifeguards? He asked. "I've never seen a lifeguard down here."

He's never seen a beach badge either. Not only can you drink on the beach; you can build a fire.

"It's the land of the free," he said.

No one would say that about New Jersey.

As someone who spent his youth working in Ocean County's version of Wildwood, Seaside Heights, I quickly noticed that every aspect of government is calculated to separate the bennies from their bucks. (Though even in Seaside they're thinking of restricting teenagers from renting hotel rooms.)

Drinking in public is outlawed not for any moral reasons but for the same reason changing into a bathing suit in your car is outlawed: Because there's money to be made charging the suckers to do it in private.

In this, the town of Wildwood is following in the tradition of that great Philadelphia sage W.C. Fields.

"Never give a sucker an even break," he famously said.

Why the suckers keep showing up is another question I'd like to see addressed.

COMMENTS - THIS IS NOT THE PLACE TO DEBATE THE ARREST:

As I said above, this column is not about who's right and who's wrong in that incident. If you want to comment on that, please go to this excellent nj.com article on the arrest or this one about Gov. Murphy's reaction to it.

But that is not the subject of this column.

This column is about the issue of whether drinking on the beach should be banned, as it is on practically every beach in New Jersey - except of course the private beaches where the owners can make a buck off it.

As I wrote, I've been all over the world and never seen such a ban, even in communist countries. So why does the nanny state mentality prevail here? And why do the nannies keep the drinking age at 21, a level rarely seen in civilized spots around the globe.

If you want to weigh in on the side of the nannies, feel free. This state is run by them, so there must be some argument for their practices.

Oh yeah, if you can figure out why some beaches have smoking sections but no drinking sections, let us know as well. Smoking is the most deadly habit out there while moderate drinking actually increases lifespan. I can understand the littering angle attached to both, but that could be cured with a couple well-placed garbage cans.