World Politics
Safety Nazis
President Reagan has grappled with myriad threats to the American way and tossed no few of them. The pork and dove barrel in Congress has been silenced. Libya has had an emetic. The air controllers have been sent to bed without their or anyone in their family’s supper. And something has even been done about that tired observation “The poor are always with us”—what with the end of busing and affirmative action the poor will be, I presume, mostly with each other.
But there is one menace to western civilization, one assault on the free world, one threat to everything we value which the President has yet to confront. I speak of the childproof bottle top. Now a childproof bottle top is a fine thing for a child who has no job or other weighty responsibilities in life and can spend all day mastering the technique of opening bleach and cleaning-fluid containers (a leisure pursuit much resorted to by children—as anyone can attest who has watched a three-year-old tackle the cap on a pint of bug poison with the agility of a pre-Seiko Swiss watchmaker). But an aspirin bottle equipped with such a device is a Gordian knot to an adult who drinks. Consequently our nation is weakened.
Life is filled with pain and sorrow, which facts cannot fail to touch the heart of any perceptive American. Therefore no U.S. citizen with an IQ over 110 is sober after 6:00 in the evening. Yet we have allowed our country’s most effective headache cures to be sealed like the tomb of Amenhotep IV. How can our elite confront Soviet hegemony, lower interest rates without fueling inflation, and draft a viable Law of the Sea treaty when their skulls are throbbing to the tune of the sound track for Zulu Dawn? Allen Ginsberg said he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. I have seen the best minds of my generation go at a bottle of Anacin with a ball-peen hammer.
There’s an easy solution to this. Place all dangerous household substances out of reach in a crib or playpen and put the children under the sink. But childproof bottle tops are, in fact, only one aspect of a much larger problem. I was depressed the other week and did not know why. My finances were in no more than normal disarray. The girlfriend and I weren’t getting along any worse than usual. I was not under indictment for any felony I could think of. Still, I was blue. Days passed before I realized what was the matter: My car was nagging me. I don’t like seat belts. They make me feel like a nineteenth-century sea captain. If the car is going to have a wreck, that’s its business. I will not be compelled to stay aboard. Yet each time I demur to fastening this contrivance, the car lets out a horrid electronic scold. And this sound is as nothing compared to the shriek when I open a door with the key left in the ignition. And other rude noises and annoying blinkers are rigged to let me know if I do anything else potentially detrimental to my well-being. Some newer-model automobiles have actual recorded voices which speak about one’s feckless habits in the tone used by wives during NFL play-offs. I’m told this is the wave of the future. I predict mayhem. All the pent-up hatreds of those households where husbands driven mad by continuous domestic friction murder spouse and offspring and hold police at bay for hours will now be directed at the family car. Once too often the Malibu Classic will inform a drunken gun nut that his trunk lid is ajar, and pow! This is a serious matter. A new family can be had free through various charitable organizations, but a car costs $10,000.
On the subject of automobiles, something worse has happened to them than their newfound disposition to whine and bitch. They have become boring and abstruse—rounded about with lumpy bumpers and Targa bars and looking under the hood like the back of an Atari game. For those readers too young to remember, a car used to be a simple piece of machinery, something like a very fast rider mower but better because you couldn’t mow the lawn with it. You started this up, drove off at pretty much any speed you desired, and then exercised a variety of constitutionally guaranteed liberties, usually by having sex and accidents. No more—nowadays if a car cannot survive a drop from the Gateway Arch and emits any vapors more noxious than Evening in Paris, the federal government won’t let you own it, and what they will let you own you can’t really drive, because fifty-five miles an hour is the speed at which a spirited person parallel-parks, not motors to Chicago.
Medicines which come practically locked in a Brink’s truck, electronically admonishing automobiles, speed limits prudent to the point of cowardice—there is a pattern to these annoyances. I purchased a wood-splitting maul not long ago. Pasted on the head was a lurid sticker instructing me to cover my eyes when doing anything with it and attached to the handle was a pair of nasty plastic goggles, painfully uncomfortable to wear and producing that view of the world called “fish-eyed” (though if fish really did have eyes like that we would be able to go after them with ball bats instead of expensive fly rods). A box of shotgun shells now devotes three full flaps to caveats and counsels advising against almost every conceivable kind of shooting activity and stopping just short of warning you not to own a gun at all. And the daily newspaper, once replete with tales of exciting fire and police department actions, political scandals, and international donnybrooks, is now filled with items about untidiness at toxic chemical dumps, hazardous-toaster product recalls, and the cancer-causing properties of everything good on earth.