Republican Party Reptile(5)
Something is happening to America, not something dangerous but something all too safe. I see it in my lifelong friends. I am a child of the “baby boom,” a generation not known for its sane or cautious approach to things. Yet suddenly my peers are giving up drinking, giving up smoking, cutting down on coffee, sugar, and salt. They will not eat red meat and go now to restaurants whose menus have caused me to stand on a chair yelling, “Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, dinner is served!” This from the generation of LSD, Weather Underground, and Altamont Rock Festival! And all in the name of safety! Our nation has withstood many divisions—North and South, black and white, labor and management—but I do not know if the country can survive division into smoking and nonsmoking sections.
As once anything was excusable in the name of patriotism, now anything is excusable in the name of safety. We will kiss some low place on every dishtowel-head in the Levant rather than have a single breeder reactor on our shores. We will make every lube artist in America learn Japanese rather than produce an enjoyable automobile. And we will all be eating Communist bananas rather than risk a Kent State over Nicaragua. (Unless, of course, bananas are found to cause cancer too.) This is treason. America was founded on danger. How many lifeboat drills were held on the Mayflower? Where were the smoke detectors in the Lincoln family cabin? Who checked to see whether Indian war paint was made with Red Dye No. 2?,It was the thrilling, vast, wonderful danger of America which drew people here from all over the world—spacious skies filled with blizzards and tornadoes, purpled mountain majesties to fall off, and fruited plains full of snarling animals and armed aborigines. America is a dangerous country. Safety has no place here.
In fact, safety has no place anywhere. Everything that’s fun in life is dangerous. Horse races, for instance, are very dangerous. But attempt to design a safe horse and the result is a cow (an appalling animal to watch at the trotters). And everything that isn’t fun is dangerous too. It is impossible to be alive and safe. It’s very safe to be an inanimate object, but the carbon molecules who were our ancestors chose otherwise, and having once set upon a course of devouring things, we must submit to having other things occasionally attempt to devour us. This is painful, but pain is an important part of existence. No amount of hazard warnings on the back of our hand would keep us from thrusting it into a lion’s mouth if that didn’t hurt. Lions are in admitted short supply, but the same holds true for whirling Cuisinart blades and oil-burning space heaters. Pain is the body’s way of showing us we’re bone-heads. A child growing up in an excessively safe environment may never learn that he is one—not until he gets married and has a wife to tell him so. Nor can death be avoided. Death is even more important that pain. Death was invented so we could have evolution. The process of Darwinian selection does not work on things that don’t die. If it weren’t for death we would all still be amoebas and would have to eat by surrounding things with our butts. Also, a lack of death would result in an extraordinary number of old people and the Social Security system is already overextended.
Therefore it is the duty of every patriotic, moral, and humanistic person among us to smoke, drink, drive like hell, shoot guns, own Corvairs, take saccharin, leave unmarked medicine bottles open all over the house, get in fistfights, start barbecue fires with gasoline, put dry-cleaner bags over our heads, and run around barefoot without getting a tetanus shot.
But I don’t know how long we will be able to continue like this. The forces of safety are afoot in the land. I, for one, believe it is a conspiracy—a conspiracy of Safety Nazis shouting “Sieg Health” and seeking to trammel freedom, liberty, and large noisy parties. The Safety Nazis advocate gun control, vigorous exercise, and health foods. The result can only be a disarmed, exhausted, and half-starved population ready to acquiesce to dictatorship of some kind. I do not know what the ultimate aims of the Safety Nazis are, but the prevalence of flameproof infant sleepwear argues that a totalitarian force is looking to someday use my children as fireplace tongs. Other than that, however, it will probably be a very safe dictatorship without the dive-bombers, tanks, and huge artillery pieces which are the only fun things about totalitarianism.
President Reagan has shown some promise of standing up to the Safety Nazis. James Watt was as dangerous a Secretary of the Interior as we’ve had in a long time. And a few of the safetyist regulatory excesses of the Carter years have been revoked—the requirement that all full-sized sedans carry a blimp under the dashboard, for instance. But as yet there is little indication that the President perceives the true lack of danger our country faces. Maybe this is because he got shot not long ago. That’s fine for him. His life is plenty dangerous. But what about the rest of us, the common people crying out for hazard and risk? I hope President Reagan keeps us in mind as he trims the federal budget. The MX missile system looks like a perilous thing, but if that proves too expensive, give us a small increase in Amtrak funding and perhaps we could all die in a horrible train wreck.