You know me, I like playing with words. I compose little gags
and occasionally sell one to the Reader’s Digest or
someplace. Like this one I just wrote: a young man starting college
in zoology but anxious to pay his own way applies for a job at the
local zoo. They cannot pay cash but because of overbreeding in
their gnu population, they will cull the herd, saving the sturdiest
and letting the employees eat the rest. “Mom,” he says. “I love my
job. I’ll earn some thin gnu every day.”
Or this one: an attorney advised his client to choose a jury
trial, because it only takes one dissenter to achieve a hung jury.
“Great,” he says. “I’ll avoid a hanging judge and hope for a
judging hang.”
So when I heard yesterday on the radio about “five point fork
wake” in Los Angeles, I had scary visions of a large pointy farm
implement prodding me out of a deep sleep. Eventually it sank in
that the announcer had actually said that a five-point-four quake
had rattled that great city of angels and dodgers. To a child I
would have to explain that 5.4 was a measurement of force on a
scale delineated by a chap named Richter. Not to be confused with
the “rictus kale,” a type of cabbage that makes me grimace when it
appears in a salad.
Yet the story from L.A. that aroused the greater tremor was the
one about the fast food ban in poor neighborhoods. Huh? Yes,
indeed. The City Council had pushed this bill through committee and
yesterday brought its final passage in a unanimous vote. The law
creates a moratorium for an initial period of one year during which
no new establishments may be opened for the sale of greasy,
high-fat food. There is a tendency for the less moneyed to consume
the most superfatted fare, with predictable results such as wattles
and waddles. By slowing the fast food traffic, the city government
hopes to unclog some of those metropolitan arteries.
Yes, this is a new form of redlining, but apparently using the
waistline to cross the borderline.
At moments like this, people who believe that constitutional
government is the foundation of our nation experience culture
shock. It seems absurd even to be debating the merits of such a
statute. Unless the obesity “crisis” has reached proportions that
call for instituting martial law and suspending habeas corpus,
there is no conceivable theory by which a government has the power
to a) prohibit fast food restaurants anywhere, b) prohibit any kind
of restaurant in a particular zoned-for-business neighborhood, or
even c) determine a category of food as being officially “not good
for you.”
The particular legislation will either succeed or fail to be
enforced and will either fail or succeed to make a difference in
the habits of individual citizens. More important to public policy
and political science is the arrogation of volition. The sheer gall
of believing that elected officials are better equipped to make
private life choices. The staggering effrontery of coercing such
choices. And the stupendous audacity of employing the law as a
vehicle to implement such coercion.
Perhaps it is time for folks like you and me to throw in the
towel and pick up the handkerchief. Let us suggest more laws in
this spirit. People waiting for public buses may no longer read
Archie comics, only War and Peace. Movie theaters in
low-income areas may no longer show Kung Fu, only
Bambi. Longshoremen may no longer marry women with
tattoos, only librarians. Construction crews after work may no
longer guzzle beer, only Pinot Grigio. If those pigs can play
Pygmalion, if those burghers can ban the burgers, if those flies
can ban fries, why can’t gentlemen cultivate gentility?
A quake does not begin to describe how this shakes the
foundations of our social structure. People sitting in councils
looking at neighborhoods…looking down at the residents…looking
at restaurants…looking down at the ingredients… looking at the
laws…looking down at constitutions…help! All this leaves me in
great trepidation; the aftershock may be even worse. No voice rose
in protest and the empire of grease has lost without the other side
even bothering to use a Trojan horse. The agenda is no longer
hidden, because they do not think it is stoppable: it ain’t overt
until it’s overt.
