Off With His Head!

[Note: This post is a rare, off-topic excursion for this weblog as it has nothing at all to do with high culture or the arts. It's been provoked by my reading this essay (link via Arts & Letters Daily) on three lunacies engineered and promoted by the Health Nazis (concerning smoking, drinking, and "unhealthy" foods) which encouraged me to reprint below an article of mine published in 1999 (print) dealing with similar lunacies, and offering a modest attempt at an explanation of their common etiology; an explanation that serves as a modest attempt to explain as well the lunacies of the Health Nazis, for at the root of all such lunacies can be discerned the same loathsome creature: the zealot with an agenda.]

"Off with his head!" roared the Queen. It was always her first — and usually only — solution, no matter how disproportionate or inappropriate, for all that perplexed, vexed or displeased her.

Quite a character, the Queen of Hearts. Easily literature's most ruthless and relentless proponent of the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle.

New York City, it seems, has lately taken the old gal to, um, heart, and instituted a new legal process. If you get stopped by the police for any reason while driving your car in New York City and are declared by the stopping officer to be legally drunk, you lose your car on the spot; not for the nonce, but forever. As far as you're concerned, it's gone, baby. Kaput. History. And there's no appeal. Its new owner is now the city of New York, and it can do with it what it will (what it will is sell it at auction and pocket the cash). Never mind that, at the very least, such action denies due process and is only borderline constitutional. New York City, you see, had what it perceived as a drunk driver problem. Now it figures it won't.

Pretty neat, huh?

That any American city or state takes Carroll's Queen to heart should come as a surprise to no-one. Over the past three decades all America seems to have taken that draconian royal personage to heart. Witnesseth but a few prominent examples.

Item: The criminally imbecile "war on drugs", ill-conceived at its inception, continues unabated to the present day. Never mind that its ultimate objective is one it had no business fighting battles for in the first place (viz., forcibly compelling people to cease practicing private behavior that's deemed socially unacceptable). Never mind that in almost three decades of doing battle it hasn't managed to put so much as a dent in drug use, and costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year. And, most of all, never mind that it's responsible for evils whole orders of magnitude more egregious than the perceived and largely fictional evil it was intended ultimately to eradicate. That's all beside the point.

And what's the point?

If you ask the cheerleaders of this war for an explanation, a defense, of their advocacy, they'll first utter lofty sermons about protecting our children — America's most frequently invoked straw man to justify otherwise unjustifiable agendas — followed by other arguments equally as lofty and mendacious. After one cuts through or discards all the obfuscating and sanctimonious gibberish, what remains, in effect, is the desperate cry, "We've a drug problem, and this method of solving it is the most simple and direct. We have to protect our children. Off with his head!"

Item: In many cities and states it's difficult to buy a handgun, and virtually impossible for an ordinary citizen to get a permit to carry one. Never mind that such prohibiting laws virtually guarantee that the only persons carrying handguns will be murderers, rapists, muggers and other assorted thugs.¹ That's beside the point. There's a handgun problem, and we have to protect our children. I mean, all those handgun-related deaths!

Righto. One solution coming up. Off with his head!

Item: Smoking is now banned in federal buildings nationwide, and in some states in all public places whatsoever, ballparks included. Never mind that the ban's sine qua non is a largely bogus and politically-motivated report on the lung cancer-causing effects of environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) released in 1993 by the EPA, complete with manufactured and cooked statistics.² That's beside the point. There's a tobacco problem that needs a solution, and we have to protect our children. Off with his head!

The instances go on, but I won't. In America, off-with-his-head solutions are legion. A written list would have entries so numerous it would rival the number in Leporello's infamous list of his master's conquests.

So what's happening here? Is there some common ground, a common impulse that compels Americans to so easily, even eagerly, accept off-with-his-head solutions for even the most complex of problems?

Indeed there is, and one part of that ground is plain old intellectual sloth. Americans are famous for it. Another is our fat, comfortable, self-satisfied bourgeois way of life which we don't want disturbed. After all, any laws passed to stem (insert name of offensive behavior here) won't affect us good people.

The rest of that ground resides in another aspect of our national character; a legacy of those who first stepped on these shores at Plymouth almost four centuries ago.

There's an old but fairly amusing joke. It goes: When it came to British colonization, Australia got the hands-down better of America. Australia got all the convicts. America got the Puritans.

On second thought, not so amusing.

But there's no gainsaying it. Even in this do-your-own-thing-anything-goes era the Puritan impulse is still alive and well in us Americans whether we acknowledge it or not. And that impulse is forever fighting to assert the Pure and the Good.

And what must it fight? Why, the demons, of course. The Puritan impulse must have its demons or it perishes, and that impulse is not at all ready or willing to go gentle into that good night. And if demons aren't readily apparent, well, then, they must be sought out. And if they still remain elusive and can't be found, why, then, they must be invented. The Puritan impulse simply cannot and will not be denied its demons.

So much for the ground.

But ground is just an empty plot without a planter to sow it. And therein resides something darker; something more sinister. For at the bottom of every off-with-his-head solution, as at the bottom of every human outrage in history, of all magnitudes and without exception, are to be found always the same loathsome creatures: zealots with an agenda.

Zealots used to operate openly, loudly, and brazenly on street corners, podiums, and pulpits. But today that simply doesn't play well in most places. The public is far too sophisticated, too savvy, generally. Technology has made them so. And so zealots have wised up, most of them. They understand that today things must be done more quietly, more soberly; done even, in the beginning, by indirection and subtle manipulation. It takes longer doing things that way, and one doesn't immediately get exactly or all one wants, but today it's still the best way to go. And if one is patient and plays things just right, one will end up getting everything exactly as one wants it — eventually.

But as planters, zealots must first find fertile ground to sow. No problem in America. In America, fertile ground is everywhere for the sowing, for what ground more fertile for zealots to sow than a smug, intellectually slothful Puritan ethos loath to acknowledge or even recognize itself head-on? Such an ethos is particularly nutritious soil for zealots' sowings and mischief-making of all sorts, and for catastrophes as well. And so, in America, all that's fundamentally necessary is right to hand for enterprising zealots.

Is it any wonder, then, that off-with-his-head solutions in America are legion?

Not a bit of it.

There's a curious article of faith that would have it that as God is good and the ultimate creator of everything, even the worst of things can be put to good use if only one is perceptive enough to discern it.

I don't at all buy that particular article of faith, but that notwithstanding, I can think of one good use to which the off-with-his-head solution can be put: if one meets a zealot on the road, rather than debate or even speak with him, Off with his head! There are, after all, exceptions to everything.

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¹I omit good guys like the police as they're useful only after the fact, useless before the fact, and, except by happy accident, absent during the fact.

²The EPA looked at 30 existing independent studies of the lung cancer risk from ETS from various countries around the world. Of the 30, only six showed even a marginal lung cancer risk, while the U.S. studies, which constituted 11 of the 30, showed no lung cancer risk. Made unhappy by this, the folks at EPA creatively reworked the analysis and the numbers to show that, "correctly read," all the studies, if lumped together and subjected to a specialized (and in this case, wholly inappropriate) statistical technique called meta-analysis, showed, that though not obvious, there really was a lung cancer risk from ETS (surprise!). And those clever little devils even came up with a creative if lame (and unsupported) body count to make the conclusion sound even more ominous (3000 a year, nationwide).