I'm
going to fill a dark awful basement with radioactive
cockroaches. Yep. Big nasty ones like skateboards on legs,
that go click-click-click when they walk. And maybe
poisonous. I'm going to starve them for a week.
Then
I'm going to catch all the coercive priss-spigots in the
world, the ones that want to ban second-hand smoke and
dwarf-tossing and beer. I'll smear the rascals with bacon
fat, so the roaches won't know what they're eating, as
otherwise they might not.
Then
I'm going to toss all those greased busybodies into the
basement. And whoop. And dance. Ha.
In
the National Post of Canada,* I find that one Sandra
Pupatello, a member of that afflicted nation's Parliament,
has her knickers in a bunch over dwarf-tossing. Upset, she
is. No end.
Now,
dwarf-tossing is a sport, like baseball. The Aussies
invented it. (I think.) A great big guy picks up the dwarf,
or maybe a couple of great big guys, usually in an agreeably
unruly bar full of second-hand smoke, and beer, where people
say dirty words, and toss him as far as they can. Like the
shot-put.
I'm
puzzled. Why is this terrible? And why is it any business of
Sandra's?
From
the pupatellian whoop, and yellin,' you might believe what
the dwarves aren't tellin': that they're being forced into
indentured tossedhood--shanghaied, or drugged, or hit on
their heads and dragged into dark alleys, thereafter to lead
degraded lives of being tossed till closing, and then kept
in wall lockers, and fed scraps.
No.
It is voluntary. In fact Bradley, a Torontovian dwarf
otherwise known as Tripod, said, "I'm doing this
because I want to. I'm an adult and can make my own
decisions."
Well,
no, he can't. The dread lady is going to make them for him.
It's because she's his mother. She's everybody's mother.
I
want a DNA test.
You
might also gain the impression that the dwarves, victims of
course, were being hurled against broken rocks, or boards
with nails in them, or perhaps into industrial grinders.
Savagery. Sadism. Oppression (especially). Broken and
bleeding little people.
Again,
no. Cushions. It is a non-destructive sport. Silly, perhaps.
Silly almost certainly. But not vicious.
I
once knew a couple of dwarfs casually. One did some kind of
library research in Washington, and the other didn't.
Relying on an exhaustive statistical sampling of both of
them, I have elaborated Fred's Law of Dwarves: They're like
everybody else, only short. They can make their own
decisions without help from some overwrought Carrie Nation
with an Adolph wish.
Used
to be, crusaders wanted to stop abuses, such as wretched
treatment of migrant labor, or the sweating of children in
shoe factories. It was a good idea. Mostly it worked. Then
the reformers ran out of victims, and needed to find some
more. So they started hunting for new and largely imaginary
victims, like pigs snuffling for truffles.
Soon
fat people were victims. Homosexuals were victims. Women who
gave birth like a slot-machine jackpot were victims. The
shiftless were victims. The unhappy and bored and rained-on
were victims, and people with warts. Their rights had to be
protected.
The
reformers had discovered predatory moralism. It gave us
Prohibition and organized crime. The focus shifted from
helping the downtrodden to browbeating everyone else. Virtue
is the instinctive weapon of the vaguely angry. They wield
it like a cosh.
Do
they ever. Sandra says, "We've worked diligently over
generations to change attitudes towards people who might be
different in some way."
The
dripping sound you hear is Ms. Pupatello. She's leaking
forty-weight meddlesome tediousness. "We"? Who is
"we"? Who asked her to change attitudes? (Maybe in
Canada they elect politicians to change attitudes.) What
attitude precisely needs to be changed?
Mother
Pupatello has found a new twist in the social rope: Coercive
third-party civil rights. She wants to impose unwanted
rights, and then enforce them. Dwarf-tossing, which is
voluntary behavior between consenting adults, becomes a
violation of rights, though no one involved thinks it is,
and nobody asked Mommy Sandra in the first place. (Who, by
the way, is in violation? The dwarf willingly engages in the
tossing. He's violating his own civil rights. We should jail
dwarves.)
The
punitive imposition of rights not asked for grows common in
North America. Note the banning of dodgeball in the public
schools as violence, and the attempt to keep boys from
roughhousing. Why? Kids want to play dodgeball. If they
didn't, they wouldn't. We aren't talking compulsory
dodgeball. And boys like to wrestle. It's why they do it.
(Anybody thought of that?)
But
teachers don't like to roughhouse. So, following the
totalitarian instincts of prigs and prudes and the
self-consciously inadequate everywhere, they make sappy
passivity a human right. Then they inflict it on kids who
would rather have scarlet fever.
It's
rule by parsnips, I tell you, by smugly hostile hop-toads
with damp fingers.
Smoking
in bars works the same way. If you don't like smoke, tell
the owner. Then go to another bar. If enough people want
smokeless bars, somebody will start one, or lots of them.
But don't tell me I'm a victim of second-hand smoke, when I
didn't ask your opinion in the first place, and then protect
me from something I don't mind.
(No,
I don't smoke, never have, but I like smoky bars. People who
smoke are more interesting than people who don't. And
reformers would never come to a smoky bar because they'd be
afraid they'd get cancer. I'd be afraid they wouldn't.)
But
maybe there's hope. Says an AP story out of Tampa, a dwarf
named Dave Flood is suing to have Florida's anti-tossing law
overturned. He appears on a radio show as Dave the Dwarf,
and opines as follows:
"They
assume because you have some physical handicap, you can't
make decisions for yourself…I don't have a mental
handicap. I don't like the government telling me what I can
and cannot do."
But
the position of the reformers, though they would never admit
it, is precisely that the very short are mental defectives.
They can't manage their lives, so priss wads have to do it
for them.
She
needs a cat.
Now,
if the tossed guys aren't offended (and if they were, they'd
just quit), and the customers aren't offended, who or what
is offended? Answer: Ms. Pupawhatsit's delicate
sensibilities. Of which more and more of us are indeed the
victims.
I'm
changing my mind about the giant radioactive cockroaches.
It's an animal-abuse issue. I mean, I'd hate being kept in a
dark basement and having puritans dropped on me.
*National
Post, June 13
