Fred On Everything

We tell ourselves that in America we are the Free People.
I wonder whether we might not better be called the Obedient
People, the Passive People, or the Admonished People. I doubt
that any country, anywhere, has been so regulated, controlled,
and directed as we are. We are bred to obey. And obey we do.

It begins with the sheer volume of law, rules, and administrative
duties. Most of the regulation makes sense in isolation, or can
be made plausible. Yet there is so much of it.

Used to be if you wanted a dog, you got a dog. It wasn't really
the government's business. Today you need a dog license, a shot
card for the dog, a collar and tags, proof that the poor beast
has been neutered, and you have to keep it on a leash and walk
it only in designated places. It's all so we don't get rabies.

Or consider cars. You have to have a title, insurance, and
keep it up to date; tags, country sticker, inspection sticker,
emissions test. Depending where you are, you can't have chips
in the windshield, and you need a zoned parking permit. You
have to wear a seatbelt. And of course there are unending
traffic laws. You can get a ticket for virtually anything,
usually without knowing that you were doing anything wrong.

Then there's paperwork. If you have a couple of daughters with
college funds in the stock market, annually you have to fill
out three sets of federal taxes, three sets of state, and file
four state and four federal estimated tax forms, per person,
for a total of twenty-four. This doesn't include personal
property taxes for the county, business licenses, tangible
business-assets forms, and so on.

Now, I'm not suggesting that all these laws are bad. Stupid,
frequently, but evil, no. Stopping at traffic lights is
probably a good idea, and certainly is if I'm crossing the
street. But the laws never end. Bring a doughnut on the subway,
and you get arrested. Don't replace your windows without
permission in writing from the condo association. Nothing is
too trivial to be regulated. Nothing is not some government's
business.

I wonder whether the habit of constant obedience to infinitely
numerous rules doesn't inculcate a tendency to obey any rule at
all. By having every aspect of one's life regulated in detail,
does one not become accustomed to detailed regulation? That is,
detailed obedience?

For many it may be hard to remember freer times. Yet they
existed. In 1964, when I graduated from high school in rural
Virginia, there were speed limits, but nobody much enforced
them, or much obeyed them. If you wanted to fish, you needed
a pole, not a license. You fished where you wanted, not in
designated fishing zones. If you wanted to carry your rifle
to the bean field to shoot whistle pigs, you just did it.
You didn't need a license and nobody got upset.

To buy a shotgun in the country store, you needed money,
not a background check, waiting period, proof of age,
certificate of training, and a registration form. If your
tail light burned out, then you only had one tail light.
If you wanted to park on a back road with your girl friend,
the cops, all both of them, didn't care. If you wanted to
swim in the creek, you didn't need a Coast Guard approved
life jacket.

It felt different. You lived in the world as you found it,
and behaved because you were supposed to, but you didn't feel
as though you were in a white-collar prison. And if anybody
had asked us, we would have said that the freedom was worth
more to us than any slightly greater protection against rabies,
thank you. Which nobody ever got anyway.

Today, the Mommy State never leaves off protecting us from
things I'd just as soon not be protected from. We must wear
a helmet on a motorcycle: Kevorkian can kill us, but we
cannot kill ourselves. Why is it Mommy Government's business
whether I wear a helmet? In fact I do wear one, but it should
be my decision.

And so it goes from administrative minutiae (emissions
inspections) to gooberish Mommyknowsbestism ("Wea-a-ar your
lifejacket, Johnny!") to important moral decisions. Obey in
small things, obey in large things.

You must hire the correct proportion of this and that ethnic
group, watch your sex balance, prove that you have the proper
attitude toward homosexuals. You must let your children be
politically indoctrinated in appropriate values, must let
your daughter get an abortion without telling you, must accept
affirmative action no matter how morally repugnant you find it.

And we do. We are the obedient people.

As the regulation of our behavior becomes more pervasive,
so does the mechanism of enforcement grow more nearly
omnipresent. In Washington, if you eat on the subway, they
really will put you in handcuffs, as they recently did to
a girl of twelve. In 1964 in King George County, the cop
would have said, "Sally, stop that." Arresting a child for
sucking on a sourball would never have entered a state
trooper's mind.

Which brings us to an ominous observation. America is
absolutely capable of totalitarianism. It won't be the
jackbooted variety, but rather a peculiarly mindless,
bureaucratic insistence on conformity. What we call
political correctness is an American approach to
political control.

Our backdoor totalitarianism has the added charm of being crazy.

Think about it. Confiscating nail clippers at security gates,
arresting the eating girl on the subway, the confiscation from
an aging general of his Congressional Medal of Honor because
it had points, the countless ejections from school of little
boys for drawing soldiers, or the Trade Centers in flames,
playing cowboys and Indians, for pointing a chicken finger
and saying Bang.

This isn't intelligent authoritarianism aimed at purposeful
if disagreeable ends. It is the behavior of petty and stupid
people, of minor minds over-empowered, ignorant but angry, and
charmed to find that they can push others around. It is the
exercise of power by people who have no business having any.

And we obey. We are the obedient people.

(C) Fred Reed 2002