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Monday, 6 December
2004
Mark Steyn |
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For half a decade now, Jacob Weisberg of Slate has
had a column called "Bushisms," dependent on the proposition
that the president is an inarticulate moron. No argument
there, not from Slate readers. But, after September 11,
Weisberg was sporting enough to force himself to consider why
the moron seemed to be doing a reasonably good job with the
war on terror. His conclusion was that war plays to an idiot's
strengths: "Bush continues to exhibit the same lack of
curiosity, thoughtfulness and engagement with ideas that made
him a C student," he wrote. "And curiously enough, it is these
very qualities of mind--or lack thereof--that seem to be
making him such a good war president." In war, the idiot
president comes into his own.
Indeed. Summing up Weisberg's argument, I wrote, "War is a
simpleton's game and does not require the grasp of nuance,
subtlety, etc. of more complex issues such as mandatory
federal regulations for bicycling helmets, or whatever it was
Bill Clinton was busy with for eight years."
I don't know why I picked bicycling helmets. Clinton did
not, to the best of my recollection, actually enact any
bicycling-helmet regulations, but it seemed symbolically
consistent with the kind of micro-politics his administration
pursued for eight years--federal toilet-tank regulations,
programs to connect grade schools to the Internet, etc. On
foreign policy and national security, he gave the impression
he was going through the motions, but get him on to some
really pressing, if non-federal, issue--like curfews for teens
or the merits of school uniforms--and he'd come alive. So I
started using "federal bicycling-helmet regulations" as an
all-purpose cheap crack about the indulgent, inverted
priorities of the Clinton years.
On the other hand, on all the many occasions I've used my
all-purpose cheap crack, it never occurred to me that it meant
anything other than mandatory bicycling-helmet regulations for
children. The notion of mandatory bicycling-helmet regulations
for grown men and women seemed too preposterous.
I should have known better. The other day, a private
member's bill was introduced in the Ontario legislature
requiring every grown-up, before mounting a bicycle anywhere
in the province, from Niagara Falls to Hudson's Bay, to strap
him or herself into a helmet. Needless to say, the bill was
approved on its second reading unanimously.
Have you ever read Jerome K. Jerome's Three
Men on the Bummel? Lovely book. Three chaps bicycling
through the Black Forest. On the jacket they're all wearing
plus twos with checked caps. Can't do that in Ontario.
The Germans made a film of it in the fifties, Immer die
Radfahrer--three hearty Teutons cycling along in their
loden huetes with feathers in the hatbands. Can't do
that in Ontario. Seen Jules et Jim? Love triangle on
bicycles: two French blokes plus Jeanne Moreau tootling
through the countryside. Can't do that in Ontario. It wouldn't
work in helmets.
Remember the late Queen Juliana? Holland's famous
"bicycling queen"? She lived in Ottawa during the war, but, if
she came back, she'd discover it's now illegal for a crowned
head to bicycle with an unhelmeted head.
You know the old song, "Daisy, Daisy"?
It won't be a stylish marriage
I can't
afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet
Upon the
seat
Of a bicycle made for two.
It'll be a lot less stylish in Ontario, and how sweet upon
the seat Daisy looks depends on whether she's cool about
having a helmet crammed down on her wedding hairdo.
Or how about The Great Escape? James Coburn gets
away on a stolen bicycle. Can't do that in Ontario. The Bike
Reich's Helmet Enforcement Patrol would have spotted his lack
of headgear and returned him to the camp to be executed.
To call this a "nanny state" is an insult to nannies. When
Baron von Trapp hired Maria to look after all the little von
Trapps, he didn't object to her and the kids riding their
bicycles down the lane while singing "Do-Re-Mi" unhelmeted.
Forty years on, the gal who was 16 going on 17 and the
telegraph boy who was 17 going on 18 are 56 going on 57 and 57
going on 58, but in Ontario they're still not old enough to
ride a bicycle without government supervision.
To modify Lord Acton, soft power corrupts absolutely
softly: smoothly, painlessly, totalitarianism-lite advances
from hate-crimes to hat-crimes. As revealing as the inability
of any Ontario legislator to rouse himself to defend the
freedom of adult Canadians to conduct their own
risk-evaluations before getting on their bikes, was the dozy
complacency of the press. My old comrade Andrew Coyne was a
notable exception, weighing in with a scathing column on the
lack of "evidentiary basis" for this law. Silly Andrew,
obsessed with facts, statistics, science. For as the editors
of the Guelph Mercury headlined their own thoughts on
the subject, "Helmet Law a No-Brainer."
"Anyone using his head should agree that any measures to
prevent serious head injuries are for the common good,"
pronounced the editorial, dismissing dissenters as "Don
Cherry-type naysayers." Maybe they should try using their own
heads. There's no epidemic of cycling deaths or cycling head
injuries. As Coyne pointed out, if you bike one thousand
kilometres a year (which most cyclists don't), you'd have to
pedal for 10,000 years, on average, to be at risk of dying in
a cycling accident. And even then, if you're sideswiped by a
logging truck, the likelihood of a helmet improving your
chances of survival are minimal.
Chris Gilham, who runs the website cycle-helmets.com, has analyzed the impact
of similar laws in Australia. One consequence is that fewer
people bicycle and thus what was meant to be a public health
benefit is, in fact, a public health disaster--"mass
discouragement of society's most popular exercise at a time of
soaring obesity."
That sounds right to me. I like to tootle along a country
road with the wind in my hair. If I can't do that, and I have
to climb into the body armour to go down to town, I'll pass.
So the question is whether, among the 70 or 80 cycling
fatalities each year, the small number of lives (if any) saved
by wearing a helmet outweighs the social costs of discouraging
what was hitherto an agreeable form of exercise. Another is
whether cycling helmets for the young, in making children even
more top-heavy and impacting their balance, actually increase
the risk of accidents. Maybe the no-brainer crowd at the
Guelph Mercury would like to look into that instead of
just parroting big-government bromides.
But, in our increasingly coercive utopia, the bossier types
defend such legislation on the grounds that injured cyclists
have to be treated at public expense. That's actually an
argument not against unhelmeted cycling, but against
government health care. But, as decrepit socialized medical
systems creak under the strain, one hears similar sentiments
more and more--doctors in Manchester, England, refusing to
treat patients with heart disease because the patients are
smokers, etc. The inclination of public health systems to make
access conditional on your living your life in approved ways
would be repugnant enough were it uniformly applied. But it's
not. Gay sex, for example, places much greater strains on
public health than bicycling head-injuries, but no government
would institute laws on maximum number of sexual partners or
demand proof of extra-strength condom usage. In its
selectivity, soft totalitarianism is more prone to fashion
than the traditional kind. More people are injured each year
falling out of bed than in cycling accidents, but Pierre
Trudeau's great dictum that the government has no place in the
bedrooms of the nation prevents our rulers from mandating
compulsory sleeping helmets. For the moment.
Hardly any legislation is a no-brainer. There are always
unintended consequences, most of which could have been
foreseen. But, after 9/11, I started using my bicycling-helmet
crack as a convenient shorthand for the gulf between
government's real responsibilities and the irrelevant trivia
it prefers to busy itself with--putting the meddle to the
pedal. Such laws corrode the citizenry's self-reliance and
assertiveness--the qualities that will determine which western
nations will survive the civilizational struggle on which
we're embarked. A land in which an adult cannot evaluate for
himself the risks involved in cycling to a neighbour is not
truly free. But soft power is an elusive enemy--a cotton-candy
cocoon of illusory security binding its subjects ever tighter.
Whether or not we reduce any individual head injuries, we
inflict a massive head injury on society as a whole through
such laws. It's time to end the cycle of violence--the small
acts of vandalism against a free people. Rise up, Ontarians!
You have nothing to lose but your bike chains.
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