Please, Sir, No Smoking in the Self-Decapitation Zone
or: Guillotines don't kill people, people kill people
We were lamenting, last time, the loss of our pal: the neon-yellow-jacketed cyclist whose untimely end - or at least its immediate aftermath - I witnessed while walking home the other day. If you missed that post, by the way, here’s the link:
If we can put the human tragedy aspect of it all aside for a second (it’s what he would have wanted, I’d like to think) we’d concede that his grisly fate raised some mouth-watering philosophical/legal questions around things like negligence/manslaughter/individual liberty, e.g.: If you leave a guillotine outside your house and someone happens to use it to decapitate themselves, can/should you be held responsible?
I think we can all admit that we ask ourselves this constantly. (…right?)
It’s actually not that much of a joke, in the US, at least: we’ve gone back and forth - vociferously - on this sort of thing for a while now. Not with execution machines from the French revolution, necessarily, but definitely with regard to other instruments of warfare; guns, namely. I’m sure you know how the tried-and-true NRA party line goes: “They don’t kill people [you fucking idiot], people kill people.” We usually say this sort of thing in a vaguely threatening manner, to make it clear that, if push came to shove, we’d do whatever we needed to do. (Some people, of course, like the giant dude from Happy Gilmore, don’t fuck around with any of that “subtext” nonsense…)
So, I guess if you’re a libertarian/anti-nanny state kind of person, you’d have to say “No,” right? As far as whether the driver of the “Too Much Grips” truck or the production company at large were guilty of wrongdoing? After all: Individual actors (e.g. cyclists) must be allowed to make individual decisions [which may involve self-decapitation].
In fairness to the “guillotines don’t kill people” crowd, I can see that it is sort of a slippery slope: once you start baby-proofing the world, where do you stop? One man’s “common sense guardrail” is another man’s “chokehold on the neck of liberty” (or whatever). In light of this, it’s no surprise that our results, legislatively, are somewhat incongruous: Somehow, we’ve agreed to put a speed limit on our highways, but can’t seem to reach any consensus on questions like whether My Right to Hunt (or just do some target practice) with my extended-mag machine gun(s) takes precedence over your Kid’s Right to Make it Through First Grade Without Getting Shot. (There’s pros and cons to both sides, I guess. Let’s not be hasty.) Once you allow for the idea that some degree of unnecessary suffering/tragedy is acceptable (and indeed necessary; rationalizing it as “the Price of Freedom”), you open the door to all sorts of interesting theories about what Freedom and Government and Civic Society actually mean/should look like in practice.
Still, you’d think/hope there’d be a few lowest-common denominators that everyone could agree on; guardrails that are incontrovertibly a net benefit for everyone - ones that, crucially, come with so few drawbacks that there simply isn’t any logical reason to not comply. Suggestions like, “No making bio-weapons/napalm in your garage, please.” Or the mere suggestion of “driving sober.” Or of “using seatbelts.” Pretty entry-level stuff, as far as building a society that keeps unnecessary death and suffering to a minimum.
Again, though: You’d think.
Which brings us to one of my favorite videos, or at least one on which I reflect often, given how much it tells us about not only our culture, but how we (in America, but more generally, too) think:
…Incredible. How quickly things change! We could never imagine a world where people felt totally comfortable defending their right to drive drunk on live TV. This is kind of how it goes, though; it’s always impossible to imagine how things worked in the past: how it took so long for people to figure out that bloodletting or mercury didn’t cure blindness (or whatever), or that perhaps lead wasn’t a great substance to make our pipes from, or to smear all over our walls, furniture, and kids toys.
Things did change, obviously, but I’m sure the transition wasn’t seamless: I’ll bet you had loads of people arguing in defense of leeches and mercury and lead, including their god-given right to use/consume them. That was the world they knew, for better or worse. Better the devil you know. (Even things like the women’s suffrage movement in the early 1900s US had loads of detractors - many of them women!)
One of these more recent paradigm shifts was the banning of smoking indoors. The notion that this smokelessness isn’t how things were - up until so very recently! - is incomprehensible to me, and I’m sure many other people under 35 or so. It feels like a different universe, one where nobody had higher than double-digit IQs (on second thought, maybe all that lead had more of an impact than we realize); there’s simply no other explanation for their not seeing how bad an idea that was. All the facts were right in front of them! You’re saying people were just going around filling every house, car, school, and restaurant with smoke, and nobody seemed to mind!?
On every flight I take I wonder how it can possibly be that they still - in 2020-something! - have to put a No Smoking sign above every seat. Evidently, there remains a small - yet very real - cohort of chainsmoking-first-time-fliers on every plane that must be accounted for. It must be so: these companies focus-group everything. Still, it feels impossible. Maybe my being hung up on this stems from my cultural ignorance: for whatever reason, smoking - of all things - was the one product/destructive habit we were warned off (we were shunted in the direction of more suitable alternatives, like ultra-processed foods, sugars, trans fats, etc.). From what I’ve seen, smoking’s a lot less common in the US than in places like the UK, Europe, and South Africa - even among young people. So maybe the signs are for the benefit of people from those other places.
Even if that is the case, it raises a couple of questions (I’m digressing here, but oh, well): in my estimation as a somewhat-qualified social scientist, the fellow back in 28C who - due to ignorance or stubbornness or any other reason - still tries to light up is probably also the guy who has a few other habits/attitudes we might deem “regressive” or “socially abrasive.”
I’m picturing the tripartite Venn Diagram of “Heavy Smokers” + “First Time Fliers” + “People Oblivious/Resistant to Modern Social Norms/Signage” … in my mind, there’s a lot of overlap going on. Point being, I think it’d be a safe bet that Mr. 28C (and thus those around him), would almost certainly benefit from a few other reminders, too. Requests to please refrain “from slapping The Wife if/when she talks back,” and “from referring to other ethnicities by any of the slurs/epithets listed on the pamphlet in the seat-back in front of you.”
But we never see/hear anything like that; not once have I seen an illuminated sign that made any reference to: Slapping/Groping/Cross-Burning/Bestiality/etc.
Strange, isn’t it? Their silence is deafening.
Maybe these airlines are just single-issue (i.e., anti-Big Tobacco) activists, I guess; but come on, use your platform for good, why don’t you? What about FGM, for christ’s sake!? Take a fucking stand! I know; I’m being obtuse. It’s not really that the airlines are spineless, fence-sitting cowards. They’re far less worried about the wellbeing of your lungs/your wife/that other trivial nonsense, and more about keeping their plane not-on-fire and its occupants alive.
That said, maybe there’s something to it (i.e. protecting their bottom line). As mentioned, we know these companies have focused-grouped everything… I’m reminded of Michael Jordan’s response back in the ‘90s when asked why he refused to speak out in support of progressive social movements: “Republicans buy shoes, too.” Is that what this was, then, Delta? United? BA? …Hmm!? Some sort of self-satisfied equivocation, a reluctance to alienate your wealthiest customers? A tacit admission that “Hey, man, bigots, abusers, savages, war criminals, and kidnappers buy plane tickets, too”…!?
Questions for another day, I guess; that’s all the time we have. I got side-tracked by the smoking stuff; we’ll get to the point - or at least start heading in that direction - next time.
Given that I’m a serious/highly ethical journalist, I booked a flight this past weekend to test my theory. Before I ripped them a new one, I wanted to make sure the airlines were still fence-riding, effectively condoning anti-social/potentially criminal behavior by refusing to drop their ridiculous “libertarian”/anti-Nanny State spiel.
My worst fears were confirmed: my seat had been taken by a character I can only describe as “unsavory.” But it was too late to get off; we’d already started taxiing.
Things went as you might expect: sure enough, for the next 13 hours (why, why, why did I book a direct flight to Sydney, of all places!? Was there some part of me, deep down inside, that wanted this?) I became his prison wife/masseur. For the sake of my fellow passengers, I complied willingly. Quoth Big Daddy: It wasn’t gonna suck itself [babygirl]. And he was right. A dirty 'job, but somebody had to do it.
We actually ended things on pretty good terms. I managed to snap a pic as I was de-boarding (he was staying on; the next leg of the flight was to Thailand, his final destination):
