Naysaying the Nanny State

We all practice civil disobedience. We have to. It's the only way to live in a world where every snaggle-toothed snot-nosed gecko-skinned legislator in the nation just has to pass a few thousand more laws to show us how superior they are. Maybe we drive home from Bubba's Bar and Rattlesnake BBQ a couple of points above the federally mandated two-beers-fits-all inebriation limit. Maybe we seal our old crankcase oil in milk cartons and dump it in the Monday morning trash to avoid the recycling charge. And, come on, fess up, how many of you out there have ever bought devil weed from a friend of a friend of a cousin who knows a guy? According to one source, 74 million of us -- I mean, of you --have sucked a roach at least once in utter defiance of Big Nanny's anti-drug fanaticism.

Increasingly, however, civil disobedience has become an organized community event. Never mind the WTO demonstrations or genetic crop burnings. Here, culled from various cyber sources over the past year, are edict-defying acts that libertarians can eagerly wrap both of our Invisible Hands around.

SMOKE-EASIES

Welcome to the Roaring Twenties Revisited. California outlawed smoking in restaurants and bars several years ago but that hasn't snuffed the puffing. Lookouts alert denizens of clandestine smoking bars when a local Serve And Protect unit appears. Innocent looking tin cans are used in lieu of ashtrays, big fans blow away the smoke, and bartenders activate their phone trees to warn other underground smoking dens. When the blue uniforms walk into the club there's plenty of innocent boozers but no Marlboro Men. (No mention of doors with peepholes through which you can whisper "Guido sent me.") What a switcheroo from our great-granddad's day when the Volstead Act made liquor forbidden but left smoking legal.

ENDANGERED SPECIOUS

Suppose you discover a coven of rare and endangered snaggle-toothed snot-nosed gecko-skinned jackalopes living on your property. Do you excitedly report your sighting to the authorities? Expect your land to be restricted, devalued or outright confiscated and your business destroyed in the name of protecting the little beasties from extinction. Or you could do what landowners have done for years throughout fly-over country, a practice known poetically as "shoot, shovel and shut up." Couldn't environmental groups just pay landowners to look after the critters instead of dealing out millions of dollars of membership dues to lobbyists? Well, no, then they wouldn't get what they really want -- political power and land grabbing. So the laws created to save rare flora and fauna become death warrants instead.

CUBA COPING

Per US Treasury rules, Americans can visit Cuba but they're not allowed to spend American dollars there. So business folks set up non-American Cuban joint venture companies or a consortium of international firms and these front groups pick up the tab for visiting Yanquis. That includes meals, lodging, transportation and colorful souvenir mosaics of the rare Cuban snaggle-toothed snot-nosed gecko-skinned jackalope. The State Department is miffed about the rules-dodging. And well they should be. After four decades of trade embargo, the Castro regime would collapse any second now if only recalcitrant Americans would just obey their government's decrees. Right?

DUELING WITH SCHOOLING

As we all know by now, public schools have gone stark raving loopy with their bizarre zero tolerance obsessions. One high school newspaper was forbidden to print irregularities about their class elections. The principal of another Institution of Learning (?) shredded 2200 copies of his high school's paper because an article about school violence included pictures of students posing with -- gasp! -- weapons. (The report I read didn't specify what kinds of weapons. Toothpicks? Bobby pins? Gun-shaped noodles?) So the kids have taken to the net to escape the censor's scissors. "The web site," says one teen, "gives us a chance to write stories about things that bug us in school." Others publish articles or art that would otherwise be verboten per the administrative Gestapo. Personal web sites independent of those good ol' school ties allow teens to publish what they want, be it mindless rants or attempts at serious journalism. One exceptional site I surf to frequently is Libertarian Rock, which encourages student activism against curfew laws, idiotic dress codes, disapproved hair color, and the little known "teen gulag" of coercive "behavior modification" camps. Without the Principal, Superintendent, teachers or school board snoops leaning over their shoulders, kids can free their imaginations. Like maybe posting a cartoon of a rare and endangered snaggle-toothed snot-nosed gecko-skinned jackalope brandishing an AK-47.