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Posted on 01/21/2003 6:17:11 AM PST by George Frm Br00klyn Park
Ron Smith's "Something to Say" Commentary
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More Lunacy
January 20, 2003 Ron Smith's Something to Say
More signs of what Fred Reed (fredoneverything.net) calls “the creeping lunacy” appeared this past weekend, one of the most notable of which was New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg dispatching his gendarmes to stop a couple of rock musicians from smoking cigarettes on stage at Madison Square Garden.
Hizzoner, a Democrat turned Republican in order to facilitate his move into Gracie Mansion, is also former smoker turned fervent anti-smoking fascist. You might recall that he spearheaded the city council ordinance that extended an already strict anti-smoking ban to include restaurants and bars. He also wants to make it a crime, for goodness sake, to light up in the vastness of Central Park.
According to Matt Drudge, Bloomberg became enraged when he spotted Keith Richards and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones puffing away during the group’s live HBO concert Saturday night. Apparently, the cops dispatched to put a stop to this egregious violation of the law chose to watch the show on a monitor offstage rather than stopping the performance, something which might well have precipitated a riot by Stones fans who were having a fine time rocking and rolling with their heroes.
“The band raced out of the Garden after they finished their last number,” Drudge reports an ‘insider’ as saying, “The music had not even finished playing and they were in their cars already, spinning away.”
Just in time, one would guess, to avoid the clutches of the enforcers of modern American Stalinism, which mandates that smoking is so offensive that its perpetrators must be banished to cold, dank places to get their nicotine fix. There is such sanctimonious piety, such sheer dishonesty in extending reasonable restrictions on smoking to the point where it is clear the goal is not the protection of non-smokers but the punishing and ridiculing of those who persist in doing what their moral superiors deem improper.
What’s the matter with us? Is this resurgent prohibitionist activity simply another eruption of the Puritan ethic -- you know, the one that led to the Salem witch trials – or are we so feminized these days that we no longer even know what Freedom means? Or is it something else, something we can’t quite explain?
We drug our schoolboys to make them behave less like boys, we expel children from school for all sorts of imagined offenses (such as playing with a laser pointer or drawing a picture of a gun) while leaving unpunished kids who actually terrorize their teachers and schoolmates.
We subsidize the unproductive through all sorts of government handouts and tax the crap out of those who work for a living. I just read that the author of a book called Fat Land blames the morbid obesity so prevalent among our poor on the rest of us. It is our fault that they eat fattening cheap fast food, our fault because if we had a heart we’d tax ourselves even more to pay for government school programs that would teach these wretches proper nutrition and exercise habits.
He says if we were just, we’d give these people cash instead of food stamps. He hasn’t heard, one would guess, about the unfortunate propensity of some of the sainted poor to squander their money on drugs and alcohol instead of food.
Nobody’s to blame for their own shortcomings or excesses, except, perhaps, smokers. And even those addicted folks, puffing away in whatever space is still left them, perhaps a rooftop or an alleyway, are victims of Big Tobacco. No doubt our current elite would do away with smoking altogether were it not for their own addiction: To the billions of dollars collected from the smokers in taxes and poured into the coffers of state governments and into the already jam-packed pockets of the tort lawyers.
As for the Stones, I’ve never been able to understand their appeal. To me, their music is all din and cacophony. I’m a U-2 fan all the way.
THIS article at WBAL - Baltimore
If Madison Square Garden can't book any concerts because these bands all decide to play at the Meadowlands in New Jersey instead, you can bet that anti-smoking law would be overturned in a heartbeat.
Maybe he thinks the taxpayers should finance their habits too. After all, if it wasn't for our stinginess, they wouldn't be so oppressed that they have to drink or take drugs. < /sarcasm >
They've already gone after cell phones.
Smoking in your car is coming. It just hasn't hit the fast part of the slippery slope yet.
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