This week many of us have done our level best to ignore how the Dow/S&P, the Nikkei, the Hang Seng, the DAX, the London Exchange, etc. are all plunging and anemically regaining value in paroxysms of wild panic. Meanwhile the news on job losses and industry contractions is making many people seek oblivion in whatever form they can come by it, whether that’s a liquid, a capsule, a pulsating LCD display, or whatever.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been something of a train wreck these last few weeks.
So I fear that I have to resort to mordant humor and patent absurdity that may get me in trouble. Please forgive this lunacy.
I tend to take drunk driving and alcohol abuse pretty seriously. This position made me very popular among the carousers in my cohort of collegiate alcoholic conformists. Well, if you grow up around a bunch of annoying gin-and-tonic-addled adults, the sXe lifestyle starts to look a tad appealing. One only tends to get drunk to emulate Mom and Dad if one doesn’t hate their pickled guts too much.
You know, it’s a little like non-smokers who grow up associating foul ashtray smells with the rank stench of Mommy’s sweater or Daddy’s sportcoat.
Proud Papa-to-be Pagnucco over at MPW generously provides the text of Ike Leggett’s letter in support of stricter DUI/DWI enforcement measures using a clever ignition interlock device that only activates if the operator exhales a “clean” enough breath.
Are such devices hard to foil? Can you get a (presumably sober) child to exhale into the thing, for instance? Yes, it’s true, drunks will attempt stunts like this. Let’s just hope they don’t try it in the Old Wine(-o) State.
We just have to make sure that these gadgets are simple enough that tipsy Maryland politicians like state Dels. Barve and Taylor can use them effectively.
Hmm, I think I feel a tickle of farce coming on.
Let’s start with the “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” premise but replace the Jersey bit with some Old Line State flavor.
“Herman & Kumar Go to the House of Crabs” is more like it, the House of Crabs in question being the stale echo chamber occupied by Maryland Delegates.
Or what about the sequel: “Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay”? Man, that’s so ’07/’08. The Gitmo goons are closing up shop and Barve and Taylor probably won’t get profiled as enemy combatants unless (a) they go on a drunk driving spree in Carroll County and/or (b) Bobby “Persecution Complex” Ehrlich gets voted back into the Governor’s Mansion and jumpstarts another spying & profiling program directed at his mortal enemies.
Nope, we need to adjust the tone for a new era of dope, er, hope.
“Herman & Kumar Escape from Annapolis Soirée.” Yep, that’s much better, plus it sort of rhymes with “Bay.” “Chesapeake Bay” would be another obvious possibility, although then we have to explain how these two pols ended up in that pfiesteria-infested pond to begin with. Crumbling infrastructure anyone? A few certifiably shoddy bridges would be like money in the bank for Maryland Democrats. We’re talking Federal Stimulus paydirt here, kids. But that’s a topic for another long-winded post.
But, ahem. Back to our DUI duo.
We’ve got the promise of a narrative here. Picture this for starters:
Herman & Kumar stagger out of a stultifyingly boring engagement full of hobnobbing Maryland muckety-mucks. The open-bar drinks and phony praises are pouring forth freely. Then they stumble into the leather-upholstered bucket seats of their respective luxury vehicles, now outfitted with this clever breathalyzer “interlock” ignition device.
After spending too many hours in the dense, soporific fog of Maryland Democratic politics, Herman & Kumar breathe hearty sighs of relief into their ignition interlock mouthpieces. The dense vapors of their winey breaths immediately trigger the fuel cell contacts to close; their keys fail to budge. After screaming invective at their vehicles that would make Mike Subin blush, they each whip out their BlackBerrys and implore their long-suffering wives to come pick them up.
Hey, this could be the setup for a brilliantly staged candid-camera press conference on the new device.
If such a press conference were to occur, we’d hope that Herman & Kumar wouldn’t louse things up by doing something embarrassing like inserting their car keys in the wrong car holes or something.
Paging Parris “thwarted-by-the-child-proof-safety-lock” Glendening, anyone?
5 comments:
Moe: “The ‘garage’ !
Hey fellas, the ‘garage’ !
Ooh la di da, Mister French man.”
Homer: “Well, what do you call it?”
Moe: “A cah hole!”
Ah, this is just yet-another move towards the Orwellian horror of "automative ubiquitous law-enforcement".
It's like the theme of "A Clockwork Orange", in which the question arises, can a person be thought to be redeemed if their propensity for violence is restrained through external imposition of control? Little Alex -- the twisted protagonist -- becomes the subject of an experiment in Operant Conditioning and becomes incapable of the violence in whichh he so cheerfully previously engaged. Yet it can be argued that all that has happened here is that society has imposed a much greater violence on little Alex, by removing all vestiges of free will from him regarding everything remotely "violent", from self-defense to even moderate impoliteness.
In general, I can't come out in support of driving while intoxicated; clearly that's in nobody's best interest.
But do you, does anyone, want to live in a civilization where your car writes you tickets for speeding or simply won't allow you to exceed the posted speed limit? Hey, who's driving here? Me or the car? Does anyone want to live in a civilization where every last car -- and not just GM models with OnStar -- has a built in location and direction tracker linked to an ubiquitous wireless network? "You are driving into a jurisdiction with a high-crime rate. A 200-percent increase in your insurance premium is now in effect." Or how about this? "Your cellphone was used in a bar in a jurisdiction that allows smoking in restaurants. Your medical co-pay for office visits is now eight-hundred dollars and your monthly premium now reflects the actuarial risk for your increased chances of lung-cancer."
Seriously, once the camel has his nose inside the tent, as they say, it won't be long until the only thing in the tent is the camel. Slippery slope, folks.
For this particular case, I can understand a call for someone already caught violating their probation to have raised the level of surveillance of probation.
Yet keep in mind the slippery slope. It's bad enough that the world seems to be falling into economic collapse. Let's not add global technical fascism to the list of reasons for suicide.
“‘You are driving into a jurisdiction with a high-crime rate. A 200-percent increase in your insurance premium is now in effect.’ Or how about this? ‘Your cellphone was used in a bar in a jurisdiction that allows smoking in restaurants. Your medical co-pay for office visits is now eight-hundred dollars and your monthly premium now reflects the actuarial risk for your increased chances of lung-cancer.’”
Hardman, the scenarios you sketch out here are alarming, but nevertheless useful to explore. While I grew up bashing science fiction as irrelevant and juvenile, the power and influence of technocrats and social engineers lead me to wonder whether the boundary between speculative fiction and reality is finer than I once thought.
“Let's not add global technical fascism to the list of reasons for suicide.”
Suicide?! ¡No más!, Mr. Hardman.
Right now I’m opting for planned obsolescence as my preferred method of self-extinction.
Here is a “scared sober” news item for anybody who occasionally climbs behind the wheel of a car after a bender.
“Drunk Driver Gets 15 Years For Fatal Wrong-Way Crash,” Washington Post, March 7, 2009
“A Woodbridge man who drove the wrong way, drunk, on Route 1 last year and slammed head-on into another car at 96 mph, killing the driver, was sentenced to 15 years in prison yesterday by a Fairfax County judge.
“The sentence for Alfredo Martinez Rivera, 31, was imposed by Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Bruce D. White and was one of the stiffest penalties imposed in Fairfax for a traffic death in many years, lawyers said. Although Martinez Rivera had pleaded guilty to aggravated involuntary manslaughter, with a maximum of 20 years in prison, Virginia's voluntary sentencing guidelines recommended a range of three to nine years in prison.
“The crash killed Robert L. Thomas, 53, who lived in the Groveton area of eastern Fairfax and was married with four grown children and a fifth adopted child. Thomas worked as a porter at the Harris Teeter groceries in Pentagon City and Alexandria, had just finished working a 16-hour double shift on a Sunday and was bringing home a jobless friend who needed a meal.
“The friend, Franshaw Jackson, survived the horrendous impact, which occurred in the Lorton area about 11:30 p.m. Aug. 3, but suffered severe heart, chest and brain injuries. Thomas died at the scene.
“Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Brandon Shapiro said Martinez Rivera consumed 12 beers at a restaurant in Gunston Plaza with friends, then pulled out and began driving south in the northbound lanes of Route 1 at speeds that one witness said exceeded 100 mph. He stopped and crossed back over into the southbound lanes but drove so fast that he lost control, spun across the median and smashed into Thomas's car, Shapiro said.
“Martinez Rivera was taken to Inova Fairfax Hospital, where his blood-alcohol content was later measured at 0.20, more than twice the legal definition of intoxicated. Shapiro said when an officer informed Martinez Rivera that he had killed someone, Martinez Rivera replied, ‘He shouldn't have been in my way.’”
[We now interrupt this news story for a tabloid-style link to a gratuitous mug shot of this arrogant bleary-eyed buffoon drying out in his hospital gown.]
“Crash data from Martinez Rivera’s 2006 Pontiac sedan indicated that he was traveling at 96 mph at the moment of impact and that he did not apply the brakes. When a probation officer interviewed Martinez Rivera before sentencing, Shapiro said, he told the officer, ‘I don't think I was the driver.’[*]
“Shapiro said Martinez Rivera “didn't show a drop of remorse”[**] and asked White to impose the maximum 20-year sentence.
“Thomas's widow, Kim Jackson, testified that her husband often brought home friends who needed something to eat or a place to sleep and that she frequently found people sprawled on her living room sofa.
“He also gladly agreed to work longer hours when a co-worker didn't show up, Jackson said, and customers who came to his funeral told her that even though he had to clean up after others, ‘he still was always happy.’”
* Blackout (Alcohol-related amnesia)
** Alcoholic Blackouts: The Big Lie — This Canadian psychologist and alcoholism specialist doesn’t deny that alcohol-related amnesia occurs, but basically asserts that heavy drinkers who commit dangerous reckless acts while intoxicated tend to be conscious of the difference between right and wrong and deliberately choose wrong. Afterwards, amnesia may blot out the alcoholic’s memory of his/her reckless behavior and lead to repeated denials and protests of innocence.
Sleepless, let me offer to you some top-flight science fiction that is both award-winning and relevant. Please trust me on this and don't read the wikipedia review.
Try Vernor Vinge's "A Deepness in the Sky" is rolls several stories and themes into one. It's all good and if you read it and stop to think about it, you will probably see how much of it may apply to the modern days. Then you'll probably read it again to see if that's what you thought you read, and you'll probably discover other things. This could take you a while, as it's a thick thick book. But it's definitely worth it, and there are reasons why it got both of the most prestigious awards the SF community can bestow, both from the fans, and from the other writers.
Mostly the book deals with how civilizations rise, how they fall, and how new ones rise again from the ashes of the old... sometimes.
Vinge is a name among names in the IT and InterNetworking communities, as a professor at UCSD he was also one of the engineers of a lot of internet protocols and is also a fine writer, if tending to being rather long-winded as a storyteller.
As part of the story, he gives fairly broad scenarios of a variety of collapses of civilizations, and one of the most feared and generally worst cases is that of "ubiquitous law enforcement", when everything everywhere becomes a tool of obedience, from automated bugging of baby-monitors to computer-driven analysis of conversations at bus-stops to universal vehicle path monitoring to elimination of currency to promote universal tax collection on transactions, not incidentally recording all point-of-sale location and purchase data. Eventually people go exactly where they are allowed to be an say and do exactly what they are allowed to say, and as independent expression of ideas and action dies out, so does the origination of solutions to problems. Since the condition of ubiquitous law-enforcement generally can't exist without exceptionally high levels of technology, increasing levels of problem-solving are essential to keep complex systems in tune so that they don't collapse, and when society is one big jail, nobody works to prevent collapse; they'd generally rather that things did fall apart. That might kill people, but anyone who is actually human would probably rather risk probable death rather than live a life where they were born into a stinking jail where conditions only ever get worse. Someone somewhere might survive and they'd survive to live free and presumably civilization would rise again but not repeat the same mistakes.
But as bad as that is, Vinge manages to show us something that goes one better -- if "better" is the right word -- than ubiquitous law-enforcement. Eeew. Definitely worth reading.
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Now, as for the idiot driving the wrong way on the freeway... throw the book at that bonehead. Martinez-Rivera is a textbook example of why it's a federal offense to sell liquor on Reservations.
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