All I Think Is That It's Stupid

Dave Barry on laughing at Very Big Government

Glenn Garvin from the December 1994 issue

(Page 8 of 8)

Sheldon and I would argue. I mean, really argue. Well, what if a baby is born with no arms and no legs and his parents both die? Huh? Doesn't society have a obligation? Sheldon was wonderfully patient and had a excellent sense of humor and never lost his temper, which is not true of me. I'd yell at Sheldon and get furious at Sheldon, but we were still friends.

I left journalism for a while and I was working for a consulting company where I taught effective writing seminars and by my recommendation we hired Sheldon. We argued more. I was a middle-of-the-road Democrat more than anything else. I know I voted for Carter. Watergate taught me how bad the Republicans were. Then in the late '70s, I begin to see. I think the gas crisis had something to do with it. I began to realize, this is all happening because of the government. And I began to think about all the government people I knew, all the times I'd sat in meetings with Sheldon, watching people who were theoretically for the common good. Then I realized not one of them was and none of them ever have been. All these things Sheldon had said to me: There is no such thing as the common good, there is no such thing as society. He was right.

So I wrote him a letter. "Sheldon, I just wanted to let you know that in all the arguments you were right."

Reason: Here you are a libertarian and you work for The Miami Herald, conceivably the most anti-libertarian newspaper in North America.

Barry:: You mean our editorial board. The eight or 10 people who nobody knows here who speak for this paper.

I don't like anything unsigned in a newspaper that purports to be the opinion of some group if we don't know who the group is. It's laughable to say that The Miami Herald's editorials or any newspaper's editorials represent any views other than those of the people writing them, so why don't we tell everybody who they are?

It bothers me greatly that we have this system of opinion pages that dates back to when you knew who the owner of the paper was and his editorial told you what he thought. We should call editorials what they are: columns written by committees. If you want to agree with the committee, that's great. But they don't speak for me and they don't speak for a lot of people who work at the paper. I want to gag sometimes when I see who "we" are recommending that people vote for, and not just as a libertarian.

Reason: Is this a reference to the First Lady's brother?

Barry:: Yeah. We are recommending that people vote for Hugh Rodham for the Senate of the United States !

Reason: You write a lot about rock 'n' roll. From a philosophical standpoint, what's the worst rock 'n' roll song of all time?

Barry:: My nomination right off the top my head is a song that was a hit in the '70s--"Signs, signs, everywhere signs. blocking up the scenery, breaking my mind, do this, don't do that, can't you read the signs?" Basically a diatribe against property rights.

Reason: That was by The Five Man Electrical Band.

Barry:: It' s a real smug self-righteous punk kid saying nobody has the right to tell him what to do and how dare you put a sign up saying that I can't go on your property? Hey, kid! Stick this sign up your ass.

Reason: You wrote a serious column about your son's bicycle accident, in which you concluded that he should wear a helmet even though he looks like a dork. Now a lot of states are considering mandatory bicycle helmet laws. What do you think about that?

Barry:: I got a lot of mail about that column, which is the only serious column I've ever written that went out as a regular column. It was the only time I ever had anything to say, which is, "Make a kid wear a helmet."

I got a lot of mail from organizations concerned with bike safety. Then I got a couple from people who wanted my support for mandatory helmet laws. I can't support that. If you pass a law like that you'll do more harm than good, because you'll make people think they've done something about the problem when they haven't.

There's only one way kids will wear helmets, and that's if their parents are nagging them to. They will never wear helmets because some state passes a law requiring it.

I genuinely think in this case--just 'cause I know my son and I know his friends--that kind of legislation would focus responsibility in the wrong place. It' s not up to the cops, for God' s sake. So I know that all over America there's probably politicians sending out pictures of themselves signing that mandatory helmet bill, but it' s bullshit. I say that as a parent.

Reason: As your son grew up and began getting into activities where he had the potential to break things and kill himself, did that cause you to rethink your views?

Barry:: No. He does hurl that back in my face sometimes. I said, "Rob, as soon as you are paying your own way in life, I'll stop telling you what to do. But you're not. You're taking money from me, living in my house." I try really hard to make him a responsible person.

Reason: What if the 7-Eleven down the street put in a vending machine where you could get heroin for a quarter?

Barry:: And then have sex with a dog? Meaning what? My son wouldn't go get heroin. If he did or didn't, it wouldn't have anything to do with whether it was legal or illegal. I did all this stuff that was illegal when I was a kid. I drank beer when I was 15. I smoked cigarettes when I was 13. I drove to New York City when I was 14--don't tell my son. Those things were against the law, but I did them anyway. I didn't become a heroin addict, although I probably could have gotten heroin somehow. I don't think my son would buy heroin at any price. He knows what it is, and he knows how stupid it is. Any parent that relies on any law to help him parent is an idiot.

Reason: Why did you leave Coral Gables, the Miami suburb that's the libertarian paradise?

Barry:: God, you talk about a libertarian nightmare ! We got a ticket for painting our own living room white. And they came to the door, a guy in a uniform.

Reason: This is inside the house?

Barry:: The interior living room. It turned out you had to have a permit if the job cost more than $50. I don't know what you can possibly do for less than $50 to have somebody come in your house. I had to pay the painter to go down to the city hall. This is after I called up city hall and ended up actually screaming. The painter spent a day getting a permit to do a job that took about half a day to actually do.

Then I wrote a column about that and discovered that there were people in Coral Gables who would wait until 2 o'clock in the morning to replace a sink because to do it during the daytime you'd see the trucks outside. Two trucks. That's a carpenter and a plumber. So that's two different permits. People were not fixing their houses because they didn't know how to get the permits. It was crazy.

Reason: If you have a cat out of the house, it's supposed to be on a leash there.

Barry: Yeah, and you're not allowed to park a truck in your driveway. You're not allowed to work on your house on Sunday. The people who enforce these laws are nuts. After I wrote a column on this, I got I don't know how many letters from Coral Gables homeowners, story after story after story, wonderfully horrible stories. And the venom they felt for their own government! You cannot paint the exterior of your house. You have to take the paint chip down to show the paintchip Nazis. It goes on all the time and it's hilarious. People are afraid to own their own homes. People are afraid their own government will catch them fixing their houses.

Reason: Thank you.