Reason Magazine - Contributors

The Man Can't Bust Our Muselix

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 07:00:00 EDT

No doubt dismayed by California's disappointing status as only the nation's eleventh least overweight state, anabolically incorrrect fitness freak Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.) recently approved legislation that will make trans fats verboten in restaurant food and baked goods. In Los Angeles, the city council is doing its part to keep residents healthy by declaring a one-year moratorium on new fast food restaurants in a 32-square-mile chunk of the city's South Los Angeles, West Adams, Baldwin Village, and Leimert Park neighborhoods. And in San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors outlawed cigarette sales at drug stores like Walgreen's and Rite Aid.

Call it the flipside to Michael Moore's mouth-watering vision of universal healthcare as a tasty buffet of all-you-can-eat medical care. Instead of bottomless salad bowls of angioplasties and farm-fresh upper gastrointestinal endoscopies, it's Big Brother as Biggest Loser jackboot, regulating us all into tighter blue jeans and less costly LDL levels. Today, Moore and other reformers dream of living in England or France, where hip replacement is a fundamental human right, not just a medical procedure. Tomorrow, they may seek asylum in any country that does not consider double cheeseburgers a felony.

Not that anyone's taking the trans fat ban too hard; even the California Restaurant Association didn't put up much of a fight. Apparently, donuts fried in canola oil are just as tasty as their slightly more lethal counterparts fried in partially hydrogenated vegetable shortening, customers seem to like the idea of trans fat-free food, and making the transition to non-hydrogenated alternatives provides a great excuse to jack up prices. One Southern California hamburger joint told The New York Times it will have to increase the price of its fries from $1.75 to at least $2.75 because of the change.

Similarly, the fact that there are already 400 or so fast-food outlets in the area of Los Angeles where the one-year moratorium will be enforced means a Happy Meal should still be easy to come by. Finally, banishing cigarettes from San Francisco pharmacies just means that smokers will be more likely to patronize liquor stores to get their nicotine fix—and anything that encourages addictive personalities to impulse-buy a quart of Jim Beam over an Odwalla Mo'Beta Smoothie can't be all bad for society, can it?

Or to put it another way: These laws are getting passed not because they promise to radically change things, but rather because they aren't going to change things enough to truly inconvenience anyone. Which also suggests they won't have much impact on California's eating and smoking habits. Trans fats will still be available in packaged foods. In burger-plagued South Los Angeles, sit-down restaurants already outnumber fast-food outlets by more than 100, but the ready availability of slowly delivered fare has apparently done little to curb local appetites for fries and shakes. Why it's necessary to penalize the fast food industry to attract Applebees and vegan cafes is a mystery the LA City Council has yet to divulge—it makes about as much sense as penalizing auto parts stores to attract yoga studios. But even if the moratorium does somehow result in more sit-down restaurants, waistlines may actually expand. After all, the absence of a clown mascot doesn't automatically knock 500 calories and 20 grams off every dish on the menu.

And when these measures don't really have much impact on public health, what next? It's probably best to think of trans fat bans and fast-food moratoriums as appetizers, small portions of government waistline engineering designed to get us used to even more proscriptive preemptive strikes against obesity and other health issues. And indeed, who can blame government officials for thinking this way? As we continue to normalize the idea that unlimited health care is something the government owes us, why shouldn't the government demand more compliance from us in exchange for the care it renders?

In Japan, the government requires anyone between the ages of 40 and 74 have their waistline measured on an annual basis. If they don't meet certain standards—33.5 inches for men, 35.4 inches for women—their employers or local governments are subject to fines. So much for the Masters sumo circuit, so much for bean paste Fridays, and so much for the old-fashioned idea that what one does in the privacy of one's dining room should have little bearing on one's employment status.

Of course, it's all but impossible to imagine the U.S. adopting a similar policy. Too many of our most passionate healthcare reformers would end up on the wrong side of the divide; even Arnold is looking pretty thick in the middle these days. But really, if increasingly proscriptive waistline engineering is the price we're doomed to pay as we increasingly turn to the government to provide us with healthcare, the Japanese model is a more palatable alternative to the bans and moratoriums we're currently experimenting with.

At least it preserves a certain measure of personal choice: Eat all the trans fat you want, but just know that you might be risking your job. Surely, this is an approach Arnold Schwarzenegger can sympathize with. Without his multi-decade diet of steroids, he might not even be Jean-Claude Van Damme, much less governor of California. But he had the freedom to consume steroids without government intervention. And while doing so exposed him to myriad medical dangers, it ultimately paid off in spectacular fashion. If only he'd acknowledge that the next time he gets the urge to make our health choices for us.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer living in San Francisco. Read his reason archive here.

First Amendment Lite

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 07:00:00 EDT

If you’re a perfume manufacturer and you’d like to name your latest fragrance Opium, no government agent will stop you. The world’s flagship soda is called Coke. A company called Chronic Candy has been selling lollipops flavored with cannabis flower essential oil for eight years. Energy drink connoisseurs routinely enjoy products with names like Fixx, Bong Water, Buzzed, and Speed Freak. Even the controversial energy drink Cocaine is for sale again, after revising its label to comply with Food and Drug Administration guidelines.

If you produce alcoholic beverages, however, puns, drug slang, and ghoulishly percussive monkeys may land you in trouble. Take, for example, the case of the Mt. Shasta Brewing Company. Located in tiny Weed, California, the microbrewery sells bottled versions of its five ales and lagers in retail stores in California, Oregon, and Washington. Since 2004 the bottle caps on all five Mt. Shasta beers have been emblazoned with a slogan that plays on the town’s name: “Try legal Weed.”

Anytime a producer or importer of alcoholic beverages wants to market a new product, it must submit a proposed label to the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) for approval. Earlier this year, when Mt. Shasta proprietor Vaune Dillman turned in his application for a new beer he planned to start bottling, he included the design of the bottle caps. Shortly thereafter, the TTB advised him by fax that the slogan “Try legal Weed” was an impermissible “drug reference,” adding, “We do not believe that responsible industry members should want or would want to portray their products in any socially unacceptable manner.”

To put it another way, the TTB believed the 61-year-old businessman and civic booster was guilty of a thought crime. Although no law on the books explicitly prohibits “drug references” on alcoholic beverage product labels, the bureau told him he had to stop using his socially unacceptable bottle caps.

Every year, the TTB reviews more than 100,000 proposed labels, and because the statutes and regulations it has at its disposal are both extremely specific and extremely vague, its agents often end up behaving more like cultural critics than government bureaucrats—parsing puns, interpreting illustrations, determining the artistic value of the occasional female breast. In theory, the agency is supposed to protect consumers by ensuring that product labels accurately convey a product’s identity and quality. In practice, it often disallows labels (and thus, at least temporarily, products) that it deems bad for the image of the alcoholic beverage industry, short-pouring the First Amendment in the process.

“What would you do if somebody handed you, I don’t know, Hannah Montana beer, and said, ‘Please approve this’?” asks Robert Lehrman, an attorney who specializes in beverage law and has been dealing with the TTB and its predecessor, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, for more than 20 years. “I don’t think they like making all these immensely subjective decisions on every cotton-picking label that comes down the pike. But that’s how the legislature set it up. The government decided that liquor’s taboo and therefore needs restrictions beyond those for food generally. ”

Thus, if Disney decided to market a Hannah Montana energy drink laced with enough caffeine to power the entire touring cast of High School Musical for a week’s worth of shows, it would not have to submit a proposed label to the FDA—and consequently, the FDA would not be faced with the embarrassing prospect of having to officially “approve” a product that might be considered objectionable.

If Disney decided to create a Hannah Montana pale ale, however, the TTB would either have to give an explicit endorsement or figure out some grounds on which to reject it. In such situations, the TTB resorts to nitpicking. Take the prohibition against “drug references.” While Congress grants agencies like the TTB the authority to create rules and regulations that more thoroughly interpret general statutes, the TTB’s “no drug references” edict isn’t even that official. It’s just a policy that someone decided the bureau should implement for some reason or other. In 1994 the agency published a brief notice in a newsletter outlining the new guidelines for socially acceptable labeling. “I don’t know the particular incident that brought that about,” says Art Resnick, the TTB’s director of public and media affairs, when asked about the origins of the policy. “I could look and see if anybody remembers.”

Being fuzzy on the rule’s history doesn’t prevent the TTB from enforcing it with gusto. In 2003 a Texas liquor importer named Dan Dotson began efforts to import absinthe from Kubler, a Swiss distillery that had been producing the fabled spirit since 1863. Because Kubler’s version contained less than 10 parts per million of thujone, the chemical in wormwood that had kept absinthe off the market in the U.S. since 1912, Dotson believed it was legal to sell here. After several years of discussion, the TTB agreed. But in a 2006 letter to Lehrman, whom Dotson had retained to facilitate the TTB label approval process, the agency insisted that while the beverage Kubler had produced was legal, the word absinthe (along with the variations absynthe, absente, and absinth) was an “illicit drug term” that could not be used on the labels.

Eventually, the TTB softened its stance. Now absinthe can appear on the packaging, but only as a “fanciful term” modifying some other word. One can sell “absinthe verte” or “absinthe superieure”—but not plain old “absinthe.” And probably not “absinthe weed” either. Because of absinthe’s reputation as an illegal, mind-altering substance, the TTB continues to make marketing difficult for anyone interested in selling it.

When Lance Winters, master distiller for St. George Spirits, submitted a label for his version of the spirit in 2007, it took him seven tries before he gained TTB approval. First, he says, the TTB told him the word absinthe appeared in too large a font. Then it told him his label looked too much like a British pound note. Then it said the label’s depiction of a monkey beating a human skull with a pair of femurs implied that the product had hallucinogenic properties—impermissible, since the Code of Federal Regulations does not allow labels that “create a misleading impression.”

This, alas, is government by Rorschach test. Who’s to say exactly what a cartoon monkey indicates about the properties of absinthe? Winters says he simply wanted to create a fun, light-hearted package. “Our distillery has been trying to steer people away from the idea that absinthe has hallucinogenic properties,” he explains. “I don’t want to sell a product based on promises that I can’t deliver. I want to sell this product based on the fact that it’s complex, it’s delicious, it’s something that poets and artists loved to drink because it was inspirational.”

According to Resnick, a basic tenet of the TTB’s approach is voluntary compliance. “We don’t want to take somebody’s permit,” he says. “We don’t want to put anybody out of business. So we work very hard with the businesses that we regulate to achieve voluntary compliance on their part.”

Unfortunately, the voluntary compliance the agency achieves doesn’t always feel so voluntary to those doing the complying. While Winters is happy with how his label turned out—the monkey now bangs, in unambiguously nonhallucinogenic fashion, on a cymbal, not a human skull—all that wrangling left him frustrated. “The product in the bottle had been approved,” he says. “They weren’t protecting anyone from absinthe. They were protecting people from how the absinthe had been presented. It’s wonderful that they offered solutions to help me get the label approved, but what their solutions amounted to was a dumbing down of the labels and a loss of a certain amount of freedom.”

By censoring small businessmen like Winters and Vaune Dillman over purported “drug references,” the government is enforcing the idea that it’s not just illegal to manufacture, sell, or possess certain drugs in America. It’s illegal even to possibly allude to them. Even when confined to the limited scope of alcoholic beverage labels, that’s enough to drive a man to drink.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

Suited and Booted

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Typically, swimwear creates scandal in inverse proportion to the amount of fabric it's crafted from, but not so the Speedo LZR Racer. Like most of the high-tech bodysuits that have become popular among the world's fastest swimmers since the 2000 Olympics, the LZR is as modest as Mormon underwear—it leaves only one's ankles, arms, and shoulders exposed. And yet for the last several months, it's been attracting more attention than a fake Kazakh journalist in a neon green banana hammock.

With its ultrasonically bonded paneling, corset-like "core stabilizer," and fabric that sheds water like the Tour de France sheds dopers, the LZR Racer reduces drag significantly better than any other suit currently available. It's so form-fitting it takes Olympic medalist Natalie Coughlin 20 minutes to put hers on. Five-time Olympian Dara Torres requires two helpers to wedge herself into hers. Still, if the LZR isn't breaking any world records in locker rooms, the pool's a different story. Since the LZR's introduction four months ago, 44 world records have fallen to those who've managed to squeeze into one.

But what sort of message is such promiscuous record-breaking sending to our children? With the Olympics just around the corner, and the Tour already under way, this is high season for leather-lunged oratory about level playing fields, the spirit of sport, and the character-building that comes from joyless, obsessive, meticulously plotted training regimens that nonetheless do nothing to compromise the size of one's genitals.

A common theme of such rhetoric is that sport loses its metaphorical value and instructive authority as soon as things like magic Speedos—and even worse, magic anabolic agents—enter the picture. We value athletic competition in part, this reasoning goes, because it teaches us important life lessons about hard work, sacrifice, discipline, the passionate commitment to exceed one's limits. But when an athlete employs unsanctioned performance-enhancement techniques, somehow that all goes out the window and sport becomes an empty, meaningless, completely corrupt sham.

Or is it just that we're setting new world records for performance-enhancement hysteria? According to swimming's governing organization, FINA, the LZR Racer is legal because there's no evidence that it improves a swimmer's buoyancy—and yet its detractors characterize the suit as "drugs on a hanger." At this point, apparently, we're so wary of doping and its pernicious impact on sport that doping can occur even when no dope is actually involved!

And when dope is involved, it overshadows everything else. Versus, the cable channel that broadcasts the Tour de France in the U.S., has chosen to characterize this year's edition with the theme "Take Back the Tour." A promotional spot that airs repeatedly during the channel's commercial breaks features footage of Floyd Landis, Michael Rasmussen, and other pharmacologically suspect cyclists playing in reverse as singer Paul Weller warbles soulfully about clearing out his head, getting himself straight, making a brand new start. It's as if Versus believes the Tour must erase its entire recent history and go backwards into the future, toward some purer past, before EPO and testosterone digestifs, before autologous blood transfusions. Ah, yes, the good old days, when only cocaine, strychnine, and peppermint fueled the peleton, and the heroic alpine exploits of Gallic ectomorphs could still legitimately inspire us to push past our own boundaries and pain thresholds.

During the chatty intro segments that start each Tour broadcast, the Versus announcers have been taking special care to mention the new procedures and policies designed to keep riders clean. During the broadcast's up-close-and-personal profiles, past and present luminaries issue vague, halting platitudes about the positive new attitudes, positive new beginnings, the potential for change. Eventually, as one of the world's greatest sporting events is reduced to tedious a AA meeting, one can't but wonder: In all those prior Tours that we're supposed to wipe clean from our memories, were the drugs the only thing that mattered? What about rain, wind, flat tires, crashes, feuding teammates, efficient mechanics, drunken fans creating havoc in the roadways, routes that favored one type of rider over another, injuries, illnesses, perfectly executed race strategies?

If banned substances or other unsanctioned performance-enhancement techniques can single-handedly render a sport meaningless, that sport must not have much meaning to begin with. If a tremendous appetite for steroids is all that's required to achieve athletic excellence, Hulk Hogan wouldn't just be a D-list reality TV star—he'd be wearing the Tour's yellow jersey, closing in on Barry Bonds' home run record, and, provided he could shoehorn himself into Natalie Coughlin's LZR Racer, breaking the 100-meter backstroke record too.

Which is not to say that EPO, anabolics, and all the other substances athletes illicitly consume in an effort to beat those blessed with superior aerobic capacity or God's favor don't have an impact on outcomes and the culture of sport in general. Obviously they do. But they don't have nearly as much impact on sport's metaphorical value as anti-doping crusaders insist. Indeed, while Versus' cyclists-in-reverse commercial is supposed to signal a new beginning for the scandal-plagued Tour, it plays more like a highlight reel. Look at Floyd Landis as he hunches over his handlebars while barreling down a mountain at more than 50 mph and abnormally high testosterone/epitestosterone ratios are not what comes to mind. Instead, you see his courage and skill, his intense desire to win, his love of the sport. Dope-fueled or not, he looks like a hero and continues to inspire.

Meanwhile, consider the kinds of messages that arise from sport's current War on Doping. Be suspicious of achievement, wary of innovation. Embrace progress only if it's rare and gradual. According to the War on Doping mindset, the only way to ensure fair play is to monitor athletes more intrusively than we monitor paroled felons. Long hours in the pool, a knack for guessing curve ball when indeed a curve ball is coming, and all the other elements that lead to exceptional athletic performance mean nothing in the face of the awesome, incontrovertible, game-altering powers of dope. But are these really the messages we want to be teaching our children? And if the human spirit really is so impotent and inconsequential compared to a few hundred IUs of EPO or a magic Speedo, why are we even bothering to suit up at all?

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer living in San Francisco. Read his reason archive here.

Free the Fireworks!

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Outside of hardcore porn, is there any art form as static as a Fourth of July fireworks display? Once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, yet year after year, like stoned zombies staring at screensavers, we tilt our heads to the sky and watch amateurs and professionals alike stage the pyrotechnical equivalents of gang bangs. If a dozen silver comets shooting across the heavens are spectacular, 100 are even better! And why not throw some crimson, gold, and turquoise into the mix too? Thus the spectrum expands, the explosions multiply, the choreography grows increasingly byzantine—but the basic plot remains unchanged.

So why are we so crazy about fireworks? In 1976, the year the United States celebrated its bicentennial, American patriots blew up 29 million pounds of fireworks. In 2006, the American Pyrotechnic Association reports, we exploded nearly 10 times that amount—in part, no doubt, because 10 times as many events have become fireworks appropriate. NFL games, casino openings, political conventions, weddings, and even a few funerals now get the sort of schlock-and-aww pageantry we once reserved for the Fourth.

Industry boosters typically attribute the growing popularity of fireworks to better safety standards and fewer regulations prohibiting their use. But the pyrotechnics still do injure people; 9,200 Americans required medical attention due to fireworks injuries in 2006, according to Consumer Product Safety Commission statistics. (In contrast, 220,500 people suffered toy-related injuries that year.) And in most states, regulation remains strong. While prosecution is mainly reserved for individuals caught selling products that exceed Washington’s safety guidelines for “consumer fireworks”—e.g.,
M-80s, quarter sticks, and professional display fireworks that require a federal permit—penalties for much lesser offenses can be comically severe. In New York, for example, you can get three months in the slammer for possessing $50 worth of sparklers.

Thus, while fireworks may splatter the sky with every neon hue Chinese chemists can summon from strontium and copper chloride, they exist in a legal and moral gray zone. They’re kind of safe and sort of permissible, but also sort of dangerous and kind of against the law. All of which, of course, makes them immensely appealing. They offer us a chance to engage in semi-illicit behavior without excessive risk of punishment or serious injury, at least until the NYPD makes zero sparkler tolerance its primary mandate.

If John Adams were alive today, he’d be issuing $500 fines for possessing sparklers too—but only because it would pain him to see us commemorating the Fourth in such timid fashion. In 1776 he exclaimed in a letter to his wife that the anniversary of America’s independence “ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”

In the decades that followed, Adams’ countrymen readily embraced this edict—or at least the “guns, bells, bonfires” part of it. By the end of the 19th century, however, the social fallout from chaotic Independence Day celebrations began to coalesce into an anti-fireworks movement. In a 1904 letter to The New York Times, a physician lamented the Fourth as “a sad story of amputated little fingers, arms, or legs.” In 1910 a Philadelphia rabbi called it “the annual day of slaughter of the innocents, the day of conflagrations, the day of compulsory self-exile, the day of agony for the sick and feeble.” Newspapers ran stories about drunken mobs firing guns in the streets, shooting Roman candles into crowds, and attacking police officers.

Progressive advocacy groups such as the Playground Association of America, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the American Medical Association began to actively campaign for a “safe and sane” Fourth of July. “In 1903 the AMA began keeping a tally of people who were killed and injured by fireworks,” says James R. Heintze, author of The Fourth of July Encyclopedia. “And out of that movement the legislation began to occur in a number of different cities.”

In her 1989 book Glorious Fourth: An American Holiday, an American History, the historian Diana K. Appelbaum writes that the AMA reported 4,543 fireworks-related deaths from 1903 to 1910. Cleveland, Chicago, and other major cities started banning the private use of fireworks and offering “safe and sane” celebrations that included parades, pageants, and the sort of large public fireworks displays that remain popular today, in the place of unregulated displays of spontaneously combusting patriotism. Individual citizens could no longer be trusted to celebrate the roles independence and liberty played in their lives.

But some Americans will give up their sparklers only when you peel them from their cold, dead, occasionally fingerless hands. Today, fireworks that meet a set of requirements established by the Consumer Product Safety Commission are legal at the federal level, but in states and municipalities where they’re regulated more stringently, the locals simply devise ways to get around the law. In Wisconsin individuals aren’t allowed to buy fireworks. Organizations can, but only after obtaining a permit issued by a local government official.

Some communities allow retailers to sell permits directly to their customers, however, as long as they promise to pass along the fees they collect. Because individuals aren’t allowed to purchase fireworks even with a permit, the retailers establish “user associations” that consist entirely of their customers. The customer buys his stockpile of fireworks, buys a permit, joins the association, and in one seamless transaction is transformed from a guy who’d like to set off some pinwheels in his backyard into an officially sanctioned community organization.

No doubt such ingenuity is as much a testament to the American spirit as the 16-shot “Untamed Retribution” aerial repeater, which comes in a package emblazoned with a bald eagle whose menacing, belligerent glare suggests little tolerance for namby-pamby expressions of patriotism like smoke pots and pie-eating contests.

But should the people of Wisconsin have to resort to such elaborate workarounds just to get their hands on some neutered, prettified sky bombs that even a pacifist floral arranger could love? In the eyes of John Adams, celebrating the nation’s birthday in noisy, incendiary fashion wasn’t just a right; it was a duty! To fulfill that duty in Wisconsin, alas, you have to behave like a Soviet Union bureaucrat trying to wangle himself a few extra vodka coupons.

In the first decade of the 20th century, when as many as 600 citizens were dying from fireworks injuries each year, such regulations may have been easier to tolerate. From 1988 to 2004, according to the Centers for Disease Control, the U.S. averaged approximately 6.4 fireworks-related deaths per year. According to the American Pyrotechnical Association, the number of injuries per 100,000 pounds of fireworks dropped 91 percent from 1976 to 2006. Meanwhile, with professional outfits like Fireworks by Grucci and Pyro Spectaculars by Souza producing massive fireworks blitzkriegs in honor of nothing more than halftime, it’s only natural, in the age of YouTube, Home Depot, and all the other manifestations of do-it-yourself culture, for individual Americans to believe they have the right to emulate such efforts, especially on the one day of the year when we’re ostensibly celebrating our status as citizens of the freest nation in the history of the world.

Thus, as with porn, the escalatory nature of fireworks isn’t just an aesthetic phenomenon but a political one. Just as we test the boundaries of our freedom by pushing from Playboy to Hustler to Little Red Rides the Hood #2, we do the same by pushing from firecrackers to cherry bombs to items with names like Mineshell Mayhem and Live Free or Die. Blowing up huge caches of fireworks doesn’t just celebrate our freedom; it certifies it—a patriotic act our Founding Fathers would have readily endorsed.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

Sex, Lies, and Reality Television

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Moment of Truth, the ludicrously hyped Fox reality series where contestants answer intrusive questions for a shot at $500,000, is back for its second "shocking" season, and just like its first "shocking" season (which only ended a couple months ago), the new one delivers about as much voltage as a flat can of Coke. A married woman admits she's cheated on her husband? That revelation wouldn't even earn her a spot in Jerry Springer's studio audience. A man has gambling debts he hid from his wife? Until that man actually bets and loses his wife in a poker game, Dr. Phil is not interested.

If the disclosures that occur on Moment of Truth aren't that alarming, however, the show does have one intriguing aspect: Contestants routinely opt out of the game after reaching the $100,000 mark. In doing so, they're essentially acknowledging that their secrets are worth more than the additional $400,000 that is theirs for the taking, simply for answering a few more questions accurately. In an age where people expose every last detail about themselves for no payoff save a few extra MySpace readers, this aspect of the game is genuinely shocking. At least a handful of people in America still value privacy.

Meanwhile, a British company has developed a camera that can see through clothes at 80 feet. Lawmakers in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania are contemplating a measure that will make it mandatory for certain businesses to operate security cameras on their premises around the clock. Soon, our surveillance tools will be more omniscient than God, but will they be as forgiving? On Moment of Truth, the contestants aren't spies or terrorists or serial killers—they're waiters and hair salon assistants and housewives. They think of themselves as decent people. "On a daily basis, would you say you try to be honest with everyone you meet?" host Mark Walberg asks a contestant, during a friendly moment of good-cop banter before the formal interrogation begins.

"I do," the woman replies. "I'm a big believer in honesty."

"Question two," Walberg continues, his voice sharpening to signify his shift into bad-cop mode. "Have you ever told a credit card company that a charge was not yours, when in fact you knew it was?"

"Um, yes, I have," the woman answers sheepishly.

Every episode follows the same downward trajectory. The boyishly handsome former NFL quarterback? The pleasant-looking New York housewife? Within minutes, they all look like creeps—selfish, deceitful, hypocritical, morally deficient. They touch clients inappropriately. They hit strangers' cars and don't leave a note. They snoop through the desks of their co-workers. They're happy when their siblings experience misfortune.

Most of us have committed similar indiscretions, of course—but there's only so many people Mark Walberg can fit into his schedule. Lucky for us, that's how justice works in a general. As a culture, we're not very good at detecting wrongdoing, or meting out punishment when we do. Such inefficiencies gives us the freedom to break speed limits, overestimate tax write-offs, and steal grapes from the supermarket, and it also gives us the freedom to conceive of ourselves as generally decent sorts. Our forgetfulness helps too. Sure, we may pick our nose from time to time, or drive with our children sitting on our laps when they should be in a carseat, or outsource our pleasure fulfillment to paid professionals. But we don't dwell. We forget these lesser moments, and since there's no easily accessible public record of them, who's to know? Bad people? Not us. In fact, 95% of the time, we're big believers in honesty.

Alas, the days of flying under the radar are coming to an end. Unless we're doing something wrong, we're told, the kind of pandemic surveillance that is just around the corner poses no threat to us—and yet look at how our most closely monitored celebrities are responding to such pressures. There's a chance, no doubt, that Britney and Lindsay are members of a terrorist cell in league with Al Qaeda, and the strain of potential exposure is what's making them so crazy. Or maybe it's just that a bottle of booze and a fistful of tranquilizers is a perfectly reasonable way to address the fact that every public moment of your life—and thus every little slip-up you make, not to mention the really spectacular ones—is going to get recorded, publicized, analyzed.

To his great credit, President Bush endures similar scrutiny, and yet he never forgets to wear his pants in public. But not everyone's made of such strong stuff. On the most talked-about episode of Moment of Truth, after a contestant already confessed to cheating on her husband and admitted that she was in love with another man on the day she got married, she was asked if she thought she was a good person. "Honestly, I think I am a good person," she replied, with apparent conviction, but the show's talking polygraph quickly set her straight: "That answer is false."

At first, the woman's mouth opened into a tiny circle of disbelief, then she attempted to make a case for herself. "I think that I have become a better person," she tried, but Walberg wasn't buying it. The machine said she was lying, he carefully explained. "Your truth is that you don't think you're a good person at all," he concluded, with all the moral authority that accrues from having presided over shows like 101 Biggest Celebrities Oops and Temptation Island.

And how, really, could she rebut that? In approximately five minutes, she'd admitted that her marriage was a farce, that she'd stolen money from a past employer, that she'd sooner give food to a stray dog than a homeless person. All she could do was nod in agreement. She was a bad person. The evidence was there. In the coming years, as we perfect our abilities to capture and catalog every misdeed we commit, it's a conclusion we're all likely to reach.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer living in San Francisco. Read his reason archive here.

The Birth of the Nuppie

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 20 May 2008 07:00:00 EDT

At 31 inches long and 48 inches wide, weighing approximately 300 pounds, Casulo may be the largest, heaviest gadget in the history of gee-whiz technology. And yet for a few days in February, as news of its existence traveled from one trend-spotting blog to the next, the bulky rectangular box captivated the attention of those normally preoccupied by much tinier fare.

Created by two German designers, Casulo is an almost magically compact trunk crammed with enough stylish furniture to outfit a studio apartment. The pieces include a slatted bed frame and a twin mattress, a sizable armoire, a desk with a four-drawer cabinet, a six-shelf bookcase, one height-adjustable stool, and two square seating cubes that moonlight as additional storage space. Its footprint matches that of a standard European pallet, making it easy to ship and store. Its contents can be unpacked and assembled in approximately 10 minutes, no tools required.

Casulo’s streamlined surfaces are devoid of any non-functional ornamentation—the mood the system projects is one of clean, efficient, and fairly institutional playfulness. If there were a high-security prison for criminal Playmobil figures, it would be equipped with this stuff. But if whatever comfort Casulo’s spartan furniture offers the body remains largely untested—so far, only a prototype exists—the comfort it affords restless souls is obvious.

Thanks to an ever-expanding array of wireless technologies, we can now fit our jobs, our record collections, and our five favorite friends into our pockets. But even our most state-of-the-art futons and entertainment centers remain hopelessly immobile, their practical range limited to one side of the room or the other. Products like Casulo attempt to remedy that: Any day now, they promise, our physical property will be just as portable as our intellectual property.

No doubt old Tom Joad would be surprised by our kinetic aspirations. On one hand, mobility in the service of leisure is a hallmark of the richest among us—these days, you can easily spend more than $1 million on a luxury RV, and if you have a spare $100 million, Space Adventures, Ltd. will be more than happy to send you to the moon next year. On the other hand, mobility yoked to domesticity, mobility as an economic strategy, have traditionally been hallmarks of the underclass.

In the last decades of the 19th century and the first of the 20th, what the historian Carlos Schwantes has dubbed a “wageworkers’ frontier” existed in the American West and Canada. Millions of migrant laborers provided temporary manpower for the fisheries, mines, lumber operations, farms, canneries, cattle ranches, and construction companies operating in the new territories, and mobility was the key to their livelihood. As soon as one job ended, they hit the rails or the highways looking for the next. “There are 300,000 hobos in the country, and we want good roads so it will be easier for us to find work,” exclaimed Jeff Davis, the self-proclaimed “King of Hobos,” at a 1913 meeting of automotive industry executives in Detroit.

But however important this just-in-time army of human labor may have been to the region’s economic development, the hobos (whom Davis always took care to distinguish from “tramps” because of their desire to work) weren’t particularly respectable. Without families to support or mortgages to pay, these highly mobile workers, most of whom were young men, spent their money in saloons, gambling dens, and brothels.

In the 1920s, John Grissim explains in The Complete Buyer’s Guide to Manufactured Homes & Land, a nationwide craze for family camping inspired some car owners to build trailers comprised of “little more than folding canvas tents on a wooden platform mounted on a single axle.” Eventually, commercial vendors began producing trailers too; when the Great Depression hit in the 1930s and people started moving west in search of better prospects, they often turned their erstwhile leisure vehicles into home sweet home when they got there. “It wasn’t long before campgrounds that accepted these semi-permanent tenants were dubbed trailer parks,” Grissim writes.

Citizens with more permanent roots dubbed these parks “trailer slums,” and mobile living became the province of the poor—and, to a lesser extent, plucky retirees piloting Winnebagos across the country at a pace that would make even Jack Kerouac weary. But why let the oldsters have all the fun? Why should rock stars and power forwards have a monopoly on traveling from urban playground to urban playground in pursuit of new customers for their services?

In the current bestseller The 4-Hour Workweek, the 29-year-old slackerpreneur and self-improvement guru Tim Ferriss insists that the greatest assets of the “New Rich”—and the keys to creating “luxury lifestyles”—are “time and mobility” rather than huge bank balances. To put it another way: That homeless guy sleeping in his own urine in your building’s doorway? He isn’t as poor as he looks!

Ferriss, a self-described tango champion and online dietary supplement tycoon, disdains the notion of slaving away in white-collar serfdom for the deferred promise of geriatric adventure. Instead, he preaches the virtues of economic autonomy, extended travel, and “mini-retirements” that last months or years instead of weeks. And thus Tom Joad’s nightmare becomes today’s white-collar dream. What is Casulo but the creative class’s version of a homeless guy’s shopping cart? And what are vehicles like the Design Within Reach Airstream Trailer or the GMC Pad but more elaborate and mobile versions of Casulo?

Introduced last year, the $50,000 DWR Trailer updates Airstream’s iconic, aluminum-shelled asphalt dinghy with an interior suitable for a Dwell centerfold. The GMC Pad, so speculative it doesn’t even exist as a prototype, is a concept for something General Motors describes as a “mobile urban loft” for modern city dwellers who’ve been “priced out of Southern California’s escalating housing market.”

Along with side panels decorated with graffiti murals, it includes all of the touches that deliver the “cultural & geographic freedom” that today’s migrant copywriters demand—Thermador kitchen appliances, a personal spa designed in collaboration with Kohler, satellite TV. “Whether located in walking distance from your job @ TBWAChiatDay, spending a couple evenings along PCH, or wintering at Mammoth, with the GMC PAD, home is where you want it,” General Motors advises. “And commuting is what other people do.”

No doubt it’s easy to mock the idea of, say, rebel handbag designers lighting out for the territories in their DWR Airstreams, mad to live, mad to be saved, mad to admire the matte ebony finish of their eco-friendly flooring and burn, burn, burn like recessed halogen lighting tastefully exploding across the laminate doors of the roomy cabin’s overhead lockers.

But it’s a seductive vision too. Ever since Huck Finn decided to go downriver on a raft for no other reason than to escape the bounds of sivilization, hyper-mobility has stood as one of the purest expressions of American liberty. Now, as gas prices and gridlock threaten to constrain us, as Minutemen and TSA officials do their best to keep the flow of human beings in check, it’s no wonder products like Casulo and the GMC Pad are so appealing. Shouldn’t we be able to move around the planet at least as freely as our credit histories and embarrassing party photos do?

And must we really sacrifice comfort and style just because we want to live the itinerant life? In On the Road, Sal and Dean remain so committed to constant movement, one suspects, in part because the accommodations are so squalid whenever they actually arrive anywhere. In 2008 shouldn’t you be able to consort with winos and hookers all day and then, after managing your online dietary supplement business via your on-board WiFi connection, fall asleep on pin-tucked Baltic flax linens?

Today’s merry entrepreneurs and migrant knowledge workers can combine the liberating mobility of the Beats with the liberating autonomy of having a simple, Walden-like shelter even Martha Stewart might envy. The dream doesn’t get any more American than that.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

Drop Barbies, Not Bombs, on Iran

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 06 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Despite Hillary Clinton's penchant for magnificently monochromatic pantsuits that are just a couple epaulets short of colonel status in Michael Jackson's toddler army, the bellicose Democratic senator from New York is apparently incapable of intimidating Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In a recent appearance on Good Morning America, Clinton told ABC News' Chris Cuomo that she will definitely attack Iran if it launches a nuclear strike against Israel, and even added a dash of swaggering trash-talk to her promise. "Whatever stage of development they might be in their nuclear weapons program in the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel," she exclaimed, "we would be able to totally obliterate them."

But while Clinton's saber-rattling may have unnerved lesser Iranian officials such as Amb. Mehdi Danesh-Yazdi, who lodged a formal complaint to the United Nations, Ahmadinejad appeared unmoved by Clinton's morning-chat bravado. "Presidency of a woman in a country that boasts its gunmanship is unlikely," he quipped.

Meanwhile, Iran is terrified of Barbie, the tiny polyvinyl sex bomb who loves shopping, pizza, and brushing her hair, but has few satellite-guided missiles at her disposal. According to Iran's Prosecutor General, Ghorban Ali Dori Najfabadi, a loosely organized coalition, led by the world's most impeccably accessorized mercenary but also including additional combatants like Harry Potter and Spider-man, is doing "irreparable damage" to Iranian children. "The irregular importation of such toys, which unfortunately arrive through unofficial sources and smuggling, is destructive culturally and a social danger," Najafabadi cautioned (doubtless worried about the effect on sales of Iran's "official doll," Sara).

In the long run, of course, a Barbie revolution would be more devastating—and humiliating—to Iran's theocracy than a nuclear strike. Fundamentalists of all stripes inevitably fear homegrown dissidents more than foreign aggression: The prospect of annihilation is more palatable than the specter of choice. In Iran, the prosecutor general is battling plastic dolls. In the U.S., the American Family Association (AFA), armed to the teeth with adjectives, is decrying the "explicit, open-mouth homosexual kissing" that recently occurred on As the World Turns, the long-running soap opera underwritten by consumer-products giant Procter & Gamble.

In August 2007, As the World Turns made history when it showed a kiss between two gay male characters, Noah and Luke, or as their fans refer to them, "Nuke." In the months that followed, their romance continued, albeit with only one additional instance of same-sex first base action. Suddenly, in fact, even modest, closed-mouth homosexual air-kissing seemed off-limits—whenever the characters seemed on the verge of smooching, the camera panned away. Viewers took note of this uncharacteristic discretion and began campaigning for another kiss; a couple weeks ago, the show delivered. (And now the American Family Association would like you to see it too.)

According to the AFA, Procter & Gamble wants to "desensitize viewers to the homosexual lifestyle and help make the unhealthy and immoral lifestyle more acceptable to society, especially to children and youth." No doubt this is because Procter & Gamble's main business is selling Tide, Crest, and Pampers, and the unhealthy and immoral gay lifestyle inevitably leads to a pathological obsession with clean laundry, cavity prevention, and baby care.

In the case of Barbie, there in no multinational conglomerate driving the agenda. Mattel doesn't officially deploy its unlikely freedom fighter to Iran; the Barbies who show up in Tehran shop windows are smuggled into the country, the victims of international doll trafficking. Once there, however, they make the best of it, embodying the traditional American values of self-determination and haircare—and potentially exposing impressionable Iranian minds to phenomena as diverse as Frank Sinatra, the occult, investment opportunities involving miniature dog poop, and who knows what else.

Contemplating such matters, an obvious question arises: If Barbie's marginal and haphazard presence in Iran is so disruptive, what kind of impact might she have there if a more orchestrated effort to put additional sexy white boots on the ground was implemented? Luckily, the relative economy of a Barbie surge—an army of 200,000 cheerleaders for Western decadence can be mustered for the price of a dozen Tomahawk missiles—means our government isn't likely to get involved any time soon. If anything could dampen Barbie's revolutionary power, official U.S. sanction just might; the people of Iran already have one government too many trying to manage their doll-play.

Best just keep filling up your SUV, gas prices be damned. According to the Associated Press, the increasing presence of smuggled Barbies in Iran is "partly due to a dramatic rise in purchasing power as a result of increased oil revenues." As long as America's expressways remain bumper-to-bumper every weekday afternoon, hope for democracy in Iran exists.

And if we could aim a few gay soap opera Nukes their way, so much the better. After all, hardcore mullahs and old-school feminists aren't the only ones who despise Barbie's vacant but empowering gaze. In 2002, an AFA spokesman decried a pregnant version of Barbie's married sidekick Midge that featured a trap-door stomach with an adorable unborn baby inside it, exclaiming that "Mattel should stay out of the 'birds and bees' business and leave adult themes alone." (Yes, you read that right; the American Family Association is officially against childbirth.)

In 2006, Robert Knight, the confusingly virile president of Concerned Women of America, accused Barbie.com of trying to promote "bisexuality gender confusion" among visitors to its site, based on a poorly worded question in a survey that the site quickly amended. These days, however, such groups apparently don't have the troop strength to maintain a presence in every zone of the Culture Wars—they're too busy waging war on imaginary homosexuals to do battle with Barbie too.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer living in San Francisco. Read his reason archive here.

Hollywood's Decency Epidemic

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:01:00 EDT

On May 3, at the Wilshire Theater in Beverly Hills, there won’t be a single shamelessly naked trophy in the house. The 2008 CAMIE Awards will be celebrating “Character And Morality In Entertainment,” and in contrast to the disturbingly androgynous and probably bisexual Oscar, the CAMIE statuette is clad in a wholesome dress that leaves everything to the imagination except a beguiling flash of patinated bronze ankle. But don’t be getting any ideas, fresh guy! According to CAMIE’s creators, she is “a lovely and modest young woman.”

While Hollywood is the Thomas Edison of self-congratulation, always inventing new ways to honor itself, Tinseltown is apparently too busy churning out simulated sex and lovingly choreographed gore to devise an awards show that emphasizes family-friendly entertainment. Thus, the task was left to outsiders, and in 2001 Dr. Glen Griffin, a retired pediatrician and abstinence advocate from Salt Lake City, organized the first CAMIEs. The event was held at lunchtime, in a local park, and it seems safe to say that whatever its attractions were, Gwyneth Paltrow in a see-thru Alexander McQueen mesh tank-top was not one of them.

In 2005 the CAMIE Awards migrated to Los Angeles, and the production has been growing quickly ever since. Each year, it honors five theatrical and five made-for-TV movies that feature “positive role models who build character, overcome adversity, correct unwise choices, strengthen families, live moral lives and solve life’s problems with integrity and perseverance.” And each year, more and more industry types show up to pay tribute to technicolor virtue and inoffensiveness. “The reception from Hollywood has been great,” exclaims CAMIE Awards Productions president Joseph Lake.

Wait, Hollywood? The same Hollywood that presidential candidate Barack Obama recently chastised for allegedly marketing “violent, slasher, horror films” to six-year-olds? The same Hollywood that the Senate’s own Siskel and Ebert, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, have been panning for years now, via testy congressional hearings and proposals like the “Media Marketing Accountability Act”? (That would have made it potentially illegal to market R-rated movies in any medium with children under 17 in the audience.) The same Hollywood that packs TV’s “family hour” with 4.19 violent incidents, 3.76 sexual references or situations, 0.01 bleeped “cocksuckers,” and 1.08 unbleeped “hells” per hour in a wicked attempt to poison the minds of innocent and impressionable Parents Television Council employees?

Look around. America is in the throes of a raging decency epidemic. On American Idol, TV’s perennial ratings champ, even the edgiest contestants are a temporary-tattoo-removal away from blending in at an Osmond Family reunion. Reigning Disney Channel poppet Miley Cyrus oozes 100-proof adorableness so relentlessly that one suspects she actually has tiny little paws instead of hands and feet. The casts of tween favorites like Zoey 101 and High School Musical are so wholesome they make those hoodlums from Saved by the Bell look like extras in a Scorsese film.

Of the 20 movies that got the widest circulation in 2007, only two were rated R. From 2005 to 2007, during the traditional summer movie season—the first weekend of May through Labor Day—only 40 R-rated movies and zero NC-17 movies opened up in 500 or more theaters. According to the box office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations, this represents just 29 percent of movies in wide release.

In September 2006, Fox established a stand-alone division called Fox Faith to distribute movies with strong Christian themes. It also partnered with Walden Media—the production company created by billionaire Phillip Anschutz that has developed such hits as Charlotte’s Web, Bridge to Terabithia, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—with the aim of producing a half-dozen family-friendly movies a year.

Even Hollywood’s bad boys are going soft. During their tenure at Miramax, Harvey and Bob Weinstein released movies like Priest, Kids, and Dogma, and were only slightly less reviled than gay marriage amongst the family values brigade. At their new gig, the Weinstein Company, they’ve signed a multi-year first-look deal with Impact Entertainment, a Christian production company.

“Studios who in the past weren’t even interested in talking to us about this kind of stuff are submitting products to us on a regular basis,” says the CAMIEs’ Joseph Lake. “This year, we could have picked 20 movies to honor. Or even more—there were that many really good ones.” The Dove Foundation, a nonprofit organization that encourages the “production, distribution and consumption of wholesome family entertainment,” issued its blue-and-white “Family-Approved Seal” to 58 feature films released in 2007.

For connoisseurs of tasteful A-list nudity and deftly emoted expletives, things are getting a little dire. If you want to seamlessly exterminate the coarse language, blood-soaked imagery, and sexual themes from R-rated titles like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Lethal Weapon 4 so you can more comfortably consume their more positive, character-building messages with your family in a safe viewing environment, there is a device, the ClearPlay DVD player, that promises to do just this. But where is the machine that can make the excruciatingly dainty Miss Potter more engaging by magically deleting Renee Zellweger’s Victorian bodice on occasion, or inserting a charming explosion or two?

Alas, even as the floodtides of rectitude threaten to give us all a cleansing soak, the Culture War’s most dogged mercenaries grow increasingly desperate to sound notes of alarm. The Parents Television Council is so eager to characterize your flat-screen as the portal to Satan’s eternal multiplex that it actually characterizes the plastic surgeries on the MTV show I Want a New Face as “violent incidents.” It also employs eagle-eyed lip-readers to decipher and categorize the bleeped-out utterances of reality TV contestants. In 180 hours of family-hour programming the group recently assessed, there were 30 bleeped “fuck”s, one bleeped “bitch,” one bleeped “asshole,” and an especially troubling 54 “unknown” bleeps.

In a column touting the October 2007 release of the animated movie The Ten Commandments, the conservative pundit Janice Shaw Crouse noted that only two of the top 20 grossing movies of 2005 had an R rating. “This shift in public tastes has yet to be recognized by the Hollywood elites, who continue to promote movies that are less financially successful at the box office,” she concluded, without bothering to reveal the mysterious entity that created, distributed, and marketed the other 18. Has Lincoln, Nebraska, suddenly turned into a hotbed of major studio film production?

At this point, there is pretty much too much content for everyone—you can waste your entire life watching warm, gentle tales of perseverance and uplift just as easily as you can waste it watching hardcore porn. While the Internet has shown us that Hollywood will never out-sleaze a Wichita housewife with a members-only website, or out-mayhem the grassroots auteurs behind Ghetto Fights #3, the Industry does its best to keep pace. It regularly convinces dewy ingenues like Natalie Portman and Anne Hathaway that they will not be taken seriously as artists until they prove their nipples can act too. It gives Sylvester Stallone $50 million to see how many decapitations he can simulate in 91 minutes. And that’s exactly why so many of us will always love Hollywood.

But the choice is no longer between frontal nudity and disembodied heads. When the aforementioned Ten Commandments opened on 830 screens yet ended up grossing less than $1 million in its four-week run, it was actually great news for decency advocates. Apparently there is so much wholesome programming out there that the audience for such stuff can afford to be a little choosy.

Nor did The Ten Commandments make the CAMIE Awards cut, either. Which, if you think about it, is a fairly stunning development. A bunch of family-friendly outsiders from Salt Lake City have deemed the work of traditional Hollywood elites like 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. more uplifting than a film based on the Bible itself.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

Absolut Faux Pas

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:26:00 EDT

Did you hear the one about the Swedish vodka company recently purchased by a French conglomerate marketing to Mexican consumers that pissed off U.S. bloggers? Ah, the perils of globalism! In early March, Absolut ran an ad in Mexican magazines as part of its "In an Absolut World" campaign. The ad featured a map of North America from the 1830s, when Mexico still controlled great portions of land it eventually coughed up one way or another to the United States. If the real world were as perfect as it sometimes seems when you're smashed on vodka, Absolut suggested coyly, the Dallas Cowboys would be Mexico's team, not America's, and the Beach Boys would've had to settle for Nebraska girls.

Apparently, Absolut's ad agency put too much faith in news stories that we gringos are so geographically illiterate we think maps are just promotional posters for globes. But as any border patrol vigilante worth his margarita salt can tell you, what happens in Mexico City doesn't always stay in Mexico City. The controversial Absolut ads crossed the Rio Grande via the Internet, and U.S. bloggers with anti-immigration leanings, already sensitive to the idea of being undermined by an army of dishwashers and day laborers, demanded a boycottini.

But do these angry patriots really believe drunken Mexicans fantasize about owning Salt Lake City? Do they really believe Absolut wants to decrease the size of its most lucrative market, America? It's just an ad, part of a campaign that portrays a glibly "idealized" alternate universe. In another ad in the campaign, men get pregnant instead of women. In a third, the Almighty Bartender reaches down from the heavens to dump ice cubes into an ocean that is presumably hot with the sweat of boiling dolphins. As much as Absolut may position itself as a light-hearted advocate for gender equality and the War on Climate Change, it's mostly a light-hearted advocate for selling as much vodka as possible—and it's not above sucking up to its many different constituencies to do so.

Indeed, over the last three decades Absolut has done a brilliant job of this. In 1980, vodka had a reputation as a cheap commodity that was so generic even Communists couldn't screw it up too badly. Then the Swedes began exporting Absolut in those chic medicinal bottles. And running ads in virtually every magazine big enough to earn a spot on your local newsrack. (Possibly the one thing Martha Stewart Living, The New Republic, Garden Design, Scientific American, and Hustler have in common is that they've all run Absolut ads.)

The spare but glamorous layouts of those initial Absolut ads transformed vodka's status from cheap commodity to yuppie status item: They were like a pair of designer jeans that got you drunk! Over the next 25 years, Absolut employed a strategy of versatile monotony, producing more than 1,500 ads that followed the same simple template as the first one—a depiction of the bottle plus a short phrase beginning with the word "Absolut."

As the campaign progressed, it grew more and more abstract, and thus more and more effective. The boastful language of the earliest ads ("Absolut Perfection," "Absolut Gem") gave way to puns that said nothing about the product itself. A bottle wrapped in chains was paired with the phrase "Absolut Security." A bottle turned on its head was paired with the phrase "Absolut Yoga." The company was no longer selling itself as a maker of vodka; it was selling itself as a maker of witty but empty advertising. In the same way that vodka is so tasteless, odorless, and colorless it can be mixed with just about anything, the Absolut brand was so meaningless it could be mixed with just about anything too.

Thanks to this chameleon-like ability to appeal to so many different kinds of consumers, Absolut is the most popular imported vodka in America. It's the third largest liquor brand worldwide. Two years ago, however, it decided to finally retire its traditional ads. Last year, it unveiled its first "In an Absolut World" ads; unlike their empty, eye-catching predecessors, these ones convey actual messages, often with a progressive slant. And that, Absolut has learned in the wake of its fantasy annexation of a sizable chunk of the American West and Southwest, is a recipe for trouble.

Still, is a single controversial ad grounds for boycotts and disownment? Last year, America drank approximately 1.68 billion shots of Absolut. Think of all the drunken hook-ups that represents! Think of all the business deals Absolut helped seal, the concerts and football games and slow Thursday afternoons it enhanced. Plus there's the question of whose "perfect world" Absolut's border realignment really represents. Ultimately, more Mexico would just mean less America; the net result would be fewer illegal immigrants invading the U.S. in search of a better life. That doesn't sound like a Mexican fantasy at all. Instead, it's a scenario nativists would toast.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

I'm With Stupid

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:00:00 EDT

On April 29 a grassroots army of teenaged billboards, provocatively packaged in combed cotton agitprop, will be deployed across the land. Their goal? Raise consciousness, spark discussion, and, if all goes according to plan, get thrown out of class. The occasion is the sixth annual National Pro-Life T-Shirt Day.

“When school administrators harass students, tell them they can’t wear the shirt, it raises awareness,” says Erik Whittington, director of Rock for Life, the group that organizes the event. “The media gets ahold of it. The word gets out. The more people who hear the phrase on the shirt, the more we educate people.”

This year, Whittington says his organization has big plans. To promote Pro-Life T-Shirt Day, they’re creating a Rock for Life website where the young pronatalist participants can network with each other. It’ll be like MySpace or Facebook, except that instead of connecting over a common interest in drunken snapshots and copyright infringement, the teens will bond via a shared passion for fetuses. Even with such Web 2.0 accessorizing, however, the key to the event’s potency remains the all-powerful T-shirt. “It has abortion in big letters,” says Whittington of this year’s model. “Then we have three graphics side by side. The first two are images of small children in the womb at early stages. The third image is blank. Under those images, it reads, Growing. Growing. Gone.”

Considering all the incendiary polemics that characterize both sides of the abortion divide, this rhetorical dinger is fairly benign. Yet some kind of escalatory alchemy occurs when free speech is wedded to casual wear; the mildly provocative becomes untenable, the sophomoric too obscene to bear. Compared to sexier media devices like, say, the iPhone, T-shirts are pretty clunky. Their storage capacity is limited. They’re not Bluetooth-enabled. And yet they boast a sense of intimacy and authority few other content delivery systems can match. They come, after all, with a living, breathing byline attached. They’re far more mobile than other forms of meat-space spam, such as billboards and posters; they literally get in your face.

In January of this year, several visitors wearing T-shirts emblazoned with various impeach-Bush-and-Cheney messages claimed that security guards at the National Archives Building—the place where the original version of the First Amendment now resides—barred them from the premises. In 1991, in the wake of the Gulf War, the Kuwaiti government sentenced one man to 15 years in jail simply for wearing a Saddam Hussein T-shirt. Today in the United States, we’re far more enlightened: Selling a T-shirt inscribed with the names of military personnel who died in Iraq will only get you a maximum sentence of one year in Louisiana and Oklahoma.

Are you against sodomy or breast cancer? In favor of “hot moms” or John Edwards? In 2007 each of these convictions got at least one high school student kicked out of class. In Wisconsin, Edgerton High School enforces a zero tolerance policy against Insane Clown Posse T-shirts. In Aurora, Illinois, all it takes to earn a trip to the principal’s office is a T-shirt with a large dollar sign on it.

How did endorsing capitalism or B-list presidential candidates become so controversial? In the 1980s and ’90s, hoping to crack down on intracurricular violence and crime, a growing number of schools resorted to the sartorial communism of dress codes and uniforms. As President Bill Clinton put it in 1996, “If it means that teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets, then our public schools should be able to require their students to wear school uniforms.” In the wake of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, message T-shirts and any other style of dress that undermined the notion that high school students were the new maximum-security inmates fell under suspicion. In the wake of 9/11—Columbine for adults—this attitude spilled over into our malls, airports, and presidential town hall meetings.

It’s not just high school massacres and terrorist attacks that have left us so intolerant of our fellow citizens’ chests. During the last decade, pretty much every major media innovation—Fox News, Google, Napster, iTunes, Digg—has involved filtering information more precisely, giving us more and more control over the data we ingest. But that uncompromising raw-foods zealot at the organic farmer’s market whose shirt reads “Chewing is murder”? Or the perky fetus hugger who wants you to know that “Mean abortionists suck”? Steve Jobs hasn’t figured out a way to delete them from your life yet.

“If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?” the satirist Fran Lebowitz quipped in her 1978 essay collection Metropolitan Life, published when message T-shirts were enjoying their first wave of cultural ubiquity. What this sentiment doesn’t acknowledge is that it’s exactly because people don’t want to listen to us that the drive-by evangelism of T-shirts is so enduring. Body-borne messages can’t be muted, fast-forwarded, unsubscribed, banished to the “ignore” list, opted out of, or dumped in the recycle bin. Unlike telemarketers or Jehovah’s Witnesses, they don’t invade anyone’s privacy. Their zero-decibel proselytizing is simultaneously low-key and obtrusive, forcing any innocent bystander we share an elevator with to contemplate our thoughts on gun control, illegal immigration, and the availability of low-cost moustache rides.

Instead of avoiding such encounters with the dye-sublimated Other, we should embrace them as a kind of civic spinach: While we may not enjoy them, they’re good for us. In Tinker v. Des Moines, the landmark 1969 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court determined that high school students have a First Amendment right to express political and social opinions in school settings, Justice Abe Fortas observed that “any word spoken, in class, in the lunchroom, or on the campus, that deviates from the views of another person may start an argument or cause a disturbance. But our Constitution says that we must take this risk; and our history says that it is this sort of hazardous freedom—this kind of openness—that is the basis of our national strength and of the independence and vigor of Americans who grow up and live in this relatively permissive, often disputatious society.”

In the late 1990s era of no-logo vogue, cultural commentators fretted that the once-democratic medium of the T-shirt had been co-opted by corporations, and that T-shirt buyers were concerned only with raising the planet’s Hilfiger consciousness and saving the FUBUs. “The slogans on contemporary T-shirts are increasingly meaningless,” the novelist and columnist Russell Smith observed in The Globe and Mail in 2000. “Most of them are simply the brand name of the T-shirt itself.”

Now that our T-shirts are so blithely outspoken—and deliberately offensive—on every issue from Medicare to Britney Spears, it sometimes seems as if we’d like to ban our way back to a more sartorially decorous era. Ultimately, however, the T-shirt skirmishes that continuously erupt are oddly reassuring. Can the public schools be as out of control as they’re often alleged to be if all it takes to get suspended from one is an “I ♥ My Wiener” shirt? Has our public sphere grown as hopelessly coarse as our loudest cultural scrub maids insist if a shirt featuring a faux fishing theme and the phrase “Master Baiter” is enough to make Southwest Airlines ground you?

Shouldn’t we take comfort in the fact that so many high school students are ready to fight for their right to champion the unborn, maternal hotties, and whatever else they can think of to test the limits of Tinker v. Des Moines? T-shirts may intrude upon our lives in the public sphere, but they’re also our most vivid reminder that free speech is woven into the fabric of our culture.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

Mothers Doin' It for Themselves!

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Behind placid suburban facades, in seemingly normal neighborhoods, restless housewives are dismembering and enucleating babies, baking them in ovens in pursuit of that gently throttled look, then selling them to strangers. And, no, it's not Satan who's making them do it—it's eBay.

Thanks to a recent British documentary, My Fake Baby, the world at large now knows about the "reborning" community, a mostly female subculture of artisans and collectors organized around vinyl infants who begin life as inexpensive, plain-looking dolls and, through the meticulous craft of maternal Dr. Frankensteins, metamorphize into super-realistic creatures that look and feel just like genuine lifeless babies. The rarest specimens fuel high-stakes eBay bidding wars that can reach upwards of $5000.

Naturally, the reporters behind My Fake Baby present the phenomenon as a disturbing trend. Grown women fussing and fawning over trompe-l'œil zombie tots who stay cute, silent, and unsoiled forever, an infinite repository for uncomplicated maternal cuddling? Cue the sad keyboards and all the dsytopian foreboding they can conjure! Punch up the narrator's voice-over with a touch of sterile sci-fi detachment!

But why the need for judicious alarm every time some new species of low-tech android manifests itself? Have the men who love women crafted exclusively from stain-resistant silicone taught us nothing about the future of interpersonal relationships? Ten years into the RealDoll phenomenon, you'd think we'd be comfortable with the fact that Canis lupus familiaris's days as man's best friend are numbered: Clearly, the future belongs to more convenient, customizable, obligation-free companions.

As with sex doll sculptors, the goal of reborn artisans is verisimilitude, the production of artifacts that "feel incredibly real and will flop in your arms just like a real newborn baby." The hair that decorates a reborn's skull and brows often comes from genuine humans, or at the very least, well-bred goats. After multiple layers of paint, a reborn's tiny face and hands bear all the subtleties and imperfections of authentically blotchy and translucent baby flesh. Glass beads, polyfill, silicone, and on occasion, kitty litter, give them the heft and consistency of real babies. Some of the most ambitious iterations have begun to wiggle and cry; you can even obtain a "beating heart" for your parthenogenic bundle of joy.

For many women, reborns are just dolls, a new collectible to peddle or pursue, this decade's Beanie Babies. For others, the attachments go deeper, a fact that's reflected in the craft's unique lexicon. Reborns aren't created in workshops and sold via online storefronts, for example; the women who make reborns refer to their businesses as "nurseries." One practitioner doesn't just merely sell her products to customers; in her description, she "adopt[s] out babies all over the world."

But is any of this blurring of reality and fantasy reall so strange or threatening? Granted, it is a bit macabre that so many reborn producers give their businesses names like "Babies From Heaven's Garden"—there's certainly great potential for a pro-life horror flick wherein the souls of aborted fetuses inhabit the bodies of reborn dolls and wreak havoc upon the activist judges who've made Roe v. Wade the law of the land. Ultimately, however, it seems no less natural to invest great emotion in a relationship with an inanimate but extremely realistic baby than it is to do the same with, say, an iguana or a hamster, and when was the last time you saw a hand-wringing documentary over the alarming trend of pet ownership?

Because reborns don't perfectly simulate living babies yet, an aura of delusion attaches itself to the subculture: Conventional wisdom suggests that if you interact with non-human entities as if they are in fact human, you must be a little bit crazy. But, really, if what you're mainly looking for in a baby is a fleshy no-hassle security blanket, then it certainly seems saner—not to mention more humane—to choose a plastic infant over a real one, doesn't it?

Traditionally, only the very rich have been able to fine-tune relationships to the exact degree of obligation and reciprocity they prefer; fake babies, like fake adults, democratize that ability. If you want to adopt a dozen babies but you're not Angelina Jolie, all those diapers and nannies are going to add up. If you want to assemble a harem of servile blonde hotties, you'd better have a house with at least as many bedrooms and bathrooms as Hef's Playboy Mansion. Or you could buy yourself a half-dozen reborns or high-end sex dolls.

At the moment, human surrogates appeal only to those whose imaginations are vivid enough to see past their technological limitations. Eventually that will change and they'll be harder to resist. It's not as if we have very far to go either. Sci-fi movies tend to present androids and replicants as near-facsimiles of actual humans, but of course the real appeal of artifical babes and babies is their lack of human complexity, not their uncanny simulation of it. Equip a reborn with a few convincing facial expressions and a limited vocabulary of charming goo-goos and Ma-Ma's, and that will be enough: The rueful documentaries will be quickly replaced by fervent infomercials.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato writes from San Francisco.

The Golden Age

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

In the increasingly divided American landscape, where language, faith, and prime-time television no longer unite us as they once did, a thin golden line holds the nation together. It connects entities as disparate as Britney Spears, the Miami Dolphins, the Tecumseh High School Science Club, the cashier at your local Walgreen’s, even George W. Bush. Its domain is the restroom stall. Its associated features include tiny plastic cups, attentive strangers, and, on occasion, latex stunt penises and disposable heat packs.

It is, of course, the precautionary drug test. In 2008 it doesn’t matter if you’re a millionaire entertainer, a service-industry clock puncher, or the leader of the free world: We’re all citizens of Urine Nation.

How did we get to this strange land, where anyone who dreams of working a cash register at Burger King must consent to high-tech bio-seizures so unreasonable they would have made James Madison irrigate his breeches in outrage? Return, for a moment, to 1988. The Cosby Show was dominating the Nielsen ratings for the fourth straight year. Donald Trump was enjoying the bulletproof sauna in his classy new 272-foot yacht. Congress was busy crafting the Drug-Free Workplace Act.

Today, if you ask any V.P. of human resources or peddler of mass spectrometers why the drug testing industry needs to conduct 40 million pop quizzes each year, he’ll enthusiastically explain how drug testing can increase workplace safety and productivity, reduce absenteeism and worker’s compensation claims, and generally make our factories, offices, and strip malls happier, healthier, more profitable engines of commerce. It’s a bottom-line issue, he’ll tell you, not a law enforcement issue.

In 1986 the sales pitch was quite different. And it wasn’t the private sector who was pitching it. It was the President’s Commission on Organized Crime. Until the early ’80s, drug testing had mainly been used by methadone clinics, law enforcement agencies, and doctors. When test prices started dropping in 1980, the military and the transportation industry began to make it part of their institutional lives. But it got its biggest boost when the commission decided the country’s appetite for drugs was a “national emergency” that the police couldn’t handle alone. They needed help from the private sector.

In that bygone era, the idea of a suspicionless bio-seizure was still controversial. The American Federation of Government Employees decried the commission’s “witch-hunt mentality.” Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) called the idea “idiotic.” Jay Miller, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Illinois affiliate, said it was “like using an elephant gun to shoot a mouse.”

So the government took baby steps. In September 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed an executive order mandating testing for federal employees. To “set an example and lead the way,” he and Vice President George H.W. Bush filled two bottles with grand old pee and had them sent to the U.S. Naval Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, for testing. Two years later, Congress passed the Drug-Free Workplace Act of 1988. While the Act didn’t specifically mandate testing, it required every company doing business with the federal government to maintain a drug-free workplace. Those that didn’t would lose their contracts. “We get an overwhelming number of calls a day,” a director at one drug-testing lab told the Tulsa World after the law went into effect. “More than 90 percent say, ‘I’ve got to do something, but I don’t understand what. Can you help?’ Most of them are not pleased. It’s just another cost, a significant cost to a small company.”

While many employers resented their conscription into the War on Drugs, the policy had a domino effect. As soon as some companies started making prospective employees submit biological résumés, no organization wanted to end up as the preferred haven of the pharmacologically incorrect. So even companies that weren’t doing business with the government felt compelled to break out the tiny plastic cups. By 1996, 81 percent of the large businesses surveyed by the American Management Association said they were doing drug testing of some kind.

Today, workplace drug testing is a billion-dollar industry. It has also spawned a thriving anti-testing industry and entirely new crimes. In Indiana, simply owning a Whizzinator—a comically complex but allegedly effective device that consists of a fake latex penis, a harness, synthetic urine, and heating pads—can lead to a 180-day jail term and a $1,000 fine. (This law hasn’t stopped people from buying the $150 unit. The company that produces the Whizzinator says it has sold more than 300,000 of them since 1999.) In 2004, a South Carolina man got six months in a state prison simply for selling his clean urine over the Internet.

And around the country, emergency rooms have reported an increase in niacin overdoses, especially among teens. Various websites suggest that taking large amounts of niacin can prevent the detection of THC, marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient. In fact, it’s mostly just a good way to overdose on niacin.

Observers still debate how much safer and more productive drug testing makes the workplace. But there’s at least one outfit that has no complaints about its efficacy. Forty million drug tests at an average of $30 a pop equals a $1.2 billion subsidy the federal government receives from the private sector each year to help prosecute its endless War on Drugs.

The private sector’s largesse isn’t limited to money and manpower: Workplace urine collection is a gateway drug to stronger forms of government coercion. As soon as we got used to dropping our pants at work, the government moved on to schools. “Fifteen years ago, school drug testing was too controversial,” John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the Los Angeles Times in 2007. Now that workplace drug testing is no more controversial than Casual Fridays, it no longer seems so invasive to make any teenager who wants to join the school choir publicly prove his chemical chastity.

This year, the federal government has earmarked $17.9 million to underwrite high school drug testing programs. That the government is extending the totalitarian, zero-tolerance perspective of the Drug Free Workplace Act of 1988 to our nation’s high schools makes perfectly symmetrical sense. After all, that simplistic edict took its ideological heart from a public policy initiative initially aimed at school kids, Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign.

The “Just Say No” campaign insisted that all drugs were equally dangerous, all use was bad, and nothing was permitted. Workplace drug testing does the same, only for adults. (“The professional who pointedly ignores covert coke-sniffing by his or her colleagues must eventually come to realize that a person can no more tolerate a little recreational drug use than he or she can tolerate a little recreational smallpox,” the Commission on Organized Crime’s 1986 report declared.)

When organizations like the Institute for a Drug-Free Workplace attempt to quantify the impact of drugs in the workplace, they consider only their negative effects. But what about the surreptitious line of coke in the bathroom that helps a salesman meet his monthly quota, or the afternoon pot break out by the dumpsters that keeps a dishwasher sane? Given the stresses of the contemporary work world, how come only Air Force pilots flying bombing missions over Afghanistan and Iraq have unregulated freedom to enhance their performance with go pills and no-go pills? Couldn’t we all use a Dexedrine now and then to get to 5 o’clock?

Talk about a pipe dream! Today “Just Say No” is kitschy nostalgia but the Drug-Free Workplace Act remains in full effect. Had the federal government started knocking on our front doors in 1988, cup in hand, demanding compulsory urinalysis, there would have been widespread outrage. Instead, in a move akin to Tom Sawyer convincing his pals to give him their marbles for the opportunity to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence, the government outsourced its soaking of the Fourth Amendment to the private sector. It was one of the most ingenious policy decisions of the last 20 years.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato writes from San Francisco.

The Virtues of Conspicuous Giving

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 07:01:00 EST

On February 6, Madonna will help save Africa by attending the opening of the planet’s largest Gucci store. The party she’s hosting is expected to raise approximately $2 million for children who will never get to visit even the planet’s smallest Gucci store. Paris Hilton is planning to go on a fact-finding mission to Rwanda, just as soon as she completes her fact-finding mission to determine where Rwanda is. Everywhere you look, celebrities are staring from billboards and bus shelters with sultry benevolence, imploring us to buy globally engaged T-shirts and humanitarian cell phones.

This may be the age of doing good by buying goodies, with glossy magazines like Benefit that celebrate “the lifestyle of giving” via fashion spreads and celebrity profiles, but can we really have our Godiva layer cake with hazelnut ganache and donate it to sub-Saharan AIDS babies too?

Not everyone is swallowing the organic, socially conscious, celebrity-endorsed Kool-Aid. Naomi Klein, whose book No Logo presented Gap T-shirts as the cause of global inequity, not the solution, decries the “Bono-ization” of activism, wherein consumers effect change by buying Project (RED) T-shirts from the Gap and swaying gently at huge benefit concerts. Chronicle of Philanthropy Editor Stacy Palmer recently told The New York Times “there needs to be greater skepticism about celebrity involvement [in philanthropy] than I see in the media right now.” Wall Street Journal columnist Robert Frank frets that “too much of today’s charity is about gratifying the giver, rather than helping the needy.”

A nation of needy pundits and bloggers might beg to differ: There is no greater gift to those eager to bash fatuous Hollywood actorvism than Gwyneth Paltrow in beads and March Madness face paint gazing indigenously at the camera and declaring, “I AM AFRICAN.” But what, really, is so terrible about a movie star who lives in a $5.4 million Hamptons mansion (and at least three other multimillion-dollar homes) expressing solidarity with poverty-stricken Africans through the transformative power of world-class hair styling, raising awareness for the Keep a Child Alive charitable campaign in the process?

In 2006 charitable contributions in the U.S. totaled $295 billion, an all-time high, according to the philanthropy report Giving USA. More than 80 million Americans volunteer each year, with the services they provide valued at more than $200 billion. Purpose-driven evangelicals have a lot to do with these totals, but so do Hollywood stars like Paltrow, who have done so much to popularize the free market approach to solving the world’s problems while simultaneously giving us all something to mock at TheSuperficial.com.

It’s easy to understand why leftists like Klein are wary of celebrity sing-alongs and the notion that corporations can help save the world one over-extended Visa card at a time. They’d prefer that the government have a monopoly on philanthropy. What’s more puzzling is why the pro-market side views celebrity altruists with such a jaundiced eye.

Adopting a Third World baby may seem like moral grandstanding, but it’s also the ultimate form of privatization. No one has done more than Hollywood’s tax-and-spend socialists to popularize the notion that we can’t rely on the government alone to combat global warming, AIDS, breast cancer, homelessness, and every other disease and social injustice under the sun. No one believes in the benevolent power of the private sector more than a rock star telling us to put our hands together for the melting polar ice caps. Al Gore, a man who once wanted to be president so badly he paid Naomi Wolf to pick out his ties, insists he’s no longer interested in public service. Apparently he feels he can implement change faster, on a larger scale, working with Leonardo DiCaprio and Fall Out Boy rather than Congress.

Admittedly, the prospect that Hollywood celebrities might end world hunger or stop global warming through philanthrocommerce and philanthrotainment is slightly unnerving. If they think they deserve golden statues for producing dreck like Forrest Gump and American Beauty, just imagine how many award shows they’ll throw for themselves, and how many sanctimonious speeches we’ll have to endure, if they establish food security in Zimbabwe.

It’s also true that celebrities haven’t placed their faith entirely in the power of Gucci’s $795 snakeskin-trimmed UNICEF sandals or charity auctions featuring lunchboxes customized by David Bowie’s personal lunchbox-customizing assistant. No matter how many Project (RED) sunglasses we buy from Emporio Armani or how much we overbid for the Prada tuxedo Matthew Perry wore to the Emmys or how much we spend to watch Shakira’s hips battle greenhouse gas emissions, celebrities will still keep asking the government to earmark billions for their favorite causes.

And they don’t always put their money where their extravagantly catered benefit concerts are either. Compared to America’s bleeding-heart titans of capitalism, celebrities aren’t all that generous, at least in terms of their own contributions. The $58.3 million that Oprah gave away in 2006, while substantial enough to establish her as the country’s most open-handed entertainer, was good for only 36th place on The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s list of the top individual donors for the year. (The list does not include anonymous donors.)

The problem is that celebrities don’t take enough credit for their good deeds. The common notion that anonymous donors, or at the very least humble donors, are more virtuous than their more visible counterparts gets it precisely backward. Contributing $1 million to tsunami victims or former child soldiers is a good start, but it’s not a truly generous act until you’ve made it at least as visible as Paris Hilton’s crotch on a Vegas bender. Noisy, grandstanding donors sacrifice discretion and good taste in the name of their cause. They get attention—from the media, the public, their peers. The more acclaim Brangelina get for their philanthropic efforts, the likelier TomKat are to start contributing too.

Or at least that’s how it works in the larger realm of philanthropy. In 1996, when Slate first started publishing an annual list of America’s top 60 individual donors in an effort to spur competition among the benevolent wealthy, it took only $10 million to make the cut. Ten years later, it took three times that amount. Now an organization called the Giving Back Fund has created a similar list devoted specifically to entertainers and sports stars, in the hope of catalyzing a similarly escalating arms race of benevolence.

Still, paying too much attention to the actual contributions of celebrities shifts the focus from their true utility. They’re not investors; they’re salesmen. Warren Buffett may give billions to worthy causes, but if he poses topless, clutching a Project (RED) T-shirt demurely to his bosom, his lips slightly parted, his splotched, meaty shoulders enticingly bare, that’s probably not going to move a lot of units. Put Anne Hathaway in the same pose, and it’s a different story. Unless, of course, she starts speaking about capital-labor ratio thresholds and malaria ecology indices with a little too much facility and expertise.

The whole point of malltruism, after all, is to show that philanthropy doesn’t have to be time-consuming, difficult, or unpleasant. It can be sexy and fun. It can be as effortless and rewarding as ordering a Big Mac. You don’t have to be a saint to do it. You don’t have to be serious or well-informed. And who better to convey this fact than people who believe their ability to cry on demand gives them special insight into the world’s most pressing problems?

Every time a celebrity reinforces the idea that individuals can make a difference by choosing a blender that will help micro-finance a small farmer in Bangladesh rather than one that won’t, she is reinforcing the idea that government aid isn’t the only solution to every global affliction. Celebrities are helping to create a system where we have countless easy ways to direct our resources to the issues we believe in most strongly. We should show our support for their efforts with golden awareness ribbons trimmed in cashmere and diamonds.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.

Where's the Beef?

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:31:00 EST

Imagine if McDonald’s picked up your bill any time you managed to eat 10 Big Macs in an hour or less. What if Wendy’s replaced its wimpy Baconator with an unstoppable meat-based assassin that could truly make your aorta explode—say, 20 strips of bacon instead of six, enough cheese slices to roof a house, and instead of two measly half-pound patties that look as emaciated as the Olsen twins, five pounds of the finest ground beef, with five pounds of fries on the side? Morgan Spurlock’s liver would seek immediate long-term asylum at the nearest vegan co-op.

Alas, this spectacle will never come to pass. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and the rest of their fast food brethren are far too cowed by their critics to commit such crimes against gastronomy. But you can get a free dinner with as many calories as 10 Big Macs at the Big Texan Steak Ranch in Amarillo, Texas, if you can eat a 72-ounce sirloin steak, a baked potato, a salad, a dinner roll, and a shrimp cocktail in 60 minutes or less. And if you’re craving 10 pounds of junk food on a single plate, just go to Eagle’s Deli in Boston, Massachusetts, where the 10-storey Challenge Burger rises so high you practically need a ladder to eat it.

Fast food makes such a savory scapegoat for our perpetual girth control failures that it’s easy to forget we eat less than 20 percent of our meals at the Golden Arches and its ilk. It’s also easy to forget that before America fell in love with cheap, convenient, standardized junk food, it loved cheap, convenient, independently deep-fried junk food.

During the first decades of the 20th century, lunch wagons, the predecessors to diners, were so popular that cities often passed regulations limiting their hours of operation. In 1952, three years before Ray Kroc franchised his first McDonald’s, one out of four American adults was considered overweight; a New York Times editorial declared that obesity was “our nation’s primary health problem.” The idea that rootless corporate invaders derailed our healthy native diet may be chicken soup for the tubby trial lawyer’s soul, but in reality overeating fatty, salty, sugar-laden food is as American as apple pie.

Nowhere is this truth dramatized more deliciously than in basic-cable fare like the Food Channel’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives and the Travel Channel’s World’s Best Places to Pig Out. Watch these shows often enough, and your Trinitron may develop Type 2 diabetes. Big Macs and BK Stackers wouldn’t even pass as hors d’oeuvres at these heart attack factories.

Yet unlike fast food chains, which are generally characterized as sterile hegemons that force-feed us like foie gras geese, these independently owned and operated greasy spoons are touted as the very (sclerosed) heart of whatever town they’re situated in, the key to the region’s unique flavor, and, ultimately, the essence of that great, multicultural melting pot that puts every homogenizing fast food fryolator to shame: America!

Instead of atomizing families and communities, dives and diners bring them together. Instead of tempting us with empty calories at cheap prices, they offer comfort food and honest value. Instead of destroying our health, they serve us greasy authenticity on platters the size of manhole covers.

As the patrons of these temples to cholesterol dig into sandwiches so big they could plug the Lincoln Tunnel, they always say the same thing. They’ve been coming to these places for years. They started out as kids accompanying their parents, and now they bring their kids with them.

While such scenes play out, you can’t help but wonder: Doesn’t that obesity lawsuit trailblazer John Banzhaf have cable? Shouldn’t he be ejaculating torts out of every orifice upon witnessing such candid testimonies to the addictive power of old-timey diner fare? And more important: Shouldn’t we thank our fast food chains for driving so many of these places out of business and thus limiting our exposure to chili burgers buried beneath landfills of onion rings? Were it not for the relative restraint of Big Macs and Quarter Pounders, the jiggling behemoths who bruise the scales on The Biggest Loser each week might instead be our best candidates for America’s Next Top Model.

Three years ago, when Supersize Me appeared in theaters and fast food replaced Osama bin Laden as the greatest threat to the American way of life, the industry sought refuge in fruit and yogurt cups and the bland, sensible countenance of Jared the Subway Guy. Today chains are still trying to sell the idea that they offer healthy choices to their customers; see, for example, Burger King’s plans to sell apple sticks dolled up in French fry drag. But they’re starting to reclaim their boldness too, provoking the wrath of would-be reformers once again.

Last summer, when McDonald’s started selling supersized sodas under a wonderfully evocative pseudonym, the Hugo, it earned a prompt tsk-tsking from The New York Times. When Hardee’s unveiled its latest affront to sensible eating, a 920-calorie breakfast burrito, the senior nutritionist for the Center for Science in the Public Interest derided it as “another lousy invention by a fast-food company.” When San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford saw a TV commercial for Wendy’s Baconator, he fulminated like a calorically correct Jerry Falwell: “Have the noxious fast-food titans not yet been forced to stop concocting vile products like this, or at least to dial down the garish marketing of their most ultra-toxic products, given how the vast majority of Americans have now learned (haven’t they?) at least a tiny modicum about human health?”

Culinary reformers around the country have been trying to turn such microwaved rhetoric into reality. In New York City, health officials have been attempting to introduce a regulation that will require any restaurant that voluntarily publicizes nutritional information about its fare to post calorie counts on its menus and menu boards. Because most single-unit operations don’t provide such information in any form, this requirement will apply mainly to fast food outlets and other chains. When a federal judge ruled against the city’s original ordinance, city health officials went back for seconds, revising the proposal to comply with his ruling. If this revised proposal goes into effect, any chain that operates 15 or more restaurants under the same name nationally will have to post nutritional information on the menus and menu boards of the outlets it operates in New York City.

In Los Angeles, City Councilmember Jan Perry has been trying to get her colleagues to support an ordinance that would impose a moratorium on fast food chains in South L.A., where 28 percent of the 700,000 residents live in poverty and 45 percent of the 900 or so restaurants serve fast food. “The people don’t want them, but when they don’t have any other options, they may gravitate to what’s there,” Perry told the Los Angeles Times, gravitating toward juicy, flame-broiled delusion. Apparently her constituents are choking down Big Macs only because they’ve already eaten all the neighborhood cats and figure that lunch at McDonald’s might be slightly less painful than starving to death. And how exactly will banning fast food outlets encourage Wolfgang Puck and Whole Foods Markets to set up shop in a part of town they’ve previously avoided? Is the threat of going head to head with Chicken McNuggets that much of a disincentive?

Suppose reformers like Perry get their wish and fast food chains are regulated out of existence. Would the diners and dives we celebrate on basic cable start serving five-pound veggie burgers with five pounds of kale on the side? Only diet hucksters and true chowhounds would benefit from a world where the local McDonald’s gave way to places serving 72-ounce steaks and burgers that reach toward the heavens like Manhattan skyscrapers. The rest of us would be left longing for that bygone era when, on every block, you could pick up something relatively light and healthy, like a Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger from Carl’s Jr.

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer in San Francisco.