Mark Steyn: Heads Should Roll

For half a decade now, Jacob Weisberg of Slate has had a column called "Bushisms," dependent on the proposition that the president is an inarticulate moron. No argument there, not from Slate readers. But, after September 11, Weisberg was sporting enough to force himself to consider why the moron seemed to be doing a reasonably good job with the war on terror. His conclusion was that war plays to an idiot's strengths: "Bush continues to exhibit the same lack of curiosity, thoughtfulness and engagement with ideas that made him a C student," he wrote. "And curiously enough, it is these very qualities of mind — or lack thereof — that seem to be making him such a good war president." In war, the idiot president comes into his own.

Indeed. Summing up Weisberg's argument, I wrote, "War is a simpleton's game and does not require the grasp of nuance, subtlety, etc. of more complex issues such as mandatory federal regulations for bicycling helmets, or whatever it was Bill Clinton was busy with for eight years."

I don't know why I picked bicycling helmets. Clinton did not, to the best of my recollection, actually enact any bicycling-helmet regulations, but it seemed symbolically consistent with the kind of micro-politics his administration pursued for eight years — federal toilet-tank regulations, programs to connect grade schools to the Internet, etc. On foreign policy and national security, he gave the impression he was going through the motions, but get him on to some really pressing, if non-federal, issue — like curfews for teens or the merits of school uniforms — and he'd come alive. So I started using "federal bicycling-helmet regulations" as an all-purpose cheap crack about the indulgent, inverted priorities of the Clinton years.

Heads should roll

Monday, 6 December 2004
Mark Steyn

For half a decade now, Jacob Weisberg of Slate has had a column called "Bushisms," dependent on the proposition that the president is an inarticulate moron. No argument there, not from Slate readers. But, after September 11, Weisberg was sporting enough to force himself to consider why the moron seemed to be doing a reasonably good job with the war on terror. His conclusion was that war plays to an idiot's strengths: "Bush continues to exhibit the same lack of curiosity, thoughtfulness and engagement with ideas that made him a C student," he wrote. "And curiously enough, it is these very qualities of mind--or lack thereof--that seem to be making him such a good war president." In war, the idiot president comes into his own.

Indeed. Summing up Weisberg's argument, I wrote, "War is a simpleton's game and does not require the grasp of nuance, subtlety, etc. of more complex issues such as mandatory federal regulations for bicycling helmets, or whatever it was Bill Clinton was busy with for eight years."

I don't know why I picked bicycling helmets. Clinton did not, to the best of my recollection, actually enact any bicycling-helmet regulations, but it seemed symbolically consistent with the kind of micro-politics his administration pursued for eight years--federal toilet-tank regulations, programs to connect grade schools to the Internet, etc. On foreign policy and national security, he gave the impression he was going through the motions, but get him on to some really pressing, if non-federal, issue--like curfews for teens or the merits of school uniforms--and he'd come alive. So I started using "federal bicycling-helmet regulations" as an all-purpose cheap crack about the indulgent, inverted priorities of the Clinton years.

On the other hand, on all the many occasions I've used my all-purpose cheap crack, it never occurred to me that it meant anything other than mandatory bicycling-helmet regulations for children. The notion of mandatory bicycling-helmet regulations for grown men and women seemed too preposterous.

I should have known better. The other day, a private member's bill was introduced in the Ontario legislature requiring every grown-up, before mounting a bicycle anywhere in the province, from Niagara Falls to Hudson's Bay, to strap him or herself into a helmet. Needless to say, the bill was approved on its second reading unanimously.

Have you ever read Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men on the Bummel? Lovely book. Three chaps bicycling through the Black Forest. On the jacket they're all wearing plus twos with checked caps. Can't do that in Ontario.

The Germans made a film of it in the fifties, Immer die Radfahrer--three hearty Teutons cycling along in their loden huetes with feathers in the hatbands. Can't do that in Ontario. Seen Jules et Jim? Love triangle on bicycles: two French blokes plus Jeanne Moreau tootling through the countryside. Can't do that in Ontario. It wouldn't work in helmets.

Remember the late Queen Juliana? Holland's famous "bicycling queen"? She lived in Ottawa during the war, but, if she came back, she'd discover it's now illegal for a crowned head to bicycle with an unhelmeted head.

You know the old song, "Daisy, Daisy"?

It won't be a stylish marriage
I can't afford a carriage
But you'll look sweet
Upon the seat
Of a bicycle made for two.
It'll be a lot less stylish in Ontario, and how sweet upon the seat Daisy looks depends on whether she's cool about having a helmet crammed down on her wedding hairdo.

Or how about The Great Escape? James Coburn gets away on a stolen bicycle. Can't do that in Ontario. The Bike Reich's Helmet Enforcement Patrol would have spotted his lack of headgear and returned him to the camp to be executed.

To call this a "nanny state" is an insult to nannies. When Baron von Trapp hired Maria to look after all the little von Trapps, he didn't object to her and the kids riding their bicycles down the lane while singing "Do-Re-Mi" unhelmeted. Forty years on, the gal who was 16 going on 17 and the telegraph boy who was 17 going on 18 are 56 going on 57 and 57 going on 58, but in Ontario they're still not old enough to ride a bicycle without government supervision.

To modify Lord Acton, soft power corrupts absolutely softly: smoothly, painlessly, totalitarianism-lite advances from hate-crimes to hat-crimes. As revealing as the inability of any Ontario legislator to rouse himself to defend the freedom of adult Canadians to conduct their own risk-evaluations before getting on their bikes, was the dozy complacency of the press. My old comrade Andrew Coyne was a notable exception, weighing in with a scathing column on the lack of "evidentiary basis" for this law. Silly Andrew, obsessed with facts, statistics, science. For as the editors of the Guelph Mercury headlined their own thoughts on the subject, "Helmet Law a No-Brainer."

"Anyone using his head should agree that any measures to prevent serious head injuries are for the common good," pronounced the editorial, dismissing dissenters as "Don Cherry-type naysayers." Maybe they should try using their own heads. There's no epidemic of cycling deaths or cycling head injuries. As Coyne pointed out, if you bike one thousand kilometres a year (which most cyclists don't), you'd have to pedal for 10,000 years, on average, to be at risk of dying in a cycling accident. And even then, if you're sideswiped by a logging truck, the likelihood of a helmet improving your chances of survival are minimal.

Chris Gilham, who runs the website cycle-helmets.com, has analyzed the impact of similar laws in Australia. One consequence is that fewer people bicycle and thus what was meant to be a public health benefit is, in fact, a public health disaster--"mass discouragement of society's most popular exercise at a time of soaring obesity."

That sounds right to me. I like to tootle along a country road with the wind in my hair. If I can't do that, and I have to climb into the body armour to go down to town, I'll pass. So the question is whether, among the 70 or 80 cycling fatalities each year, the small number of lives (if any) saved by wearing a helmet outweighs the social costs of discouraging what was hitherto an agreeable form of exercise. Another is whether cycling helmets for the young, in making children even more top-heavy and impacting their balance, actually increase the risk of accidents. Maybe the no-brainer crowd at the Guelph Mercury would like to look into that instead of just parroting big-government bromides.

But, in our increasingly coercive utopia, the bossier types defend such legislation on the grounds that injured cyclists have to be treated at public expense. That's actually an argument not against unhelmeted cycling, but against government health care. But, as decrepit socialized medical systems creak under the strain, one hears similar sentiments more and more--doctors in Manchester, England, refusing to treat patients with heart disease because the patients are smokers, etc. The inclination of public health systems to make access conditional on your living your life in approved ways would be repugnant enough were it uniformly applied. But it's not. Gay sex, for example, places much greater strains on public health than bicycling head-injuries, but no government would institute laws on maximum number of sexual partners or demand proof of extra-strength condom usage. In its selectivity, soft totalitarianism is more prone to fashion than the traditional kind. More people are injured each year falling out of bed than in cycling accidents, but Pierre Trudeau's great dictum that the government has no place in the bedrooms of the nation prevents our rulers from mandating compulsory sleeping helmets. For the moment.

Hardly any legislation is a no-brainer. There are always unintended consequences, most of which could have been foreseen. But, after 9/11, I started using my bicycling-helmet crack as a convenient shorthand for the gulf between government's real responsibilities and the irrelevant trivia it prefers to busy itself with--putting the meddle to the pedal. Such laws corrode the citizenry's self-reliance and assertiveness--the qualities that will determine which western nations will survive the civilizational struggle on which we're embarked. A land in which an adult cannot evaluate for himself the risks involved in cycling to a neighbour is not truly free. But soft power is an elusive enemy--a cotton-candy cocoon of illusory security binding its subjects ever tighter. Whether or not we reduce any individual head injuries, we inflict a massive head injury on society as a whole through such laws. It's time to end the cycle of violence--the small acts of vandalism against a free people. Rise up, Ontarians! You have nothing to lose but your bike chains.

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