Grandstanding pols shouldn’t ban stupidity
If modern America were to erect a statue in honor of a historical figure that most expresses the current zeitgeist, it could do no better than Lothrop Withington, Jr.
In 1939, the Harvard freshman boasted to his friends that he had once swallowed a live fish. They bet him $10 he couldn’t do it again, a challenge he gleefully accepted. So on March 3, with incredulous classmates and a reporter on hand, Withington threw a three-inch goldfish into his mouth, chewed a couple of times, and swallowed.
As National Review magazine recently noted, Withington’s stunt set off a national craze among college students. A University of Pennsylvania student swallowed 25 in one sitting; he was quickly outdone by an MIT student who gulped 42 fish, then a Clark University student who swallowed 89.
Proving stupidity has no expiration date, young people in the YouTube era revived the goldfish challenge, leading to thousands of videos of kids and adults engaging in imbecilic behavior that predated World War II. Other “challenges” followed, including downing as much cinnamon as possible in one gulp and drinking a gallon of milk under an hour; some teens began lighting themselves on fire, trying to douse the flames before suffering horrifying burns.
Yet the most recent YouTube fad may be the most puzzling of all. In late 2017, young people and adults alike began posting videos of themselves biting into Tide laundry pods, allowing the contents to burst into their mouths. Likely instigated by media reports of this bizarre “trend,” thousands of these videos began showing up in mid-January of 2018.
But perhaps the more embarrassing actions have been by politicians rushing to respond to the Tide Pod craze by seeking to legislate stupidity out of the populace. In New York, lawmakers introduced a bill requiring Tide’s parent company, Procter & Gamble, to make its laundry pods look less…um… delicious and add warnings to each individually wrapped pod. “They are so alluring, they smell sweet and they look like gummy bears,” said Democratic Sen. Brad Hoylman. “They might as well say ‘bite me’ on them.”
(P&G has already implemented two of the changes sought by the bill, adding child-proof packaging and providing warning labels on their primary packaging.)
Lawmakers introducing kneejerk legislation to “solve” an ephemeral issue is a time-honored tradition; even Massachusetts quickly made goldfish swallowing illegal following the craze in the early 1940s.
Republican Indiana lawmaker Milo Smith last year introduced a bill allowing Indianapolis Colts fans who felt disrespected by players kneeling for the National Anthem to claim a full refund for the cost of their ticket during the first quarter. And 24-year-old Minnesota state Rep. Drew Christensen claims he is drafting a tongue-in-cheek bill to ban “The Bachelor” star Arie Luyendyk Jr. from the state for not choosing Becca Kufrin, a contestant who hailed from Prior Lake.
The worst types of these attention-grabbing bills are ones named after individual people. Typically, when an individual is harmed or even killed, it is the result of a unique situation that can’t be fixed with legislation. (I hereby propose a new bill banning the use of people’s names in legislation, and I demand it be called “Christian’s Law.”)
As the saying goes, if you fear that government moves too slow, just wait until you see the damage wrought by a government that moves too fast.