1. Make Car Phone Use Mandatory. 2. Eliminate Nanny-State Stop Lights and Speed Limits. 3. Problem Solves Itself, Six Months, Tops.

OH, Touché, sir:

I’ve seen studies that rate eating in a car as roughly equivalent to talking on the phone.

Shall we then ban McDonald’s drive-thru lanes, or force Starbucks to serve only in porcelain cups for local use? That would be enforceable and probably save far more lives than an unenforceable law against talking on a phone.

--Some Guy on the Internets

Save more lives? You mean, if people refused to eat at McDonald's altogether as a result?

Okay, so they tell me one of the benefits of Age [strike benefits as too strong] is the learning to roll with the punches, the mastery of the sad, knowing smile, the philosophical shrug, the strategic hearing-aid disconnect, but I don't think They properly reckoned the accumulated perniciousness of Reaganism, Ayn Rand, and Reality Teevee. I can handle the repetition of fallacious arguments my grandfather brushed aside in ten seconds flat, even when those arguments are presented--as they frequently are--as the brilliant insight of the current speaker; I can take internet dumbassery in general, or rampant public cupidity; though I'm far from inured to political corruption, perpetual personal grievance, the Business Model of Everything, the substitution of "Hucksterism" for "Business" in the previous example, as well as everywhere else, the substitution of a Continual Repaving Project for Learning from our Mistakes, hypocrisy, hyperreality, Bronze Age superstition, and the current American propensity to root against the underdog, I'm able to deal with them, in the abstract, at least. What I'm finding to be a greater challenge than I anticipated, back in the green fields of Youth, when I dreamed of one day being a cranky geezer subsumed with writing Letters to the Editor and chasing dogs off my property with a pool cue, is managing to lift all this crap when it all piles together.

1. Talking on the phone while driving leads to accidents.

2. The Bush administration apparently sat on revelation #1.

Now, don't get me wrong; these matters ought to be reported, even if they ought not surprise anyone. And in an age where you don't just have a fortnight's wall-to-wall panegyric for a deceased professional boy dancer who mere hours before his untimely death was considered, with more than a little justification, to be a child-molesting freak of the first order, but that it must include some massive lying-in-state routine whose $multi-million cost falls to a bankrupt government in a bankrupt state of tax revolters which then, as nineteen ravening networks, and their nineteen gunky eyes, look on, turns out to have involved countless layers of grifting--who'd'a thunk it?--well, it's practically Pulitzer material. The question isn't even How'd We Get To This Point?; it's How'd We Get To The Point Where There's Nothing Whatsoever We Can Do About It, Except Engulf It In Flames?

The goddam onion is all skin! Fer chrissakes: no one could possibly have ever imagined that talking on the phone while driving was anything other than an unconscionable hazard to everyone else sharing Your Road (I almost said "innocent drivers", but they're all on the fucking phone, too). No one could have thought, in 2003, 2001, 1999, or whenever the words "Bush" and "for President" were linked a second time that it was anything other than a publicity stunt and a recipe for (further) disaster, though the scale was a bit surprising. And no one who claims to believe that that administration didn't take "Criminal collusion with any and all potential Republican donors" as part of that Unwritten Constitution only it could read is either a dolt or a Republican donor. If the Bush administration--in fairness, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which, whatever the natural proclivities of bureaucrats to snuggle up with the nearest warm pile of Loot, surely needed no Interagency Liaison with the National Weather Service to know which way the Wind blew--was keeping mum, exactly what was stopping the crackerjack actuaries at all those AIG auto insurance subsidiaries? Ah, but, y'know, "Hey, what about fast-food drive ups?" is a terrific rejoinder, sonny.

And, as keen-eyed readers know, I'm from Indiana, which means that it's utterly immaterial to me whether hands-free is more safe, as safe, or less safe than holding the fucker to your ear while attempting to lurch your way through a 90º turn in the same direction, because The World's Third Worst State Legislature™ won't even ban those. (Although, in a nod to a disastrous multi-fatality summer for suburban teenaged drivers last year it did ban their use for people too young to vote.) Which is particularly interesting for anyone old enough to remember the Analog Days of Yore, and Hoosier enough to remember the efforts to ban the Walkman, on grounds that some theoretical boogier would be lost in his Race music and fail to hear the 200 decibel firetruck behind him. Cynics might note that the Walkman was a device of pure hedonism, while the cell phone gets to hide under the rubric of Business. And quite possibly legitimately so, since its public use--say the woman explaining, at a volume normally reserved for communicating with the elderly, the vicissitudes of scheduling her upcoming Pap smear to the person at the other end of the connection, the cashier, the bagger, myself, and the two other people in the checkout line with us--she is not apocryphal, Reader! She's typical!--is highly suggestive of what one imagines most Americans do at work all day.

Sure, I'm old, but I suspect it's the mere wearing-down process, and not some organic mellowing on the way to the compost pile, which has eased the homicidal fantasies such behavior used to engender. I do think that I have the moral obligation to mention that should I keep my faculties in spite of it all for another decade or so the prospect of Life in prison will begin to lose some of its terror, and the equation might be reworked. On a more positive note, you Kids out there might want to consider that strangling this sort of thing in its crib, though it require something approaching attention to real life, vigilance, even, will yet pay dividends in the long run. If you live that long.