Smoked Out

As Bloomington acts to ban smoking citywide, and Minneapolis and Saint Paul sniff around the idea of doing the same, it's starting to sink in with some of the local punditry.

Even Doug Grow gets it, although he squeezes a lot of his same old crap in with his big revelation.

Grow starts:

I should have seen this coming more than a quarter century ago.

It was 1978 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. I was a sports writer, covering a game between Notre Dame and Texas. I'd arrived at the press box early to set up my work station. This involved putting my typewriter, a couple of notebooks, two boxes of Marlboro cigarettes and an ashtray on my table space.

I was ready for anything -- except for the scribe sitting on my right.

"You're not planning on smoking those are you?" he asked.

"What do you think, I'm just going to look at them for the next six hours?" I asked.

"I'm asking you not to smoke," he said.

"This is a press box!" I said, incredulous. "We're sports writers!"

As an aside - it's amazed me how people in the media have been quitting smoking. At one of the stations I worked at (KDAK in Carrington, ND, where I worked when I was 19) I was the only non-smoker; it wasn't very different from many media outlets of the day. These days, a lot fewer people in the business seem to smoke.

But back to Grow:

A few months ago, I attended a neighborhood political caucus, interested in hearing my friends and neighbors talk about what I thought were the great, common issues of our day: war, peace, an economy that shows corporate profits rising while incomes of individual workers fall. But the caucus was dominated by people with special interests. And no special-interest group was more dominating that the antismoking crowd.

My favorite was a woman who rose to her feet to deplore the fact that bowling alleys aren't smoke free.

"How can I take my child bowling?" she asked.

Neighbors who want to build a utopia on the block are one of the great evils of the Twin Cities. I have another piece in the hopper about this topic; it's a bigger problem than you might think.

I left this exercise in democracy with this question: Where's the line separating sound policy and over-the-edge, goofball zealotry?

Turns out there may be an answer: St. Paul.

Grow goes on to detail the process by which the St. Paul Park board has banned smoking in city parks, parkways, bike trails and golf courses.

"I tried to be reasonable," [Park Board member Al] Paulson said. "I tried to tell 'em that there's more bad stuff coming out of the barbecue pits than from a few people enjoying a smoke. I said, 'So what are we going to do next? Ban picnics?' "

Don't put it past them.

Grow goes on to make the big point:

This knee-jerk Park Commission action was a microcosm of 21st-century American politics, he said. Leaders are listening to the zealots, from the U.S. Senate to the St. Paul Parks and Recreation Commission.

Yeah, but the zealots at home, working at grass-roots level, are the ones that will affect your life first.

There is some common sense out there, yet:

"Compromise and common sense are left out of the equation," Kelly said...Kelly already has vetoed a City Council measure that would have made St. Paul the first city in the metro area to ban smoking in bars and restaurants...He doesn't need to veto the Park Commission's recommendation. He can -- and will -- simply ignore it.

"It will not become policy," he said.

Whew. Good thing we have a Republican mayor.

Oh, dang - Kelly's a DFLer. But as an east-side Democrat, he's far enough to the right that he's generally reviled by many of the Volvo-driving, free-range Alpaca-wearing Highland Park DFLers that dominate city politics.

But the zealots are in control. And we have groups on the right and the left demanding to tell the rest of us how to live.

Kelly has a word for this.

"Tyranny," he said. "From the left or from the right, tyranny is tyranny."

Fair enough.

Now, Doug Grow (or any of his supporters): Show me an issue where any right-wing zealot is getting policy rammed through?

Now, compare it to the issues where the zealots of the left have imposed their agenda on the rest of us: Seatbelts, victim disarmament (including last week's ruling temporarily striking down the Minnesota Personal Protection Act), condoms in schools, planning and zoning (of which more later)...

But I suppose if this gets the likes of Doug Grow to sit up and notice, it's a start.

Posted by Mitch at July 20, 2004 07:19 AM | TrackBack