A Decent Proposal (C.D.A. II)

Monday, 24 March 1997

When I was a child, I travelled by school bus to and from school every day, just like many of you, or your children, do. On one ill-starred day, the bus was stuck in traffic, as happens so often in these difficult times. One child looked down out of the bus window, at a car sitting next to us. He saw, on that car's dashboard, a pornographic magazine. Within seconds, the entire male population of that bus (driver excepted) was crowded up against those windows. The passenger in the car noticed this attention, and held the magazines up against his windshield so that we could see them better. He also flipped the pages, so we could see more pictures.

Now, I had also seen pornographic magazines in other contexts. My father has a collection of Playboy (Whose doesn't?), and I had friends who occasionally got hold of Hustler and Screw. But it's a well-established tenet of modern reporting that the addition of technology to any situation, no matter how classical, makes that situation A New Thing Under The Sun. This is why, though the phenomena of marital infidelity and romantic letter-writing have existed for thousands of years, the addition of Technology to these ancient practices (in the form of marriages endangered by steamy Internet correpesondences carried on by one spouse) are being treated by some in the news media as if nothing even remotely similar had ever occurred in the history of human civilization. The invention of the automobile precedes that of the computer by only a few decades; viewed in the millennia-long context of history, the two were practically simultaneous, so cars should not be considered any less "high-tech" than computers.

So I can only speculate at the damage those dashboard-borne images caused to my impressionable young mind. Had I not seen them, might I not today be wealthy and successful, working in a field that offers socially-approved returns, such as a high income, rather than in one that I merely enjoy? We can only speculate. We know that some damage must have been done, for Ed Meese's commission on pornography detailed the damage caused by such images, and surely no politician would ever distort the truth for political gain.

Though it's too late for me, we can keep this tragedy from striking again! There has been much concern recently about pornography on the Internet, but one cannot access the Net without a computer, and there are only some 30 million computers in the U.S. The number of cars exceeds that by an order of magnitude, and while not every computer has a Net connection, each and every one of those cars has a dashboard.

Lest you think that what happened to me and my schoolmates was just an isolated occurence, let me remind you of the naked women often painted on the sides of vans, or depicted in silhouette on the mud flaps of trucks. These trucks often travel across a number of states, making local law enforcement efforts futile. Clearly, a nation-wide effort is needed.

Thus, I propose the Car Decency Act, a new federal law to protect the children of the United States of America. Under the provisions of this law, anyone knowingly displaying any indecent or obscene materials, or using indecent or obscene language, while in a motor vehicle that a minor may observe would be subject to fines of up to US$250,000 and imprisonment of up to 10 years.

If that should prove insufficient, it may be necessary to ban dashboards entirely. Surely it would not be difficult for the automobile industry to come up with some new sort of control mechanism for their cars. Some people's lives might be made more difficult in the interim, but what are the livelihoods of several million people worth, stacked up against the innocence of a child?