BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
e-mail delivery, click
here. To send
an e-mail to Dan Kennedy, click
here.
For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
Get in the back and no one gets
hurt. You won't find a more bizarre story today than
this
one, buried well inside the
New York Times.
Headlined "Fear of Air Bag Sends
Children to Back Seat, Saving Many," the article, by Matthew Wald,
reports that parents have been properly terrified by stories that
exploding air bags have decapitated and maimed babies and small
children sitting in the front passenger's seat.
The response -- sticking them in
the back -- may have saved hundreds of lives in recent years. That's
good, of course. But it's unclear why this is better than getting rid
of deadly air bags and instead re-engineering the front seat so that
it's safer.
Or, conversely, since the incentive
appears to be arming the front seat with a lethal weapon, why not
just take a cheaper approach, and mount an AK-47 in the glove
compartment of every new car? If the rider is four-foot-10 or
shorter, blammo!
I am no libertarian when it comes
to auto safety. I'm all in favor of mandatory-seatbelt laws, for
instance. But air bags are a proven mistake, and government efforts
to justify their continued use only compounds the mistake.
For a laugh-out-loud example of
bureaucracy run amok, check out this
pamphlet from the National
Traffic Highway Safety Administration (NTHSA) on what you have to go
through to get an on-off switch installed so that you can disconnect
your air bag.
Air bags have been a hot issue for
years in Little
People of America, the
leading organization for dwarfs and their families. It's an issue for
drivers more than passengers: because most people with dwarfism are
roughly the same size as everyone else from head to hips, they do not
appear unusually short when sitting. In the passenger seat, the air
bag isn't a problem -- or rather, it's no more deadly for them than
it is for the rest of us.
But because their arms and legs are
disproportionately small, a driver with dwarfism tends to sit much
closer to the steering wheel. And that, as even the NTHSA concedes,
is dangerous.
Sensible advice on Iraq.
Newsweek's Fareed
Zakaria, as you might
expect, has some excellent suggestions for solving the chaos in
Iraq.
Zakaria supported the war, and thus
underestimates, I think, the degree to which the entire world
suspects the Bush administration's motives and resents its thumbing
its nose at the international community.
Still, Paul Bremer and company
would do well to ponder Zakaria's outline of heavy international
involvement and a long-term commitment. His conclusion:
The fundamental purpose
behind the invasion of Iraq -- more important than the exaggerated
claims about weapons of mass destruction -- was to begin cleansing
the Middle East of the forces that produce terror. Were America to
quit, it would give those armies of hate new strength and resolve.
A failed Iraq could prove a greater threat to American security
than Saddam Hussein's regime ever was.
Of course, it would have helped if
George W. Bush had told us what the "fundamental purpose" was
ahead of time instead of mindlessly repeating his aides' lies about
weapons of mass destruction.
Good news, bad news.
Boston Herald columnist (and former Boston city councilor)
Tom
Keane writes today that the
Massachusetts Convention Center Authority has managed to overcome its
hack origins and reinvent itself as a lean, mean, convention-snaring
machine.
Even so, it appears that the only
way it's been able to book any business has been to steal shows from
the privately owned Bayside Expo Center and World Trade
Center.
A well-run boondoggle is still a
boondoggle.
posted at 8:43 AM |
comment or permalink
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.