Land of the Free, Home of the Brave?
By Shashi Tharoor
Newsweek International
June 23, 2002

“A warning notice?” a friend asked the other day, not long after New York City announced its smoking ban. We were walking past the Joseph Papp Public Theater when she spotted the sign near the ticket window, cautioning playgoers that the performance they were about to see involved (gasp!) explicit live cigarette-smoking onstage.

I DON’T KNOW how many fans of the theater were put off by the prospect of secondhand smoke wafting down from the boards. But since most New Yorkers couldn’t afford seats close enough to be affected (the price of Broadway tickets these days is a scandal in itself), we realized the notice served another purpose altogether. The theater was simply making sure it was legally protected in case some tourist in the front row took offense—and sued.

Farfetched? A couple of weeks later an indignant letter writer to The New York Times asked why the actors actually needed to smoke. If the scene called for smoking, she fulminated, couldn’t they just hold unlit cigarettes and pretend? Fair enough, I suppose. After all, when a script calls for a fatality, no one actually obliges an actor to die. Yet something worries me here. The issue isn’t just to smoke or not to smoke. It’s the whiff of the puritanical, or worse. Run-amok public morality, coupled with the fear of litigation, is turning America into a nanny state. And this nanny is Nurse Ratchet.

In the land where Thomas Jefferson proclaimed the best government to be one that governs the least, we now see the most persnickety intrusions into daily life. You can’t smoke in public places, including bars and restaurants. You can’t use a cell phone in your car, though that’s about the most useful place in the world to have one. (“Hell-oo? How the heck do I get to your place? Your directions are hopeless!”). Laws of all sorts prohibit all kinds of behavior at the workplace, from casual touching to off-color jokes.

Home is no haven, either. It is illegal in several cities to be in a state of undress if a peeping Tom across the way claims he glimpsed you. Neighbors are now legally entitled to report “inappropriate” noises coming from your apartment. The city of San Francisco encourages hairdressers to report domestic violence if they find suspicious bumps or scratches on their clients’ heads. Public schools have even legislated anti-bullying ordinances governing all sorts of commonplace juvenile behavior—name-calling, teasing and even “shunning,” or avoiding kids you don’t like. What’s next—dirty looks?

Such rules, however unenforceable, have the effect of inhibiting normal human contact. In Nurse Ratchet’s nanny state, teachers are terrified of hugging children for fear of being fired. (The state of Michigan bars teachers from touching a child for any reason.) The descendants of Buffalo Bill and Wyatt Earp now ban seesaws, lest their kiddies hurt themselves. For seven years now, New Yorkers getting into taxis have listened to maddeningly grating recorded voices instructing them to fasten their seat belts and “get a receipt from the driver.” The tone is guaranteed to irritate.

Here, at least, a backlash has set in. Spurning the blandishments of such luminaries as Placido Domingo and Joan Rivers—as if anyone would listen to her—67 percent of New Yorkers refuse to “buckle up,” according to the Taxi and Limousine Commission. Showing rare common sense, the city has thus decided to phase out the announcements. No longer will the hurried businessman leaping into a cab be harried by the canned voice of Michael Buffer screaming “Let’s get ready to rrrummmble!”

Call it a small victory against the nanny state.

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© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.