The Undocumented Mark Steyn (13 page)

CARRIED TO EXTREMES

National Review
, February 16, 2010

“
IT
’
S
’
ELF
’
N
’
SAFETY
, mate, innit?”

You only have to spend, oh, twenty minutes in almost any corner of the British Isles to have that distinctive local formulation proffered as the explanation for almost any feature of life.

The signs at the White Cliffs of Dover warning you not to lean over the cliff?

It’s Health & Safety, mate.

Primary schools that forbid their children to make daisy chains because they might pick up germs from the flowers?

Health & Safety, mate.

The decorative garden gnomes Sandwell Borough Council ordered the homeowner to remove from outside her front door on the grounds that she could trip over them when fleeing the house in event of its catching fire?

Health & Safety.

The fire extinguishers removed from a block of flats by Dorset building-risk assessors because they’re a fire risk?

Health & Safety. Apparently the presence of a fire extinguisher could encourage you to attempt to extinguish the fire instead of fleeing for your life.

In December a death in the family brought me face to face with Health & Safety. I don’t mean the deceased expired because he tripped over a garden gnome or succumbed to a toxic daisy chain: He died of non–Health & Safety–related causes. A funeral just before Christmas is always a logistical nightmare, and I didn’t really start grieving until the car pulled into the churchyard. It
was a picture-perfect English country setting: The old part of the church dates from the ninth century, and the new part from the tenth century. I felt a mild pang of envy at such a bucolic resting place: Mossy gravestones, the shade of a yew tree, cattle grazing across the church wall.

Ahead of us, the pallbearers emerged from the hearse, very sober and reserved. And at that point they produced a contraption halfway between a supermarket cart and a gurney. “What’s that?” asked someone. Funeral directors are immensely finicky, and, in the course of a thousand-and-one questions about the size of this, the color of that, nobody had said anything about a shopping cart.

“Oh, that’s to roll the coffin in on,” replied one of the pallbearers.

“Hang on,” I said. “You’re pallbearers. Aren’t you going to carry the coffin?”

“Not allowed, mate. ’Elf ’n’ Safety. The path’s uneven.” He motioned to the worn gravel track leading from the church gate to the door.

“The path’s been uneven for a thousand years,” I pointed out, “but it doesn’t seem to have prevented them holding funerals.”

“It’s not me, it’s ’Elf ’n’ Safety,” he said, sullenly. “They’d rather we wheeled it in in case one of us slipped. On the uneven path.”

We conferred. The ladies were unhappy about the Walmart cart. “Screw this,” said my brother-in-law gallantly. “We’ll carry it in.” He motioned to me and a couple of other male relatives.

“You can’t do that,” protested the head pallbearer. “You’re not licensed pallbearers.”

“So what?” I said. “As you’ve just explained, a licensed pallbearer is explicitly licensed not to bear palls.”

“You can’t just pick up the coffin and take it in!” he huffed. It was now the undertakers’ turn to confer. Inside the church, the organist was vamping the old Toccata & Fugue and wondering where everyone was. I had a vague feeling we were on the brink of the more raucous moments of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral, with rival mobs tugging his corpse back and forth.

The pallbearer returned. “We’ll carry it,” he informed us, “but you blokes have to help us. That way, if ’Elf ’n’ Safety complain, we can say you made us do it, and they can take it up with you.”

“I don’t believe New Hampshire would extradite for that,” I said confidently. And we made a rather moving and solemn sight as we proceeded stiffly down the dangerously uneven path that villagers had trod for over a millennium until we reached the even more dangerously uneven ancient, worn flagstones of the church itself.

As they say over there, it’s Health & Safety gone mad, innit? Or as a lady put it after the funeral, as we were discussing the fracas, “There’s only one thing that annoys me more than Health & Safety gone mad, and that’s when people say, ‘Ooo, it’s Health & Safety gone mad!’”

I know what she means. In Britain, the distillation of any daily grievance into a handy catchphrase seems to absolve one of the need to do anything about it. As long as they can grumble the agreed slogan, they’ll put up with ever more absurd incursions on individual liberty. No state can ensure its citizenry against all risks, although in Nanny Bloomberg’s New York City and hyper-regulated California they’re having a jolly good go. And that’s the point: The goal may be unachievable, but huge amounts of freedom will be lost in the attempt. The right to evaluate risk for oneself is part of what it means to be a functioning human being.

Meanwhile, back at the headquarters of the Health & Safety Executive itself, it was reported in 2007 that staff are forbidden to move chairs lest they do themselves an injury. Instead, a porter has to be booked forty-eight hours in advance, which makes last-minute seating adjustments at staff meetings somewhat problematic. “Pull up a chair”? Don’t even think about it.

It’s good to know that at their own HQ the ever more coercive tin-pot bureaucrats don’t just talk the talk, they walk the walk. Even if they won’t push the push.

ILLEGALLY ADMIRING THE KING’S DEER

Syndicated column, October 11, 2013

IF A GOVERNMENT
shuts down in the forest and nobody hears it, that’s the sound of liberty dying. The so-called shutdown is, as noted last week, mostly baloney: Eighty-three percent of the supposedly defunded government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the eight hundred thousand “non-essential” workers have been assured that, as soon as the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full for all the days they’ve had at home.

But the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns. The NPS has spent the last two weeks behaving as the paramilitary wing of the DNC, expending more resources in trying to close down open-air, unfenced areas than it would normally do in keeping them open. It began with the war memorials on the National Mall—that’s to say, stone monuments on pieces of grass under blue sky. It’s the equivalent of my New Hampshire town government shutting down, and deciding therefore to ring the Civil War statue on the village common with yellow police tape and barricades.

Still, the NPS could at least argue that these monuments were within their jurisdiction—although they shouldn’t be. Not content with that, the NPS shock troops then moved on to insisting that privately run sites such as the Claude Moore Colonial Farm and privately owned sites such as Mount Vernon were also required to shut. When the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway
declined to comply with the government’s order to close (an entirely illegal order, by the way), the “shut down” Park Service sent armed agents and vehicles to blockade the hotel’s driveway.

Even then, the problem with a lot of America’s scenic wonders is that, although they sit on National Park Service land, they’re visible from some distance. So, in South Dakota, having closed Mount Rushmore, the NPS storm troopers additionally attempted to close the
view
of Mount Rushmore—that’s to say a stretch of the highway, where the shoulder widens and you can pull over and admire the stony visages of America’s presidents. Maybe it’s time to blow up Washington, Jefferson & Co. and replace them with a giant, granite sign rising into the heavens bearing the chiseled inscription “DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING DOWN THERE.”

But perhaps the most extraordinary story to emerge from the NPS is that of the tour group of foreign seniors whose bus was trapped in Yellowstone Park on the day the shutdown began. They were pulled over photographing a herd of bison when an armed ranger informed them, with the insouciant ad-hoc unilateral lawmaking to which the armed bureaucrat is distressingly prone, that taking photographs counts as illegal “recreation.” “Sir, you are recreating,” the ranger informed the tour guide. And we can’t have that, can we?

They were ordered back to the Old Faithful Inn, next to the geyser of the same name, but forbidden to leave said inn to look at said geyser. Armed rangers were posted at the doors, and, just in case one of the wily Japanese or Aussies managed to outwit his captors by escaping through one of the inn’s air ducts and down to the scenic attraction, a fleet of NPS SUVs showed up every hour and a half throughout the day, ten minutes before Old Faithful was due to blow, to surround the geyser and additionally ensure that any of America’s foreign visitors trying to photograph the impressive natural phenomenon from a second-floor hotel window would still wind up with a picture full of government officials. The following morning the bus made the two-and-a-half-hour journey to the park boundary but was prevented from using any of the bathrooms en route, including at a private dude ranch whose owner was threatened with the loss of his license if he allowed any tourist to use the facilities.

At the same time as the National Park Service was holding legal foreign visitors under house arrest, it was also allowing illegal immigrants to hold a rally on the supposedly closed National Mall. At this bipartisan amnesty bash, the Democrat House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, said she wanted to “thank the President for enabling us to gather here,” and Republican congressman Mario Diaz-Balart also expressed his gratitude to the Administration for “allowing us to be here.”

Is this for real? It’s not King Barack’s land; it’s supposed to be the people’s land, and his most groveling and unworthy subjects shouldn’t require a dispensation by His Benign Majesty to set foot on it. It is disturbing how easily large numbers of Americans lapse into a neo-monarchical prostration that few subjects of actual monarchies would be comfortable with these days. But then in actual monarchies the king takes a more generous view of “public lands.” Two years after Magna Carta, in 1217, King Henry III signed the Charter of the Forest, which despite various amendments and replacement statutes remained in force in Britain for some three-quarters of a millennium, until the early Seventies. If Magna Carta was a landmark in its concept of individual rights, the Forest Charter played an equivalent role in advancing the concept of the commons, the public space. Repealing various restrictions by his predecessors, Henry III opened the royal forests to the freemen of England, granted extensive grazing and hunting rights, and eliminated the somewhat severe penalty of death for taking the King’s venison. The NPS have not yet fried anyone for taking King Barack’s deer, but they are putting you under house arrest for taking a photograph of it. It is somewhat sobering to reflect that an English peasant enjoyed more freedom on the sovereign’s land in the thirteenth century than a freeborn American does on “the people’s land” in the twenty-first century.

And we’re talking about a lot more acreage: Forty percent of California is supposedly federal land, and thus two-fifths of the state is now officially closed to the people of the state. The geyser stasi of the National Park Service have in effect repealed the Charter of the Forest. President Obama and his enforcers have the same concept of the royal forest that King John did. The
Government does not own this land; the Park Service are merely the janitorial staff of “we the people” (to revive an obsolescent concept). No harm will befall the rocks and rivers by posting a sign at the entrance saying “No park ranger on duty during government shutdown. Proceed beyond this point at your own risk.” And, at the urban monuments, you don’t even need that: It is disturbing that minor state officials even presume to have the right to prevent the citizenry walking past the Vietnam Wall.

I wonder what those Japanese and Australian tourists prevented from photographing bison or admiring a geyser make of U.S. claims to be “the land of the free.” When a government shutdown falls in the forest, Americans should listen very carefully. The Government is telling you something profound and important about how it understands the power relationship between them and you.

The National Park Service should be out of the business of urban landmarks, and the vast majority of our “national” parks should be returned to the states. And, after the usurpation of the people’s sovereignty this month, the next President might usefully propose a new Charter of the Forest.

NINJAS VS. TURTLES

These days I write often about what the militia guy below calls “the militarization of the police,” and what I usually refer to as “the paramilitarization of the bureaucracy.” Because in America
everybody’s
the police: Every rinky-dink pen-pusher at the Department of Paperwork can execute a warrant, and dispatch his agency’s personal Delta Force—from the IRS to the Department of Agriculture
.

If I sound a little naïve in the piece below, it’s because a lot of this stuff—the whole money-no-object flood-the-zone approach of U.S. policing—was still new to me, as it was to many Americans back then. These days, the three-in-the-morning knock from what I’ve come to call “the full Robocop” is a far more routine feature of American life
.

The Spectator
, September 1, 1995