The Undocumented Mark Steyn (5 page)

         
Ventilate the area by opening windows and leave the area for fifteen minutes before returning to begin the cleanup. Mercury vapor levels will be lower by then.

Okay, so ventilate the area. Open the windows. Leave it for fifteen minutes, get your pets out so they don’t go snuffling around in all the mercury from the light bulb. Got it. So I take me, grandma, the pets, get us all out of the house, open the windows for fifteen minutes.

         
For maximum protection, and if you have them, wear rubber gloves to protect your hands from the sharp parts.

Fine. So after fifteen minutes with grandma and the pets outside, I have to go inside and find the rubber gloves to throw away the light bulb.

         
Carefully remove the larger pieces, place them in a secure closed container, preferably a glass container with a metal screw top lid and seal, like a canning jar.

Right. So I need rubber gloves and a canning jar when I reenter the premises.

         
Next, begin collecting the smaller pieces and dust. You can use two stiff pieces of paper such as index cards or playing cards to scoop up pieces.

Okay, so I need rubber gloves, a canning jar and a set of playing cards when I reenter the contaminated premises.

         
Pat the area with the sticky side of duct tape, packing tape, or masking tape to pick up fine particles. Wipe the area with a wet wipe or damp paper.

Gotcha. When I reenter the premises, I need rubber gloves, I need a canning jar, I need a pack of playing cards, and I need duct tape and wet wipes.

         
Put all waste and materials into the glass container including all materials used in the cleanup as well.

Ah. So you have to throw away your playing cards and your gloves and your duct tape and the canning jar, too.

         
Tape and label the container as “universal waste: broken lamp.” Remove the container with the breakage and cleanup materials. Continue ventilating the room for several hours. Wash your hands and face. Take the glass container with the waste material to a facility that accepts universal waste.

So you can’t toss it in the trash, you can’t toss it in your regular town dump, you have to take it to a special facility.

         
When a break happens on carpet, homeowners may consider removing throw rugs or the area of the carpet where the breakage occurred as a precaution, particularly if the rug is in an area frequented by infants, small children, or pregnant women.

So now aside from getting the gloves and the canning jar and the set of playing cards, you’ve got to have a pair of scissors to cut up and remove the contaminated carpet from your floor. See how simple it is? Just fourteen easy
steps. With Edison’s light bulb, if you break it, it’s one cumbersome step—you toss it in the trash. But according to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, with the Curly Fry Lightbulb it’s just fourteen easy steps. All you need to keep handy are duct tape, playing cards, a canning jar, a sticky label to put on it. Who doesn’t have those within easy reach of every electrical outlet?

If you’ve got a mason jar but it’s still got your pickles and berries in it, the Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management adds:

         
You may need to empty it into another container before using it.

Don’t ask me why. Are they just stating the obvious? Or will the mercury mutate with the content to create some giant toxic pickle that will rampage up the Maine coast all the way Down East to Campobello Island, where it will pick up the Roosevelt summer retreat and crumple it like matchsticks and hurl it across the Bay of Fundy to Nova Scotia?

This is the official State of Maine advice on what to do if you break a light bulb in America in the twenty-first century, culminating with: Don’t forget to empty any pickled tomatoes or persimmon jelly you may have into another mason jar.

So that’s now two mason jars you need if you break a light bulb. If you don’t have another mason jar available, just empty the pickled tomatoes or the persimmon jelly on to the carpet, because, as the Bureau of Remediation also tells us, you’re going to have to throw the carpet out anyway and any other fabrics that come into contact with the Curly Fry Lightbulb. Throw away your carpet, throw away your canning jar, throw away your playing cards. . . .

Oh, and throw away your clothes. You can’t stick any contaminated clothes in the washer because, says the Environmental Protection Agency, mercury fragments in the clothing will contaminate the machine and pollute the sewage system. Got that? So, even if you do everything right, the li’l ol’ lady next door who’s eighty-seven and perhaps isn’t up to speed on the Curly Fry Lightbulb, maybe she’ll just break a light bulb and she’ll put the drop cloth in the washer and it’ll contaminate the entire sewage system.

So only one thing can be said with certainty: the ensuing kidney and brain damage caused by this is going to make one hell of a class action lawsuit circa 2030.

This is Big Government at work. It solved a problem that didn’t exist. There’s nothing wrong with Edison’s light bulb: it’s the great iconic American invention, the embodiment of American dynamism of the nineteenth century. And what did we do in the twenty-first century? We banned it! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But we fixed it anyway. And as a result, every time you break it, you now need to have a mason jar, you need to have a set of playing cards, you need to have rubber gloves, you need to have throw mats, you need to empty out your persimmon jelly onto the contaminated carpet, and you’re going to be at risk from a polluted sewage system. . . .

Oh, and the list on the State of Michigan light-bulb disposal site is even longer than Maine’s. It’s not just a convenient fourteen-step disposal plan for your Curly Fry Lightbulb, they’ve got an eighteen-step disposal plan. You don’t just need the drop cloth and the baby wipes and the pack of playing cards and the two mason jars and the new carpet, you also need additional items—like an eye dropper. You know—an eye dropper, for putting drops in your eyes?

You need an eye dropper just to throw out a light bulb—the new light bulb they’re making us all install because they banned the old light bulb that doesn’t require you to have a pack of playing cards, two mason jars, a new carpet, and an eye dropper handy when you happen to break them.

For a century, Edison’s light bulb was regarded as a beacon of American genius; then it became a “climate criminal.” That transformation is American decline in a nutshell.

Mark Steyn in for Rush. More to come. . . .

II

SPIRITS OF THE AGE

LIFE CLASS

This column was an attempt to convey to British readers something of the flavor of high-school graduation, a ritual largely unknown across the Atlantic and one at odds with the basic organizing principle of English education: The continual assurances by commencement speakers that yours is the most awesome generation ever to walk the earth ring a little odd if you’re a survivor of some grim Dotheboys Hall where the prevailing educational philosophy was to lower your “self-esteem” to undetectable levels by the end of the first week
.

The Daily Telegraph
, June 20, 1998

THERE IS A
reassuring tedium to “commencement,” the annual high school graduation ceremonies, at least in my corner of northern New England, where nothing much changes about these occasions: The students all wear gowns and mortarboards and conclude with a mass display of synchronized tasseltwirling. The school band always plays “Pomp and Circumstance”—and not in the nerds’-night-out sense of “Land of Hope and Glory” at the Proms, either.
¹
These guys mean it.

Then come the zillions of student awards, some time-honored, like Randolph High’s Daughters of the American Revolution Award, which went to Charlotte Phillips; some of more recent vintage, like Rochester High’s Go For It Award, which went to Rachel Stringer; and some, usually with names like
The Steadfast Award, are frankly just to ensure that even the class thicko wins something. At Rochester, the Roxanne Curtis-Bowen Award went to Bobbi-Jo Bowen, presumably for being the Best Bowen of the Year. As for the speeches, the approved metaphors involve doors, thresholds, crossroads, and bridges, although exceptions are permitted: at Vermont’s Chelsea High, the Class of ’98 were “caterpillars emerging as butterflies,” according to valedictorian Kelly MacCarthy, winner of the L. B. Bowen and Bertha Bowen Award, an award apparently open to non-Bowens.

Someone always says that life is not a rehearsal. This year it was Mary Burnham of Waits River Valley School. “Life’s not a rehearsal,” she said. “This is it.” If life were a rehearsal, Mary’s speech would be cut before the first out-of-town preview. The starrier the guest speakers, the more pitiful their attempts to ingratiate themselves with pupils: over the border in New Hampshire, former Governor Steve Merrill cited Madonna as a fine role model because she’s in the gym every day at 5 a.m. “Madonna understands commitment,” he told Woodsville High Graduates.

Of course, in these non-elitist times, the very idea of a star speaker is suspect. For the commencement address at Whitcomb High in Bethel, the graduating class, instead of choosing a state senator or some other local worthy, invited John Hubble, a “member of the high school maintenance staff”—i.e., the janitor. With all those metaphors about thresholds and new doors opening, it makes sense to ask the guy with a full set of keys. “Always try your best,” Mr. Hubble told them, “but don’t take things too seriously.”

Naturally, a little controversy is to be expected. For example, class valedictorian Kate Skidmore declared that it was time “to tell the truth” about Woodsville. “Look around you!” she cried. “There are gay people everywhere in Woodsville.” This seems unlikely: Woodsville is named for a man called Woods, who went into the woods business and started a sawmill. It’s populated by scrawny, leathery, stump-toothed guys in plaid and their somewhat more expansive wives. I’ve spent hours looking for a decent gay disco and no one’s ever said: “Oh, sure. Second left after the lumber yard and the woodchipper rentals. I was just heading over there myself.”

Alas, such genial provocations have now been swept aside by Kate Logan, late of the Long Trail School in Dorset, Vermont. Hitherto, Dorset has principally been known as the site of America’s first marble quarry, in 1785. Today it’s famous for young Kate, who seems to have lost her marbles completely. At last week’s commencement, the eighteen-year-old stepped to the podium, warmed up with some traditional guff about her “journey on a road less traveled,” moved on to thank the school for challenging and inspiring her, and then threw off her cap, let her white graduation robe slip to the floor, and finished her speech completely naked.

“Without expectations, feeling the limitless directions, to open myself completely,” continued Kate, as students, teachers, friends, and family took in every dimple of her five-foot, six-inch, 140-pound form, “for it is only then, when I am open and free, that truth and wisdom will reveal themselves.” As you’ll have gathered, Miss Logan’s public speaking style can use all the visual aids it can get.

Afterwards, Kate said she’d given the last half of her speech nude to celebrate her graduation on a “spiritual level.” “When you’re moving through a place of truth and being yourself,” she said, “it’s always going to work out right.”

The school, meanwhile, has released a statement saying “the incident was overwhelmingly inappropriate and is not reflective of our student body.”

As
The Burlington Free Press
noted, it was certainly reflective of one student body.

Heigh-ho. Life, as someone said, is not a rehearsal. Or, anyway, not a dress rehearsal.

1
    
“Land of Hope and Glory” is A. C. Benson’s lyric (largely unknown in the United States) to Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1.” A hymn to England (“mother of the free”), it is sung in gusto by an audience in patriotic dress at the last night of the annual Sir Henry Wood Promenade Concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. It is also used as England’s national anthem at the Commonwealth Games.

E PLURIBUS COMPOSITE

Syndicated column, May 5, 2012

HAVE YOU DATED
a composite woman? They’re America’s hottest new demographic. As with all the really cool stuff, Barack Obama was doing it years before the rest of us. In
Dreams from My Father
, the world’s all-time most unread bestseller, he spills the inside dope on his composite white girlfriend, after an off-Broadway play prompts an agonizing post-show exchange about race: