Weekend Update (Friday Edition): Sorry
In the middle of yesterday’s editing storm, a friend sent me the link to a heartbreaking story about abandoned infants who die in the back seats of cars. I was going to link to the story from last night’s Compline, but I couldn’t bring myself to end a week of links on that sorry note.
As my friend pointed out, the story has many rich tangents. But one stood out for me so strongly that I just about lost sight of the others. These ghastly car deaths became frequent only after federal regulations ordained the rear-facing, back-seat infant car seat. It’s pretty obvious why this design, however “safe” would fail the test of human cognition. And yet prosecutors — agents of the state that promulgated the mistake — have charged some unlucky parents with manslaughter and worse.
No one believes in the virtue of enlightened regulation more passionately than I do; but my enthusiasm is greatly tempered by the recognition that stupid regulations feed libertarian wet dreams. As someone who thought he was going the extra mile, back in 1972, by dumping his baby daughter in a reconfigured shopping basket, sans seat belts, I’d like to see the Chicken Littles driven out of safety regulation. If they don’t in fact do more harm than good, let’s hear about it; I suspect that they do. A child who dies in a collision in the front seat of a car dies a happier death — for the rest of us, which is what counts here — than the one who languishes in hundred-degree heat in the back seat of a car before succumbing to hyperthermia (even though it’s actually sixty degrees outside the car) because rear-facing car seats, however rational, turn out to be sublimely unreasonable.
The Week at Portico: Alexei Volodin played at the Museum last week, and, breaking a long private jinx, I wrote about it (nothing much). Even more liberating was tossing off a few paragraphs about Zoë Heller’s wry-Manhattan family portrait, The Believers. And, of course, the usual suspects, le minimum, as Albin puts it at the train station — the Book Review review, which you really ought to check out just for Alison Bechdel’s graphic, a first, and Sunshine Cleaning, which I saw with Kathleen, a rare event. (She liked it, too.)