NOTES ON THE NEW PROHIBITION

The coast appears to be clear. You can remove your hamburgers from
hiding. You can gnaw your ribs in the open again. Remain alert for a
surprise attack, but the critical time has passed.

For a while it seemed that right-wing religious fundamentalists might
turn their fury on meat eaters. At least, it seemed like they should.

I'm talking about folks like the pious fellow who showed up at Matthew
Shepard's funeral in Wyoming with a sign that said "AIDS is God's Cure
for Fags." For more than a decade, we've heard their claims - that God
sent this modern plague earthward to punish man's sins, particularly
male homosexuality and intravenous drug use. Sins so heinous that God
crafted a virus just for them even as He tolerated murder and rape and
genocide and the destruction of creation.

If we assumed for one nauseating moment that these fanatics were
correct, then the greatest sin for which God hath sent us this virus
must be the eating of meat. For science has proven that the BY human
immunodeficiency virus developed from a benign virus in chimpanzees
and came to our species most likely thanks to a hunter who killed and
gutted and ate one of our chimp brothers or sisters. A meat eater.

Still no word from the Rev. Jerry Falwell on that.

I most cherish those hours on KVEC when they muzzle their talk-show
hosts and air the audio feed from CNN. I know the station probably
does it to save money, but it serves a public purpose. It's the only
way to get news on the spot in this county without resorting to cable
or the Internet or waiting for Tom Brokaw to appear at 5:30. Best of
all, KVEC frequently interrupts the news with my favorite public
service announcement.

Everyone has a favorite PSA, right? Mine comes from the Partnership
for a Drug Free America, a fine group of well-meaning media
professionals. Or so they seem. The PSA portrays a game show in which
marijuana users are quizzed with questions like these: What did you
have for breakfast? What is your name? What day follows Monday)

Of course, the contestants can't remember the correct answers. Too
many clouds on the horizon of short-term memory. Maybe you've heard it
too. Maybe, if you've never smoked pot, you remember it. I like this
PSA because I'm hip to its true intent - to encourage pot smoking in
America. While satisfying adults with it apparent disparagement of
potheads, it secretly urges teens to reach for their bongs.

Here's how it works: The PSA seems to endeavor to convince teens that
pot smoking makes them stupid, right? But anyone who has ever lived
between the ages of 12 and 20 knows that teens who are prone to pot
smoking would rather be brain-dead than be normal adults. And who can
blame them? Who wants to grow up to be like Trent Lott or Henry Hyde?

The folks at PDFA must have been teenagers once. And since they're
media professionals, we know just what kind of teenagers they were,
don't we? Those freaks who worked on the yearbook and the school
paper. The first ones to grow facial hair, girls included. The shy
ones who dwelt in the psychedelic folks of their own minds. Now
they've hit on this ingenious plot to reverse the brainwashing
inflicted on millions of teens by the DARE program.

Every time that PSA airs, millions of American teens spark up a
chubby. I'm sure of it. I'd do a study and prove it, but I can't
remember how.

Or we could examine similar studies about tobacco.

Tobacco use among adults dropped like a bomb in the first half of the
1990s. The number of adult smokers dropped from 43 percent in 1965 to
15.5 percent in 1995.

Credit for this statistic is generally given to the state's
anti-smoking campaign, which went hog-wild after the passage of
Proposition 99 in 1988. Prop. 99 slapped a tax on tobacco to fund a
new bureaucracy of anti-tobacco crusaders whose jobs now depend on
the continued sales of the products they are trying to abolish.

Around 1995, these tobaccocrats noticed something was terribly wrong.
The number of teen smokers was rising. In 1997, 19.4 percent of
eighth-graders said they had smoked in the past month, up from 12.4
percent in 1991.

New Times donned black and slunk around street corners in 1995 to ask
teens why. They told us the state's anti-smoking ads make them crave
cigarettes.

"When I look at that [ad] and it says don't smoke, I see a cigarette,"
said Ryan, a 15-year-old SLO High School student who started smoking
at age 12.

The tobaccocrats in Sacramento discovered much the same thing. They
gathered focus groups of teens and realized their campaigns didn't
work on that age group. They must also have realized, although they
didn't admit it, that they had unwittingly encouraged thousands of
teens to embark on an addiction that would last them an average of 25
years and ultimately kill 25 percent of them.

The tobaccorcarts dove into this new problem in the late 1990s, with
laws like the one that regulates the height of tobacco displays in
stores. While they were busy with that, adults turned their pent-up
nicotine lust to cigars.

SLO County's Tobacco Control Office is circulating a survey among
cigar smokers right now. It asks respondents to rate their level of
agreement to statements like these: "I think it's sexy when a woman
smokes a cigar"; "Smoking a cigar makes me feel special"' and "I would
seriously consider stopping cigar smoking if only I didn't look so
good holding a cigar."

The survey is obviously designed to help the tobaccocracy craft a new
advertising campaign against cigars. You can bet that when that one
hits the air, the fastest growing group of cigar smokers will be girls
under 10.

Who will save us from our saviors?

Which brings me to SLO Town's finest hour.

The 21st annual Mardi Gras came and went and the downtown still
stands, a little richer. Still no riots, still no infernos, still no
second coming of Christ, and still no event shows off SLO as well. The
downtown has never looked as crowded, and it remained crowded for a
three-day weekend.

The parade began as the day ended with the dying sun throwing gold and
vermilion flares of farewell against the rafts of cirrus. The peak and
the cerro stood over us like stone idols, awesome and unreal in their
height and their heft. The sky soared overhead without a hint of
chill, clear and crystal like one of those globes that snows when you
shake it. It looked a mythic place, nestled in its valley like a
beautiful cliche. The kind of city that attains what we imagine of
human cities, like Paris does, or Venice or New Orleans or Rio de Janeiro.

And in that gilded setting 30,000 people gathered and smiled and
cheered, celebrated life, celebrated health, celebrated freedom,
filled their lungs with clean coastal air and let peal a collective
howl.

Even the brigades of gendarmes on their mountain bikes and squad cars
and vacant paddy wagons seemed to get into the spirit. The helicopter
above, that dirigible Ken Starr with its prying eye, became just
another special effect. The masses cheered when its light struck them.
The only sad faces were on the roadblock monitors who had to remain at
their posts a block away.

I know it's a scandalous thought, but perhaps the time has come to
repeal the prohibition on fun.