Bad Law, Bad Sound, Good Beer

There's a wonderful phrase I came across the other day in the intro to Peter Brown's The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. He quotes the historian Arnaldo Momigliano as saying of the great Russian scholar of the ancient world Michael Rostovtzeff, "Those who have known him have known greatness. They will always cherish the memory of a courageous and honest historian for whom civilization meant creative liberty."

Creative liberty! That's our basic goal. Too often the left is seen as a kind of nanny, howling for tighter regulation, allowing the right to steal the idea of freedom.

Go back to the Enlightenment and you find the notion of creative liberty bursting from the pages of people like Rousseau or Voltaire. Anarchists march under the same banner. I think the real trouble came with the Fabians and the Progressives at the turn of the century, who turned the dream of creative liberty into a series of regulatory orders on how people should conduct their lives, right down to the simplest task, a kind of Robert's Rules of Order for every facet of life and play.

And when I say "simplest task" I mean it. How about connecting a propane bottle to a gas barbecue? Here's a parable of propane. In California and other states across this great nation we have been confronting deadlines on new propane bottle valves. I speak of the mostly 5-gallon propane gas bottles to be seen in trailer parks, on RVs, Weber bbqs, boats, back porches, street kitchens. You name it, and there's probably a 5-gallon propane bottle somewhere around.

I recently came across a vivid illustration of the passions aroused by this crisis in Butte County, in the Chico area of Northern California. The local propane distributor told my host Jeff Howell that he'd been physically attacked twice in the past four weeks by angered denizens of trailer parks. Why was he attacked? The answer can be traced to the run-up in propane gas prices in recent years, which has prompted more and more small stores like 7-Elevens to sell propane. The inexperienced propane dispenser simply fills the bottle till clouds of propane inform the dispenser that it's time to stop. The overfilled propane bottle is taken to the back porch, where perhaps it sits in the sun and warms up until gas passes through the escape valve, ready for possible accidental ignition by someone lighting a cigarette.

Somewhere in this great nation a propane gas valve-maker smelled the heady fragrance of opportunity and prompted his lobbyist to action. Regulations duly decreed that all 5- and 7-gallon propane bottles be refitted by April 1 of this year with new valves with (a) an internal float to prevent overflow, and the escape of excess, heated gas and (b) a new wide-track thread to enable a trouble-free fitting to the propane bottle of the gas hose leading to the relevant appliance.

Counties in California are dealing with this in different ways. Here in Humboldt County you can turn in your old bottle at various sites and in exchange for around $24 get a new 5-gallon bottle filled with propane. Not a bad deal. In Butte County the original plan had been to have people turn in their bottles to the propane dealer, who had set up a mighty vise to hold the bottle while some low-paid toiler drained out the propane and used spark-free brass equipment to take out the old valve and put in the new one. Cost of operation, around $28.

Wal-Mart is now trading new for old 5-gallon propane bottles in Butte County for $18.19. The propane dealer will only accept the old bottles for a fee of $6. The scrap metal recycler won't crush the bottles because they might contain propane and would explode in the crusher. There's a growing mountain of old propane bottles in a lot on the edge of Chico, all slowly leaking propane. There's also a growing tendency of people in trailer parks and similar venues to dump their useless propane bottles in the canyon or ditch, sometimes after assaulting the propane distributor for refusing to fill the old and now illegal bottles.

The summer will bring fresh excitement to Lake Tahoe when boat owners toss their useless old propane bottles, some of them with a gallon or two of propane in them, over the side, thus creating depth charges ready to detonate when the next water ski boat scythes into them at 50 knots.

But perhaps, you wonder, a leaking propane bottle did kill someone. My own local propane dispenser tells me of a case near the Bay Area where a fellow hooked up his gas barbecue incorrectly and got burned. It seems possible his folly and subsequent lawsuit led to the mandatory introduction of the new valves.

Often I'm on the side of the trial lawyers, but there are plenty of people around who will do something truly dumb, like trying to trim their hedges with a lawn mower held on its side. Then a lawyer moves in to try to make a killing because there was no warning label on the mower telling people not to hold it over their heads to slice away at a 6-foot row of privet or escallonia.

Regarding the propane valve peril there's probably a greater risk of being bitten to death by pigs.

That Certain Tingle

My friend Pierre Sprey called up from Maryland and I told him the propane-bottle saga. We derided the Nanny State. Pierre designed the F-16 and the A-10. These days he runs Mapleshade Studios and concerns himself with high-end sound. He keeps an eye on new equipment and is thus in a position to inform me of the latest European Community regulations from Brussels as applied to amplifiers.

Now, anyone who has ever assembled a sound system will know that there is a moment when you have to attach the speaker wires to the back of the amplifier, usually by wrapping the bare end of the wire around a nut on the back of the amplifier and tightening down a plastic-covered screw. In their wisdom the safety experts of the EU have decided that amplifiers represent a deadly threat, and that Europeans stand at risk of electrocuting themselves while connecting up their speakers to the amplifier.

The facts? Pierre tells me that the back of a large amplifier could put out 40 or 50 volts; if you disconnect the speakers, switch on the amplifier, turn the volume to maximum and grip both posts you might feel a tingle at that level. Maybe Jim Morrison tried it before turning to the certainty of a drug overdose.

To achieve security for all Europeans, the Euro-bureaucrats have mandated that all amplifiers have to have a big plastic surround covering the base of the binding post, and a big plastic nut that fits down into the cup, thus ensuring that prying fingers can never touch the bare brass of binding post. Out the window go simple spade connectors.

Safety carries a price, of course. In this instance the price includes impaired sound because of the plastic around the post and wire. Pierre explains that plastic causes dielectric absorption, soaking up energy from the field around the wire. This takes the excitement out of music because it compresses peaks. It also rereleases music with a little delay, so the sound is blurred.

No evidence that Europeans have been dying of tingling-post syndrome. The risk of being attacked by rabid pigeons is far greater. Death to pigeons!

Bread, Coffee And Beer

I always try to sell the left on optimism, because of the left's regrettable tendency to think everything's for the worst in the worst of all possible worlds. We just saw East Timor celebrate independence. As I told a celebration party put on by East Timor Action Network in Seattle, who would have bet in 1976 that after ghastly suffering and tremendous heroism, East Timor would, in 2002, be hoisting its flag?

Let's remember triumphs as well as defeats. I like to remind the younger crowd of some of the less trumpeted legacies of the 60s. Better food. The visionary radical hippies had a lot to do with that, touting organic food and the grains that now find their way into the health pages of the Sunday papers. Good coffee was promoted by radicals like my friends and neighbors the Paffs, who began by roasting beans on their kitchen stove for friends and neighbors because the local town sold only Folgers, and who now run Humboldt's very successful Goldrush Coffee. (Call 707-629-3460 for mail orders. Right now Joe says the Dark Sumatra is terrific.)

Beer, too. The back-lot brewers who began Sierra Nevada beer in Chico, who ultimately beat back Budweiser's efforts to destroy them and thus sealed the victory of the microbrews, came out of the 60s alternative culture. Bread, coffee and beer. It's up there with the Bolsheviks' old slogan of Peace, Land and Bread.