Tell Us What To Eat
by Donald Devine

The cops apprehended the suspect. She was caught trying to smuggle contraband into the hallways of West Friendship Elementary School and was upbraided severely, causing her to cry. I figured cocaine and so sympathetically told my granddaughter she was lucky to have avoided prison. She cried again.

The smuggled goods turned out to be candy. She is the biggest sweet-tooth since her great-grandmother. In spite of my prime directive that a government monopoly will always produce negative unintended consequences, I admit I was flabbergasted. What now was going on in our own poor public schools?

The criminal trail traces back to September 2004 as students were returning to school, an irresistible occasion for politicians to pull a public relations stunt. Department of Education Secretary Rod Paige and White House education advisor Margaret Spellings introduced a first year $69 million program with 229 grants generously sprinkled across the nation to eliminate childhood obesity, as part of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. Spellings was so good at fighting chubbiness, she was promoted to secretary herself, where she presides over the national fat police program telling us what to eat.

It is not only children. New York City, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. suburb, Montgomery County Maryland, among others, have outlawed the use of trans fats in restaurants and grocery stores. These have strange exceptions. Since they cannot control interstate commerce, such as packaged goods from outside the jurisdiction, these are excluded from the prohibition. Sarah Lee fat is ok but Dunkin Donuts, which makes its own on site, is not. Heh, it helps big contributors too, but that is the price you pay for doing good. Unfortunately, the church supper is out. Sorry for that.

Hollywood has joined in the spreading nannyism. Just recently the movie raters decided to give an R rating to any motion picture that presents people smoking on film. Betty Davis and Humphrey Bogart call your agents. Aimee Semple McPherson--she is alive and well at the cinema. Can trans fats be far behind?

Of course, environmentalists had been way ahead of these Johnny-come-lately moralists. My own children came home spouting pantheism and demanding separate trash containers way back then. Bambi was the national totem and lamb chops became “little meat.” Hunters became birdwatchers, or had to pretend to be. At the instigation of their public payroll teachers, children have been preaching the dogmas to their parents ever since, who have enacted them into law.

The Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, the fountainhead of schoolmarmism that devised and first promoted the wonderful idea of controlling obesity, conducted a poll proving people actually want them and the schools and government to control their fat intake. A whopping 83 percent liked the idea and even supported getting rid of school vending machines with soft drinks, fatty (i.e., good tasting) snacks and candy. That is where my granddaughter fell into the fine mesh of the fat law: no snack greater than 100 calories. A scarlet letter from the community for a chocolate-covered granola bar--and at such a young age!

The great French analyst of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, warned us this would happen almost two centuries ago:

The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

Even the perceptive Frenchman could not have foreseen Sheryl Crow. The glamorous rock star recently instructed students how to “become part of the solution to global warming:” use only one square of toilet paper for each visit. Yes, it has gone that far and undoubtedly soon will become law. And no one will complain. I foolishly thought when the Feds regulated the amount of water allowed for a flush insufficient to clear the bowl, there would be a revolution. But de Tocqueville apparently had it just about right.

Donald Devine, the editor of Conservative Battleline Online, was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 and is the director of the Federalist Leadership Center at Bellevue University.