Circannually, a good friend and I can agree, and this time it was over a bill just passed by the New York State Assembly. Legislators in Albany wish to succeed where their colleagues elsewhere in the Union repeatedly fail, and, too, without rectifying what courts rule as lapses in constitutional observance. "Dissemination of violent and indecent video games to minors," states a bill known innocuously as Number A08696, could earn one so convicted the same sentence as a rioter, or voyeur, or a bomb-hoaxer. Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft would be required by law, through hardware or software, "to prevent the display of violent or indecent video games."
The two of us thought this, in my friend's words, "asinine." However ambiguous the legal definition of obscenity — a bequest of the last century's Supreme Court that set distasteful creative work within bounds of protected speech — entertainment has been fairly evaluated by the citizen, not the statesman, for decades. And the judiciary recognizes this, to say nothing of a parent's injunctive disconnection of a television set. Statutes in at least eight other states have been struck down, and yet the political class believes that it is charged to denude the social stations of those whom elected it.
If, I opined, the state senate were to pass the measure and send it to an approving Eliot Spitzer, the law might be enforceable for a day or two before a court kept it in suspension for its eventual review and rejection. My friend chose to accept the open civic invitation of his state representatives, and sent each one a reproving letter.
New York's junior United States Senator, Hillary Clinton, has stood out in front on federal regulation of video games. Unlike her fellows — such as Joe Lieberman, who is an assiduous moralist — she is categorical in her regulatory designs. As Clinton campaigns, Clinton talks, and when she does that Clinton's little wheels turn, and Clinton waxes imperious.
"Let's do some reality shows about innovation," she said the other day. "And let's have some cash prizes out there to try to get young people to start thinking that way. I've long said if we could have some have some really good programming about math students and engineers that would get people excited and, you know, they could walk around in great looking clothes and be really attractive, you know, more people — " all available transcripts imply what Clinton meant to say next, as the senator's beatitude was either complemented by applause or from that point ineffable in the senator's likely state of rapture.
The question, Why doesn't Hillary go to Hollywood? was answered before the end of March 1993. Shall H.R. Clinton's Washington command the production of edifying breakfast cereal? Probably. Hyperbole is redundant. Now, my friend would prefer to vote straight-ticket Democrat, but one has to wonder where he — or any one of the many like voters his age — is going to put his particular intolerance for bureaucratic immoderateness when it comes time to vote, for or against statism, in a primary, maybe a general election. He did not, this time, include in the mail drop a letter to Clinton's office.