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| Personal Assault Craft |
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| badly wanted in heaven |
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This is Dark Cloud on Tuesday, May 19, 1998. It is amazing to me what comes to the attention of the United States Congress for legislation and what does not. For example, there is a bill before the House dealing with safety issues of what are called Personal Water Craft. I think that’s what they are called. These are those loud, annoying fiberglass pontoons with a 4500 hp engine that even a very drunk moron can start and steer till it gets up to speed, which is about three seconds and 75 knots, just previous to Nature Weeding Out the Guilty and generally several of the young and innocent by a horrible bloody accident. It is often worse: sometimes the idiots live, and their victims do not. This is getting much consideration in the media. Now, who uses such vehicles? Who has the time and money to spend on them? Well, clearly, the rich can afford several for the children to slum around in, hurtling around various harbors to buy their drugs and to race around while the folks argue during one of the cocktail hours. But there is danger here. These are cheap machines to own or rent, and because there is currently no license required, virtually anyone can rent these babies. And they do. People poorer than us! Who is at risk from them? Well, the wealthy in their yachts and speedboats who damned well used to OWN the canals and lakes that these... these punks are invading. Imagine the horror of toning down the skin after an exhausting day of sunbathing, slipping into seersucker jacket and Bermuda shorts for dinner, and then SMASH! Some drunken young man – certainly looks Hispanic – smashes into the hull of your yawl. The whole evening ruined while the blood is hosed over the side. Worse, Muffy was waterskiing earlier in the week, and these rude, rude people kept leaping her wake. I hope it was the same young man who stained the new paint job. Sound familiar? This is the snow board/skier conflict on the ocean instead of on the slopes. It is class war. But wait! Aren’t these things actually dangerous? Aren’t people being hurt and killed? Well, yes. All that’s true, but if actual physical safety was the issue, cigarettes would have been outlawed and, more telling, they’d be cracking down on the rich kids in their cigarette and lesser speedboats hurtling around the inland waterways of our nation. But they can’t do that, because rich kids have rich parents who have powerful and vindictive attorneys. We can’t, somehow, get rid of all the drunks in fast boats, just the poorer ones who can’t afford the health care to recover from being decapitated or chewed up by a beer guzzler’s propeller any more than one of our 2600 remaining manatees. Let’s get rid of the snowboarders, who couldn’t afford to take the expensive skiing lessons they no longer need, and we can’t get rid of cocaine, of course, but we can vector in on crack, the poor man’s charge, rather than the powder, because the guys that sell that stuff not only shoot back, they can afford to take out contracts on people who annoy them. And crack is mostly used by punks and people with dark skin. White people tend to use the powder; people who can afford to send their lawyers birthday cards. And this is all too bad, because I know from experience that drunken speedboat drivers are every bit as scary as drunken car drivers with loaded handguns and a lost child custody battle in that day’s events. They don’t have brakes, they don’t have the coordination to use them if they did, and they are as sharp as a bag of wet leather. They are more belligerent, as if their lake was guaranteed to them at birth as their own private pond, and you are just froth. But all this hypocritical talk about jet skis (that’s the name!) is just silly. If they want to control the problem of homicidal idiots at the controls, they do not need to install foot protectors or air bags or seat belts or any of that. The captains of these craft are not our concern, since clearly they are badly wanted in heaven. It is their potential victims who ought to concern us. Rather than install safety features on the Jet Ski, they should engineer aspects that make the craft more and more dangerous the faster it goes. A pointed stick facing the guy at the helm could emerge from the speedometer, for example, as the craft gains speed. One misjudged wave above his ability and the guy is impaled. Perfect. But not just for jet skis: for every boat. Not just for the little guy under the guise of public safety. |
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