American Taliban

By Crispin Sartwell

The Taliban, in the ultimate proof of their barbarism, banned such seemingly wholesome activities as listening to music and flying kites. The kite thing has always baffled me, actually, and I've spent fruitless hours rummaging through my Koran looking for the anti-kite commandment.

But it's amazing what you can't do right here in what we joshingly refer to as the land of the free. Several jurisdictions, most recently Fairfax, VA, have prohibited kids from playing in the streets.

The question of whether skateboarding is a crime is of course a perennial one. But the Fairfax ban extends to basketball, street hockey, frisbee, hackeysack.

There are safety concerns. But there doesn't seem to be any reliable information on the dangers of street games. The real issue seems to be what one person quoted in the Washington Post called "curb standards."

Neighborhoods in which you find basketball hoops on cul-de-sacs and kids dribbling, yelling and hitting the three are not as pristine as communities without such accouterments. This no doubt affects real estate prices as well as overall "tone."

Curb standards appear to entail an erasure of all eccentricity and personal expression, a homogeneity in which beauty is identified with strict impersonality and emptiness.

The restrictions designed to enhance curb standards reflect what we might call a neutron bomb aesthetic, in which every evidence of the human is regarded as an impertinence. And neutron bomb aesthetics - which we find in such communities asColumbia, MD - become more prevalent with each passing year.

First they tell you that you that they don't want to see your laundry hanging out on lines. Then, evidently, they tell you that they don't want to see human beings at all.

The ultimate sign of affluence seems to be a purification of the region you inhabit from any trace of the organic, a kind of Howard Hughes-type bubble now enveloping whole jurisdictions. We seek a perfection that is a transcendence of our humanity, a perfect cleanness that is incompatible with our hairy mammalian nature, and certainly with our unruly children.

Children playing basketball in the street, I would have thought, are an adornment to any neighborhood, something utterly wholesome in which we should take pride.

In some meticulously planned communities, you cannot paint your door or plant a tree without getting an approval from the neighborhood politburo. In some you cannot build except in the style (usually a kind of absolute degree of mediocrity) of the other structures. In some neighborhoods you can't grill or smoke outdoors.

That is, you cannot dispose your property or your body as you see fit, even in the simplest ways, because little neighborhood boards and planning commissions are running your life.

And though many of these restrictions seem trivial, they add up to a pretty pervasive irritation; they very seriously resemble many of the social arrangements of pre-wallfall East Germany. They are devised by teensy Mussolinis whose armed police representatives enforce curb standards against Spud-playing 12-year olds.

That, if nothing else, is plainly unAmerican, subversive to our way of life, which encourages frisbees to fly as free as our dreams.

And if I could address the children of America for a moment: In all seriousness I encourage you to play as an act of civil disobedience. Play can be your revolution as well as your recreation. Simply violate such bans en masse in nonviolent acts of courage and defiance. Make your house the home of the brave. Force these itsy-bitsy Ayatollahs to arrest you for making a layup.

You will be a beacon to Afghan kite enthusiasts and people the world over who aspire to freedom.

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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art.