ASSUME THE POSITION

The Message Police Are On The Prowl.

You can't ever be sure which trees, doors and bushes they're lurking behind, camouflage shrubbery stuck to their heads like Barney Fife on a stakeout.

Just to be on the safe side, you'd better assume they're behind all of them.  If there's one thing we should have learned about the Message Police, it's that they're everywhere.

But this is a Do As We Say, Not As We Do kind of thing, because we here at the L-E strayed from the proverbial safe side by rashly publishing an article about the now-familiar health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption.

The authors tried to pacify the Message Police by noting in the article ( a syndicated rather than a staff-written piece ) that some people, including even a few doctors, are hesitant to even talk about any health benefits, because they are concerned about the message it sends.

Morons.  You Can't Pacify The Message Police.

The gist of the article was that alcohol, in modest and moderate quantities, can have certain limited health advantages for some adults.  This isn't really anything new.  Medical folks have theorized for years that one of the reasons the French, with the richest and fattiest diet on earth, have relatively little heart disease is the wine they routinely drink with their meals.

After my father's first heart attack in the early '80s, his cardiologist at Emory told him a drink or two a day wouldn't be a bad idea.  He ( Dad, not the cardiologist ) would live another 17 years.  I don't know if the booze helped keep him alive, but I know it didn't kill him.

This is where I am supposed to insert the Message Police disclaimer, a sort of civilian version of the Surgeon General's warning.  But I just can't.

You see, I have this basic problem with assuming you, the reader, to be a drooling, thumb-sucking cretin -- the fundamental assumption of Message Police procedure.

On the contrary, and in direct violation of Message Directive ( MD ) #327, I will recklessly assume that you are a sentient, rational being, potty-trained and capable of dressing yourself and using common table utensils, and intimately aware of the health consequences of alcohol abuse.

Here's the rub: The whole issue of benefits vs.  risks is, like so much of this complex thing we call life, a matter of ambiguity.  Ambiguity is part of the human experience, and most of us learn to deal with it -- even, in some instances, to savor it.

The Message Police hate ambiguity.  It's worth noting that the only folks who regularly have a problem with ambiguity are really, really stupid people and the Message Police.  Draw your own conclusions about how much overlap there might be.

Obsession with the ( often wrongly ) inferred "message" in every human action or utterance is one of the two infallible indicators of social retardation ( "zero tolerance," of course, is the other ), but that alone isn't why I despise the Message Police.  If that were all there is to it, they'd be little more than a perpetual but harmless annoyance.

They're not harmless.  When what they, and they alone, decree to be the prevailing "message" trumps every other consideration, then the damage they can do is incalculable.  Common sense is always their first victim, but fairness, compassion, public health, public safety and sometimes even life itself can be sacrificed on the altar of sending simple signals about complex realities.

Meaning people with cancer, AIDS and glaucoma are condemned to suffer needlessly and senselessly even though we've known literally for decades that marijuana can ease some of their symptoms -- the expert medical testimony of Bob Barr and Barry McCaffrey notwithstanding.  Wasting and dry heaves are just the price they have to pay to make sure we "send the right message" about drugs.  ( The fact that doctors have been able to prescribe cocaine and morphine for years would seem to skew the message, but never mind.  )

Meaning when somebody like Joycelyn Elders has the temerity to suggest that the War on Drugs is crap ( duh ) and that frank talk about masturbation should be part of sex education ( duh ), she gets lynched by the same people who think "political correctness" is tyranny.

Meaning good kids are thrown out of schools by bureaucratic idiots for sharing cough drops and taking guns away from suicidal classmates, all in the name of "sending a strong message."

And with the very deliberate decision, in this age of AIDS, that letting sexually active young people risk unwanted birth or agonizing death is preferable to "sending the wrong message" about contraception and condoms ( which, yes, CAN help prevent transmission of disease, as everybody including noted liberal degenerate C.  Everett Koop knows ), the Message Police have sacrificed every claim to harmlessness, not to mention simple decency.

In another world, we could just talk sanely and plainly about booze and its dangers, drugs and their hazards, sex and its risks, birth control and its limitations, without having bits of bumper-sticker wisdom tacked onto the conversation by dimwits determined to make a complex world as simple as their minds.

Then again, that might send the wrong message.