Drop the Lemon and Back Away Slowly...

Although this site seems a little shrill, they have a sadly hilarious map on this page of places where, over the last 20 years or so, municipal law enforcement or code enforcement personnel have shut down lemonade or snack stands or put the arm on the Girl Scouts and their dangerous products (Thin Mints don't kill people. Middle school girls armed with boxes of cookies kill people). Most of the stands were run by kids, and in several cases the parents or grandparents in whose front yard the stands were placed were fined -- in one case earlier this summer, $500.

In some cases, the kids are told to close it down until they get a permit. After New York City's Should Be Most Ashamed Finest shut down some kids in August 2008 because they didn't have a permit, the kids were good citizens and applied for one. They were denied.

I know sometimes we look at politicians at the national level and figure that all the power and perks have gone to their collective heads, and that's one reason why they are so often jerks. When then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi demanded military air transport between her home in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., I thought it was an example of someone thinking a wee bit too much of herself, but I didn't think about it that long because nobody except the military pilots required to put up with her was harmed all that much. Plus, they could always close and lock the cockpit door.

But it seems that even the relatively tiny amount of power held by local officials can persuade them to be jerks as well. Which shouldn't surprise me; remember how the kid left in charge of the classroom when the teacher stepped out for a moment turned into a combination of Voldemort and the East German Stasi secret police? Still the same nine-year-old rug rat, but now he or she had paper, pencil, and a warrant to name the names of offenders -- or of those whom the temporary monitor wished to label offenders. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall indeed.

Eric Blair, writing as George Orwell, gave us the dystopian prediction of an all-powerful state in Nineteen Eighty-Four and a satirical vision of similar issues in Animal Farm. I'm betting that if he were alive today and tried to sit down and write the same kinds of books, he'd throw up his hands in despair. How, after all, can you create a literary extreme of an all-powerful state in a society where the city council in Savannah, Georgia, home of Girl Scout founder Juliette Gordon Low tells her organization they can't sell Girl Scout cookies outside her historic home? How do you satirize the way the exercise of power turns today's revolutionaries into tomorrow's autocrats when the health commissioner of a major American city tells a 10-year-old and a 12-year old they've got to shut down their stand because they're using "unsafe" ice cubes or another one has to close because it doesn't have a hand-washing station (To be fair, the first guy realized he'd been an idiot and backed off on his order).

Things like this aren't Orwellian, they're doubleplus Orwellian.

ETA: Should you wish, you may check out Lemonade Freedom Day, set for Aug. 20. I won't be setting up a stand myself, but I will buy from one if I see it and will certainly drink a glass in solidarity.