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Granted, summer isn't the best time for parlor games,
but then again, you may need something to talk about around
the campfire. Instead of Twenty Questions,
you could
pose just one: What's the most fragile thing you can
think of?
The easy answer used to be white blood.
The
racist speakers of my youth used to allege that if a
person's heritage comprised as little as 1/32
African-American ancestry, then that person's blood was
somehow tainted.
Obviously, any substance which can be overpowered when it outnumbers another substance by better than 30 to 1 is a weak and fragile substance indeed.
Fortunately, that drivel has pretty well vanished from
public discourse, and one might today nominate the
Ramsey investigation
for the fragility prize.
You name it -- the publication of photos, the release of
autopsy information that is normally made public, a glitch
in the power supply to the computer room -- and we get an
immediate announcement from the Boulder Ministry of Public
Information that this could impede the
investigation.
Such things happen frequently during the course of other criminal investigations, so one has to wonder, given the fragility of this case, how all those other criminals get arrested and convicted.
Another contestant in the fragility sweepstakes is the limited-sweepstakes gambling industry in Central City. Allowing big companies to gut the innards of old buildings and install one-armed bandits and blackjack tables was supposed to give the place a vibrant economy.
But apparently, it's not all that vibrant, since its cash flow is threatened by neighboring Black Hawk. So Central City says it needs a new $35 million road -- one that won't pass through Black Hawk first -- to stay in business.
Somehow, I can't imagine Salida trying to build a road that evades Fairplay, Gunnison promoting a Poncha Springs bypass, or Saguache encouraging motorists to swing around Villa Grove. Central City gambling must be fragile indeed.
Perhaps the whole industry is -- just by using the word
gambling
instead of the industry-preferred term,
gaming,
I'll probably get a tart letter from a
public-relations professional, concerned that the simple
and accurate term gambling
might tarnish the
industry's image. They like gaming
because it sounds
like game,
which is what innocent children play and
therefore carries a wholesome family aura.
My nominee for the most fragile
award, though, is
property values.
This was brought to my attention by a gay correspondent in Denver, who observed that merely by moving into a neighborhood and quietly going about his life, he could lower property values.
I responded that I, too, a practitioner of Traditional Family Values to a degree that should entitle me to an honorary seat on the Republican National Committee, could also wreak havoc on property values just by going about my life: old cars, a clothesline, some wind chimes on the porch, asphalt shingles on the roof, a wood pile in the back yard.
All these harmless objects apparently damage those delicate and fragile property values, since many upscale venues, dedicated to the preservation of property values, employ restrictive covenants to ban clotheslines, wind chimes, non-cedar-shake shingles, etc.
Over the years, other threats to our dainty property values in this state have included pickup trucks, lawns of some plant other than Kentucky bluegrass, exterior paint of an inappropriate color, neighbors of an inappropriate color, etc.
The property-values lobby resembles the gambling apologists in another way -- not only do they often attempt to protect their interests with legislation, but they deliberately obscure the issues.
The gambling industry wants you to say gaming.
The property-values crowd often says it's talking about
property rights.
Property rights and property values aren't the same thing. Property rights allow a woodpile or a clothesline or a partner of the same sex on your domain, no matter what effect that might have on some greedy neighbor's real-estate appraisal.
Now, I can't say for certain that property values are the most fragile element of modern society, since there are so many delicate contestants. But property values are so weak that they're certainly a strong contender.
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