Idiots at the gate

I associate autocratic and tyrannical homeowner’s associations with Florida. I sometimes call the gated community I live in Stalag 17, but much of America is being divided into these little City States and forced to live by rules grabbed piecemeal from form books used by contractors and developers; one size fits nobody rules which in time are accepted more unquestioningly than religious dogma. Arbitrary rules bring out the inner Nazi in us all.

Sometimes, challenges to the authority of a neighborhood association make the news and often in a humorous fashion, but that doesn’t lighten the burden of living under the unenlightened rule of little people with a little authority. Take for instance the South Florida case a few years back of a gentleman who wanted a small rooftop TV antenna to watch HDTV. The Federal Communications Commission has ruled it illegal to forbid anyone to have a TV antenna, yet the homeowner’s association in question brought suit. Their case? “We don’t like Federal Law.”

It’s not only in Florida: a Homeowner’s Association in Southwest Colorado has begun to fine a resident $25 a day for hanging a Christmas wreath that the association calls a “Peace Sign.” Colorado residents, being as ignorant and as incapable of coherent cogitation as most Americans are, see it as the sign of Satan or a protest of President George W. Bush’s sacred war. People whose children are being slaughtered for nothing really hate to see people longing for peace, you see. so don't be giving us that peace stuff at Christmas time.

Actually for those of us old enough to remember, that symbol was first used as part of a fatuous campaign to “Ban the Bomb;” although it may have originated from the semaphore signals (you’re too young to remember semaphore signals) for ND or Nuclear Disarmament, some see it as a loose adaptation of the international circle with stroke sign and a picture of a swept wing bomber, like our first long range supersonic bomber, the B-47. I remember early versions that had little engines on the downward slanting lines.

The crapulous Christians of America may see Satan everywhere; they may see the Prince of Peace in the Lords of War, but I’m sorry folks, it’s a ban the Bomb sign from the 1950’s. After the mass marketing of “hippie” idealogy in the late 60’s, the lemmings may have begun to associate it with the Viet Nam War and the peace movement, but that’s what it is. Just as the V for Victory two finger salute used by Winston Churchill is seen by the smugly ignorant iPod lobotomized consumerdroids of today as a “peace Sign,” it ain’t necessarily so.

But that’s America. Suggest that you might not like to pay to put up neon lit, plastic idols in the public square and you are torn to pieces, but if you have a private wreath on your own property that symbolizes anything not politically correct in the minds of the mindless – you’re torn to pieces, or at least fined $25 per day.