The Peanut Gallery Lives! A Digestive Directive

THINK YOU’VE SEEN all there is to see about government intervention into commerce…greasy sand, sticking in the gears of progress? Well, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. And as an indication that we communicators aren’t the only ones snowed under by useless rules…

Just when you thought government regulation of the airline industry couldn’t be more stupid, up they come with a new height in absurdity.

If you’re attending the annual Direct Marketing Association conference and flew Delta or US Airways or United or American, or any other airline that regards a paper cup of water and a handful of peanuts as a gourmet meal, you probably were the lucky recipient of a foil-wrapped bag of peanuts.

Quick! To the emergency room!

Get this: Apparently one person in several thousand has a mild allergy to peanuts. Uh-oh! The airlines pass out peanuts. In fact, on Delta peanuts are as gourmet a feast as you’re likely to get.

So the Department of Transportation (DOT), in its infinite wisdom, has told the airlines that each plane should have a designated peanut-free zone.

I’m not kidding.

A peanut-free zone. After all, next to cigarettes and glue-sniffing and self-mailers, peanuts are the deadliest poison known to humankind, right? The argument seems to be that peanut particles collect in airplane ventilation filters over a period of 5,000 hours of flight (again I’m not kidding, 5,000 hours), and a peculiar law passed 12 years ago guarantees airplane access to the disabled. So allergy to peanuts is a disability.

That’s probably why you’ve so often read about passengers, who look like harmless terrorists, sneaking peanut cluster bars through the peanut detector, past all those uniformed peanut guards who are busy reading foreign-language magazines. Ha! Once aboard, one of these miscreants waits until the plane reaches 33,000 feet. Then, when security is relaxed, out comes the peanut cluster bar. A hairy arm seizes a passing attendant: “Take the plane to Atlanta. Peanut Bar Power! Or is that 54-40 or fight?”

The attendant explains that the plane is already headed for Atlanta, but logic has no effect on fanatics. Driven by a carefully orchestrated self-immolation campaign, the hijacker warns, “Come any closer and I’ll bite into it.”

A Delta Force undercover agent pulls out a jar of mixed nuts, concealed in a shoulder holster, and aims it at the hijacker. Unlike such shots in the movies, he misses and hits the attendant with a Brazil nut, squarely between the eyes.

Bedlam. The hijacker yells, “I warned you!” He raises the bar to his lips as passengers try to kneel to pray but can’t because the seats are too close together.

Chomp!

Peanut panic erupts. The pilot radios a mayday call-“Peanuts at 33,000 feet!”-and is forced to make an emergency landing. The landing is, yes, at Atlanta, where almost every landing is an emergency anyway because you’re stuck on the taxiway for 45 minutes and can’t get up to go to the bathroom.

The FBI arrives and takes the criminal into custody, while passengers, choking and filing class-action suits, wait for their lawyers and their turn to be interviewed by television reporters with big hair. Stone Phillips is there from NBC, as usual looking as though he’s posing for a statue-in-the-park sculpture. The defense lawyers (a team of eight paid by the federal government and headed by F. Lee Bailey, who also poses for sculptures now that Sherman’s horse is no longer available) claim it’s all a mistake, because the guy thought it was Turkish Taffy. They offer a broken tooth as evidence.

Johnnie Cochran shows up, shouting, “If the bar ain’t there, check his underwear! If they ain’t walnuts, the jury is all nuts! If it’s troglodyte rhyme, I’m here all the time!” Larry King interviews Ross Perot, because he hasn’t interviewed Ross Perot for at least three weeks. Monica Lewinsky hints that she’s swallowed a 4-inch piece of peanut brittle without chewing, and does this qualify her for the Mile-High Club? She’s admitted to the God’s Little Acre Club. (Her mother has the stained paper napkin in her vault.) Linda Tripp claims to have recorded peanut farmer Jimmy Carter smearing peanut butter on whole wheat bread, a social gaffe, but the garbled recording also might be ordinary cream cheese smeared on rye.

Hey, kids, why doesn’t the DOT dedicate some time to finding out why nothing bigger than a tennis racquet will fit into the overhead bins, or why the airlines keep shortening the distance between seats, or why peanuts are their gourmet meal of choice?

Southwest Airlines has solved its peanut problem by distributing raisins. But what’s the matter with those guys? Don’t they know one person in 57,000 is allergic to raisins? That means a raisin-free zone.

And certainly we’re entitled to a baby-scream-free zone; I propose aisles 1 through 50.

The cream of the jest is that the DOT admits it couldn’t find even one medical incident resulting from airplane peanuts…but it went ahead with the edict anyway because the department has to follow the Rule of Automatic Bureaucracy: If a regulation doesn’t exist, create one.

Congratulations, DOT, on another triumph of government lunacy. And nuts to you, from your curmudgeon-at-large.