Audio Clips: The Health Nannies

The play I’m appearing in opens tomorrow, so we’ll be putting in a long rehearsal tonight. Instead of writing a full post, I thought I’d share some audio clips from a radio show called The Slagle-Naughton Report, which my comedian pal Tim Slagle and I produced back in the 1990s. Yes, that was a long time ago, but I think these bits are, if anything, more relevant today.

As I mentioned in a reply to a recent comment, Slagle and I often used comic exaggeration to poke fun of government busy-bodies; unfortunately, we learned that when it comes to the stupidity of government busy-bodies, reality eventually catches up to the exaggeration.

Here’s just one example: in an episode about the push to make everyone equal in every way, we noted (truthfully) that a feminist group had complained that the lines outside of women’s public restrooms are usually much longer than the lines outside of men’s public restrooms, and by gosh, they wanted something to be done about it. So we proposed a new law that would force men to sit down to pee. Can’t exaggerate much more than that. So imagine our surprise when that law was actually passed in some city in Europe. (Can’t remember which one; this was a long time ago.) The language of the law even described standing up to pee as a form of domination. I kid you not.

In recent years we’ve seen the busy-bodies pass a rash of nanny-state laws that are supposed to make us all healthier, such as calorie-count menu laws. As I wrote in a previous post, these laws aren’t working. Big surprise. So now the health nannies are no doubt scheming to find other ways to force us to be healthier. I give it maybe five years before you have to step on the scale to receive permission to order french fries at McDonald’s.

Anyway, here are some clips from our long-ago show. The first one is based on the idea that once the government is in charge of everyone’s health care, they’ll use that as an excuse to regulate what we can eat. (Yes, it’s an exaggeration now. We’ll see if it stays that way.)

The Popcorn Criminal:
[audio:PopcornCriminal.mp3]

Buried in the thousands of pages of legalese that makes up the latest health-care proposals are requirements that medical treatments must be “harmonized.” Translation: the government will create protocols to tell your doctor how to treat you. Great; let’s make it illegal for doctors like Al Sears or Mike and Mary Dan Eades to tell you the government’s advice for treating heart disease is wrong.

The Doctor Criminal:
[audio:HealthCareMolson.mp3]

The last clip is about the futility of government attempts to do something! to control our health. As a bit of background, this clip was from a continuing series of episodes titled “Uncle Knows Best.” In every episode, Uncle Sam came up with some expensive solution to a problem, then demanded that Johnny give him a hundred bucks to pay for it.

Uncle Knows Best – The Common Cold
[audio:UncleCold.mp3]

Back to running through my lines …