What's Up With... The Dive Stick Recall?

You must have seen by now that the Government is recalling 20 million dive sticks-- those hard, cylindrical toy things that you stand at the bottom of your swimming pool and dive down to retrieve.

According to the New York Times, "the safety commission said that at least six children had been rectally or vaginally impaled by the toys... which have been on the market for about 20 years at various retail stores."

Now, we hate the idea of kids getting hurt-- whether in the middle of spirited, summer aquatic group horseplay or more private, personal explorations in a quiet pool when mom's gone inside to make some lemonade. But recalling 20 million units of a tried-and-true summer toy? That sounds like an overreaction-- and to us, it's an overreation based on ire that would better be focussed on, say, the guns that kids the same age are also playing with.

The Opinionator on... The Indian Bomb

India's recent nuclear defense initiatives may alarm Pakistan and China, piss off Japan and the United States, and give ideas to Iran. They also seem oddly gangstery for a country whose middle class is the largest in the world. Exactly what part of arms racing hasn't long been discredited, anyway? Believing yourself protected if your guns are large and numerous enough? Wasting millions of dollars on satanic hardware, that could better be spent on agriculture and education? Orgying in a false sense of national pride and respect as a world power? Scaring your neighbors, which since the Cold War have included every other country in the world?

VOLPE SENTENCED IN LOUIMA CASE: NO RECTAL JAMMING TO BE ADMINISTERED

Now, we accept that Anglo-American jurisprudence embodies significant moral improvements over good old "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" thinking, but golly, wouldn't a stiffer sentence have been more effective in the Louima case?

Former police officer Justin Volpe just got thirty years for jamming a broken broomstick up Abner Louima's rectum in the bathroom of the 70th Precinct station house, in the now-famous, monstrously inappropriate and obviously racist assault on the Haitian immigrant during an investigation one night in August, 1997. Volpe, 27, could have gotten life. And though Judge Eugene H. Nickerson did a good job of balancing the sentence between the harshness demanded by Louima supporters and the leniency expected for a white former police officer, we propose considering another option entirely.

Instead of spending taxpayer money to house, clothe, and feed Volpe for the next thirty years (or twenty-five, if he stays in line), why not send him to some sort of court-created mental realignment facility, to receive a rectal jamming of his own, then spend a year or so talking about this experience every day with a nice counselor. Wouldn't that more effective-- not just for Volpe, who may or not use the opportunity to interrogate and overcome his own racism and rage, but for other NYPD officers, who would then understand that they were living in a kind of sci-fi world in which rectal jammings are administered by the authorities?