Tyranny Begins at Home : Ceausescu and Pinochet Are Gone, but the Beach Patrol Lives On

WE’VE FINISHED the big jobs of the 20th Century. The once-seemingly monolithic edifice of communism is eroding faster than a pensioner’s confidence in the savings and loan system. Major-league fascism is on the run in Chile and at the tip of Africa. All that’s left to do before the millennium is minor mopping up.

That may ironically be the biggest job of all: the fight against little fascism--the small moments of dictatorship and unfreedom that confront us every day, that are so insidious we don’t even look south of the smile to see the jackboot below. But there is no Resistance, no Solidarity to help us in this fight. Up against the soft wall, we are all alone.

A man I know spent a few hours of his life in jail for walking his dog on Santa Monica Beach in wintertime. Jail. As in Gandhi, Mandela, Sirhan Sirhan, Night Stalker. That’s where they put a man for letting his dog trot around on the vacant sand. It’s not an isolated instance. I know, because the same thing happened to me when I had a dog.

Public-spirited citizens will note that dog droppings on a beach are a nuisance and a health hazard, and they will be right. Of course, the little shreds of broken beer bottles sitting in the sand can cut your feet to diseased ribbons, and nobody gets jailed for littering. And, yes, the city of Los Angeles just finished dumping 8 million gallons of sewage into the ocean that laps up on that very beach. All the dogs that have ever, in the splendid British phrase, fouled the footpath haven’t contributed as much as our sewer mavens did, in one fell poop.

The point is that the real offense is fouling the beach, and that should be a citable violation. But banning all dogs from the entire beach (or entire parks) because certain owners refuse to control or clean up after their charges is like denying driver’s licenses to all college students because an irreducible percentage of them think it’s fun to get behind the wheel after consuming their weight in beer. It sounds like a good idea, but it’s an abuse of power.

The world headquarters for little fascism, though, has to be the home. Power games are to real family life what wisecracks are to sitcom families--the glue that holds the enterprise together.

Another man I know suddenly decided, as wrinkles began marching across his face, that it was time to get into shape. He resolved to work out, pump up, feel the assorted burns. But that wasn’t enough. His wife had to do it, too.

Probably the implicit threat was, “Hey, babe, I’m gonna get trim and good-lookin’. If you don’t move your hiney and do likewise, there are a lot of young gals out there who just might hanker after my new hard chassis.� It was dirty pool, the act of a household Hitler. In this case, the accommodating wife played the part of Poland.

That’s a particularly egregious example. The more sinister forms of this stuff slide by unnoticed until that fateful moment when a residual rebel in you finally yells, “Hey, what the heck is this?� You go, for example, into an electronics store to buy an extension cord for your phone, to replace the one you bought last year that’s already curled itself into more tangles than Dyan Cannon’s hair on a bad day. It’s a simple purchase, requiring nothing more than the exchange of the desired item, overpackaged in redundant folds of plastic, for a few singles.

But, as you try to complete your business before your parking meter betrays you, the clerk takes the “inputting� position in front of a computer screen and asks for your name and address. Excuse me. Why does he, or the people who boss him around, need to know anything about someone who just wants six months of tangle-free telephoning?

One day I asked that very question. The answer is that the home office compiles a mailing list, natch. The listees receive some very special flyers announcing some very ordinary sales. The home office does not, the clerk assures me, sell the list to strangers with flyers of their own. And, ultimately, he admits that if I refuse to give him my name and address, he’ll still sell me the item. “Business is business,� he smiles.

Except there was this one guy, at another branch, maybe Fox Hills, who actually did refuse to complete a sale to a non-cooperator. “Can you believe it?� my amiable sales associate asks.

Of course I can believe it. “No, you can’t buy a fake, wood-veneer storage box for your CDs without giving us something more valuable than your mere money: the right to enter your home postally any time we or our assignees see fit.� That guy at Fox Hills will run the whole operation some day.

Like dictatorships of any stripe, little fascisms occasionally can be faced down or outfoxed. My acquaintance’s wife got a young, hunky trainer to shape her up. She promptly fell in love with him and left her husband. The fallen fascist is, sorry, fit to be tied.

The little battles against those who would slice away chunks of our freedom are fought constantly, on the most unexpected battlefields, by an all-volunteer army. But soldier on. If I see you in jail for walking your dog on the beach, swear to God I’ll bail you out.