Saturday, April 17, 2004

It’s a MADD, MADD, MADD, MADD Canada

Drunk driving is one of those issues that an individual can have a hard time defending.  I mean it’s difficult to support a besotted idiot driving the wrong way down a highway or weaving through the neighborhood pinballing off the curbs and cars parked along the street. 

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is one of larger organizations which lobbies for more stringent laws as a means to bend the arms those who imbibe and get behind the wheel.  And MADD is active not only here in the U.S., but in Canada.  Colby Cosh has cast his gaze upon those MADD Canadians and their most recent push to illegalize having a drink and driving home.

“When I see a message from Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) I always become a bit ambivalent: they’re supposed to make me hate drunk drivers, but I’m afraid they only serve to make me unusually suspicious of mothers. The group is the best imaginable example of the way politics is practiced in an age of untrammelled feeling and very little thinking. Every client group of the nanny state tries to posture as Nice People Against Bad Things, but in our time only MADD has had the exquisite shamelessness to make its very name into a pre-emptive strike against counter-argument.

It has worked pretty well. Since its founding in 1980, MADD has developed remarkable fund-raising abilities and earned broad public acceptance thanks to its patina of sentimentalism. “Neo-prohibitionists on a rampage? Us? Maybe you didn’t read the acronym—we’re just mothers against drunk driving over here.”

Posted by John Venlet on 04/17 at 05:23 AM
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