7 minute read
OPINION
THE MESA TRIBUNE | NOVEMBER 14, 2021
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Mask mandate makes Las Vegas an even bigger zoo
BY DAVID LEIBOWITZ
Tribune Columnist
If you want to conduct an experiment in the sociology of pandemic behavior, try a quick jaunt to Las Vegas. Always a petri dish for freaks, Sin City has gotten stranger in these strange times since it continues to have a mask mandate for everyone, vaccinated or not, gathered indoors.
That’s Vegas. They’ll take your money until you’re bankrupt. They’ll bring you free booze until your liver ceases to function. You can jump in the car and drive 70 miles to a legal brothel. But if you expose a nostril, the blackjack dealer immediately summons security.
“Mask, sir! Mask!” has replaced “Come on, seven!” as the new soundtrack in every casino I wandered into last week. Given that I don’t gamble anymore, you can only imagine how much people-watching I did to pass the time.
It was either that or go see Barry Manilow in residency at the Westgate. That ranks somewhere between a colonoscopy and an Arizona Coyotes game on my lousy pastime scale.
These days, there are four kinds of people when it comes to mask-wearing:
“Who Me?” Guy. Everywhere in every casino, there’s signs saying you must wear a mask. Another social cue: Literally everyone else in the building is wearing a mask. Yet “Who Me?” Guy somehow fails to pick up on this. Admonished, “Who Me?” Guy stares blankly, not unlike a house pet asked to do quantum physics. Then it clicks: Me. Face. Mask. “Who Me?” Guy digs deep into a pocket and, lo and behold, produces a crumpled mask, which he dons. Life as we know it resumes – until he splits a pair of tens and his fellow blackjack players maul him to death.
Okay, I made that up. But it would be a helluva spectacle.
“The Kvetcher.” Visiting from Boca, Mrs. Horowitz is as happy to wear a mask as she is to explain her compromised immune system. She has “the asthma” and rheumatoid arthritis, plus “my nephew, the doctor, doesn’t like how my blood sugar looks.”
The mask is no fun – “it itches my face like you wouldn’t believe” – but it’s necessary, because “we do this trip three times a year, and that I could not miss.” But: “Oh, this inflation. I remember when a shrimp cocktail was 99 cents and those shrimp were as big as your fist.”
Now? “Meh! And they water down the cocktail sauce.”
“The Outlaw Josie Whines.” Mask, schmask. They don’t wear masks back home. Masks are for wussies. The outlaw has done his research too, and he knows “this whole COVID thing is bull****!” He’ll wear a mask if they make him do it, but not until he lets everyone within 30 feet know it’s under protest.
Masks are “because Biden, because Fauci, because the drug companies, because the liberals, because our Founding Fathers, because Let’s Go Brandon, because freedom...”
Because go lick a doorknob, genius.
Opposed on the political spectrum – yet equally annoying – is “The Virtuous One.” She hails from LA. Three things in life she will not do without: A Louis Vuitton bag large enough to conceal a body. Her Gucci mask. And her Resting Pelosi Face – the one that proclaims she is silently judging exactly how superior she is to you.
“The Virtuous One” wears her mask everywhere: In the casino, outside in the valet line, in her Prius driving alone, in the shower, and tonight …
In the front row at Barry Manilow.
Certain things in life I will never understand, including why people pay to listen to Manilow sing “Mandy,” the rules to Pai Gow Poker, and why a thin strip of cloth can make grown adults behave like children. ■
If time is on our side, who’s on time’s side?
BY JD HAYWORTH Tribune Columnist
You might regard this column as a form of bedtime story, just devoid of the opening words, “Once Upon a Time.”
Instead, this concerns the way we keep time.
The two words “fall back” were music to the ears of residents in 48 of our 50 states early on Sunday, Nov. 7. When clocks struck 2 a.m. in time zones across the USA, they were moved back an hour, to 1 a.m. Consider it “chronological recompense,” restoring the hour of sleep that was taken last March, when the return of daylight-saving time (DST) prompted a “spring forward.”
Of course, those of us in Arizona didn’t lose any sleep over this. That’s because the Grand Canyon State – like Hawaii – stays on standard time year-round. To out-of-state family, friends and business associates, “Arizona time” is usually explained in this fashion: “When you’re on daylight saving time we’re on ‘LA time.’ When you’re on standard time, we’re on ‘Denver Time.’ The only exception comes on the Navajo Nation, in the northeast region of the state; it goes to DST, too!”
What prompted Arizona to remain on standard time throughout the year?
When the 1966 Uniform Time Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, it ended the random way in which the states had been observing DST. The act stipulated that states must change to daylight saving time on a specified date or remain on standard time throughout the year.
Arizona in 1966 differed greatly from Arizona today. With a less-populated state in the mid-sixties, there was more farming and ranching. With limited technology, there were fewer entertainment options. Accordingly, two of the most powerful lobbies were the Arizona Cotton Growers and the Association of Drive-In Theatre Operators.
Simply stated, those agrarian and entertainment interests realized that starting movies around 9 p.m. in the summer months would impair farmhands’ ability to show up for work early in the morning.
That argument prevailed in the Legislature, and Arizona remained on standard time.
Arizona’s Barry Goldwater may have challenged LBJ for the presidency in 1964, but the 1966 law that gave states the power to opt out of DST proved – well, “timely.”
The act was vindicated in another fashion by the Commonwealth of Virginia, according to the late Rep. Herb Bateman. In the mid-1990s, Bateman welcomed his GOP colleagues to Virginia’s First District for a Republican retreat. Herb proudly called his district “America’s First District,” because it included Jamestown, site of the first permanent English settlement that eventually became the United States.
Prior to serving in the U.S. House, Bateman spent a dozen years in the Virginia State Senate. Recalling lessons he learned in Richmond, Herb emphasized that arriving at a political decision, even if controversial, was infinitely preferable to dithering and delay.
What galvanized his outlook was the reticence of Virginia Legislators to deal with a dilemma that dogged the Commonwealth before Bateman ever ran for public office — deciding whether his home state would opt for daylight saving time. Not wishing to anger constituents, the House of Delegates and the State Senate left the DST decision to Virginia’s 95 counties. As a result, some counties
adopted daylight saving time; others stayed on standard time; and a handful “compromised” by moving their clocks ahead by a half-hour.
The Uniform Time Act of 1966 ensured that Virginia would have to decide and the Old Dominion legislators finally did so, determining that the Commonwealth would find common ground through daylight saving time, putting an end to the “counterfeit compromise” of letting the counties decide.
Today, 19 states have decided that they want a permanent time change, passing resolutions to provide for yearround daylight saving time.
Arizona and Virginia are not among them.
Could it be that we fear Bob Dylan’s old refrain?
“The times…they are a-changin.’” ■
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