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that come into contact with the Curly Fry Lightbulb. Throw away your carpet, throw away your canning jar, throw away your playing cards. . . .
    Oh, and throw away your clothes. You can’t stick any contaminated clothes in the washer because, says the Environmental Protection Agency, mercury fragments in the clothing will contaminate the machine and pollute the sewage system. Got that? So, even if you do everything right, the li’l ol’ lady next door who’s eighty-seven and perhaps isn’t up to speed on the Curly Fry Lightbulb, maybe she’ll just break a light bulb and she’ll put the drop cloth in the washer and it’ll contaminate the entire sewage system.
    So only one thing can be said with certainty: the ensuing kidney and brain damage caused by this is going to make one hell of a class action lawsuit circa 2030.
    This is Big Government at work. It solved a problem that didn’t exist. There’s nothing wrong with Edison’s light bulb: it’s the great iconic American invention, the embodiment of American dynamism of the nineteenth century. And what did we do in the twenty-first century? We banned it! If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But we fixed it anyway. And as a result, every time you break it, you now need to have a mason jar, you need to have a set of playing cards, you need to have rubber gloves, you need to have throw mats, you need to empty out your persimmon jelly onto the contaminated carpet, and you’re going to be at risk from a polluted sewage system. . . .
    Oh, and the list on the State of Michigan light-bulb disposal site is even longer than Maine’s. It’s not just a convenient fourteen-step disposal plan for your Curly Fry Lightbulb, they’ve got an eighteen-step disposal plan. You don’t just need the drop cloth and the baby wipes and the pack of playing cards and the two mason jars and the new carpet, you also need additional items—like an eye dropper. You know—an eye dropper, for putting drops in your eyes?
    You need an eye dropper just to throw out a light bulb—the new light bulb they’re making us all install because they banned the old light bulb that doesn’t require you to have a pack of playing cards, two mason jars, a new carpet, and an eye dropper handy when you happen to break them.
    For a century, Edison’s light bulb was regarded as a beacon of American genius; then it became a “climate criminal.” That transformation is American decline in a nutshell.
    Mark Steyn in for Rush. More to come. . . .

LIFE CLASS
    This column was an attempt to convey to British readers something of the flavor of high-school graduation, a ritual largely unknown across the Atlantic and one at odds with the basic organizing principle of English education: The continual assurances by commencement speakers that yours is the most awesome generation ever to walk the earth ring a little odd if you’re a survivor of some grim Dotheboys Hall where the prevailing educational philosophy was to lower your “self-esteem” to undetectable levels by the end of the first week .
    The Daily Telegraph , June 20, 1998
    THERE IS A reassuring tedium to “commencement,” the annual high school graduation ceremonies, at least in my corner of northern New England, where nothing much changes about these occasions: The students all wear gowns and mortarboards and conclude with a mass display of synchronized tasseltwirling. The school band always plays “Pomp and Circumstance”—and not in the nerds’-night-out sense of “Land of Hope and Glory” at the Proms, either. 1 These guys mean it.
    Then come the zillions of student awards, some time-honored, like Randolph High’s Daughters of the American Revolution Award, which went to Charlotte Phillips; some of more recent vintage, like Rochester High’s Go For It Award, which went to Rachel Stringer; and some, usually with names likeThe Steadfast Award, are frankly just to ensure that even the class thicko wins something. At Rochester, the Roxanne