It was 50 years ago today — do you remember? — The Zip to Zap.

Wikipedia preserves the details of one of the classic hippie moments in American history:

The Zip to Zap was an idea of Chuck Stroup, a student at North Dakota State University in Fargo. Stroup could not afford to attend the more traditional spring break festivities held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Therefore, he came up with the idea of what was to become known as the "Zip to Zap a Grand Festival of Light and Love". Stroup placed an advertisement in the student newspaper at NDSU, The Spectrum. His idea was soon embraced by college students throughout the upper midwest of the United States and states as far away as Texas and Florida, thanks to extensive publicity in various college newspapers and in newspapers throughout the nation over the Associated Press wires....

Kind of an early flash mob, accomplished without social media. The Spectrum ran an article:

"Located in the valley of the scenic Knife River, Zap (Zip 58580) has thrown open its arms to students. The beautiful burg's 250 residents welcome us to their shores. Shall we say no to this truly fine gesture of western hospitality? Of course not. On May 10, we and students like us from all over the Midwest will flock to Zap, the Lauderdale of the North (where do you get your suntan, Miami? No, Knife River.)."

The article comically spoke of "a full program of orgies, brawls, freakouts, and arrests."

Zap was a tiny place. I don't know the population in 1969, but it's something like 200 today. But the people who lived there seemed to like the idea:

The two local bars stockpiled a supply of beer and local diners began marketing "Zapburgers" in anticipation of the event. "We thought, well, we'll put ourselves on the map here," remembered Norman Fuchs, the mayor of Zap in 1969....

But the reality was way too many people:

Students... quickly filled the town's two taverns. The demand for beer was such that the tavern owners decided to double the price. This action upset the students, but in the long run it did not matter since all the beer was rapidly consumed. Drunken students took to the streets of the small town. Vomiting and urinating on the streets by the students caused great concern among the locals, who quickly began to fear for their safety. The temperatures fell below freezing and the drunken college students started a bonfire in the center of town, using wood that was left over from a recent demolition project.

The townspeople, led by Mayor Fuchs, asked the students to leave: most complied but some did not. What had started out as a spring break get-together quickly turned into the only riot in North Dakota's history. Local security forces were overwhelmed and the cafe and one of the bars were completely destroyed.

Governor William Guy called in 500 troops from the North Dakota National Guard to quell the riot. Over 1,000 partiers were still in Zap when the guard arrived on the scene at 6:30 am, although just 200 of them were still awake. The guardsmen with fixed bayonets roused the hungover students.....

The media were there to titillate Americans with more of the kids-are-going-crazy news that cluttered the airwaves of the time:



It was just spring break in the north.

I don't know why they picked Zap, but "Zap" had hippie panache. There was Zappa and Zap Comix:

"I knew that they wouldn't do anything... University of North Dakota as a black student who already suffered racism in our campus..."

"... I want to say thanks. I'm ashamed to be part of UND. Thank you to treat us as nothing."

"[I]t is troubling to me that rates of termination for pregnancies where Down syndrome is identified are extremely high."

Writes Alison Piepmeier, who has a 4-year-old child with Down syndrome and a book "on prenatal testing and reproductive decision-making."

Extremely high? What percentage do you imagine when you hear the rate is "extremely high"? I pictured something like 90%, but according to this article, it's something like 50%. I'd like to see a breakdown in the percentages, with separate numbers for the women who generally think abortion is morally wrong and women who think early abortion is merely ridding the body of an unwanted growth. It might be that these 2 groups are about equal in size, and the women in Group 1 have a 1% incidence of abortion when the unborn is known to have Down syndrome, and Group 2 has 99%. Together, the result is 50%.

But I don't think women divide neatly into 2 groups. It's more of a spectrum, and there are also women who haven't thought about the question in any depth. I can also imagine how a woman in Group 1 might arrive at the decision to have an abortion, and how a woman in Group 2 might decide not to. (In the first case, a woman facing a known challenge might abandon principles she'd previously embraced in the abstract. In the second case, a woman might think that destroying the unborn because of something about that individual is murderous in a way that is not like the generic rejection of a pregnancy happening at an inconvenient time.)

Back to the linked article:

[S]ome parents of children with Down syndrome are celebrating the news that North Dakota has become the first state to outlaw abortion for fetal conditions like Down syndrome. One parent wrote that “it felt like a small victory seeing that abortions based on Down syndrome were banned — like saying, see, individuals with Down syndrome are valued and protected."...

Piepmeier — who has interviewed women who chose to abort in this situation — opposes this kind of law. Unsurprisingly, these women described an "incredibly painful decision," focusing on the difficulties the child would face.

Noting that the North Dakota law won't stop abortions — these women will simply travel out of state — Piepmeier says if North Dakota really cared about the fate of children with Down syndrome, it would take the money that it will now need to be spent in litigation defending the law and spend it on making the state a more "welcoming place for people with disabilities."

"Why Are Teen Pregnancy Rates So Low in North Dakota? Fracking."

Headline from a story that is not purveying some environmentalist scare.

How does North Dakota do it? “It’s not by having such great sex ed, contraception access, and abortion providers,” Guttmacher senior researcher Laura Lindberg told me, listing off solutions favored in more liberal states. No—North Dakota has one Planned Parenthood in a 700,000 square-mile state. Seventy-five percent of North Dakotans live in counties with no abortion provider. State law mandates abstinence-only education in its schools....

The scare is for progressives who want to believe their anti-teen-pregnancy policies work best. So it can't be that all the policies they've opposed — abstinence only education! — actually work. The theory is presented that North Dakota — with all that fracking — has a booming economy and females delay pregnancy when economic prospects are high (and when there's a plentiful supply of men to choose from).

Now, here's the craftily written last paragraph of the article (which appears at Slate and The Washington Post):

Add it all up—a sparsely-populated state heavy in white men, low in sex education, and bursting with oil—and you don’t find many helpful clues for crafting national policy....

It's important for progressives to exclude the good results in North Dakota, which call into question whether the progressive policies are the correct policies. Time to quote a professor:

“North Dakota is just off-the-charts, demographically,” says June Carbone, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and co-author of Red Families vs. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. The state may prove that white, middle-class teens will probably do OK in the absence of comprehensive sex ed and well-funded reproductive health centers, as “they’ll learn from their families, their peers, their doctors, and the internet.” But that doesn’t change the fact that “the pernicious impact of abstinence-only education is its combination with poverty,” Carbone says. “The best contraceptive has always been a promising future, and North Dakota is one of the few places in the United States right now that is booming."

Off-the-charts, demographically... white, middle-class teens will probably do OK... I can think of a way to translate that into blunter language that would — speaking of scary — sound really awful.

"I think the businesses that bring these men in should also be accountable for not providing opportunities that keep them busy outside of work."

"They should check their employees before hiring (if they don't already) and get rid of those who commit ANY kind of aggression toward women or men. Their social responsibility goes beyond the gate or the door. Maybe the answer is for the towns like Williston to heavily tax the companies so that they can afford to police the men the companies employ. If business doesn't see itself more broadly as a player in the overall health of our society, government needs to step in."

That's a reader comment at the NYT article about all the single men working out in the oil fields of North Dakota, which we've been talking about over in this earlier thread. Please go to that thread to talk about the article more generally. I'm opening up this new thread for discussion of the proposition that business should be responsible for the after-work activities of their employees, that the tendency of men to go out after work looking for female companionship calls for the heavy taxation of business, that individuals looking for sexual relationships in their own free time ought to be conceptualized as an issue of collective "health," that overall societal health requires big "players," and that if businesses don't want to see themselves as the players, they leave a gap that government must fill.

Where the unmarried guys are.

Ladies, they are not on the east coast. Here's a map to guide you, but of course, you won't go there. That's why the imbalance exists. You won't go there.

But you guys, in New York and Massachusetts (and #1, my home state, Delaware), you have rich pickings in the female-heavy disproportion, where you can continue to behave in ways that women will angst over in the pages of the New York Times, which the guys in North Dakota and Alaska and Wyoming probably don't read, but if they did, would they shed a tear for you?

Of course not. They're out in the fracking oil fields being sweaty and manly.... Oh, the sexy married life you could have together!

But the NYT would have you believe the men out there are a bunch of sexist louts.

Christina Knapp and a friend were drinking shots at a bar in a nearby town several weeks ago when a table of about five men called them over and made an offer.

They would pay the women $3,000 to strip naked and serve them beer at their house while they watched mixed martial arts fights on television. Ms. Knapp, 22, declined, but the men kept raising the offer, reaching $7,000.

“I said I make more money doing my job than degrading myself to do that,” said Ms. Knapp, a tattoo artist with dark streaks in her light brown hair, a bird tattoo on her chest and piercings above her lip and left cheekbone.

Stay in New York City, ladies. It's really low class out there in the hinterlands. It's not for you.

Many [women in North Dakota] said they felt unsafe. Several said they could not even shop at the local Walmart without men following them through the store. Girls’ night out usually becomes an exercise in fending off obnoxious, overzealous suitors who often flaunt their newfound wealth.

“So many people look at you like you’re a piece of meat,” said Megan Dye, 28, a nearly lifelong Williston resident. “It’s disgusting. It’s gross.”

All the young, highly sexed single men are out there in North Dakota, but stay away! They're disgusting. It's gross!

"Andrew Filer has photographed every single named place in the state of North Dakota."

"From cities and towns to unincorporated places, ghost towns, and the wide, empty spaces between, he visited more than 875 locations across this sparsely populated state."

Nicely done. Very instructive on how to photograph places.

"Good Evening, It's An Honor To Be Used As A Political Prop By My Husband's Campaign."

That's the headline for an Onion article, linked by Christopher in the comments to my live-blogging the first day of the DNC convention.

And here's a photoshop from Lance, appropriating my photograph from last night's "café" post and putting the dreamy "pioneer of the future" into Michelle Obama's dress:



(A "café" post headline on this blog signals that commenters should write about whatever they want. The sculpture is "Pioneers of the Future," by Jeffrey Barber, located on the grounds of the state capitol in Bismarck, North Dakota, dedicated in 1989, the state's centennial, and — according to the plaque — representing young people on "a path of knowledge through education that opens up unknown truths about ourselves." Also on the capitol grounds is this far superior sculpture "The Pioneer Family," depicting the pioneers of the past.)

Here's what I'd like to say the morning after the First Lady's speech. It was a typical First Lady speech, completely old fashioned, using the candidate's wife in the old-fashioned way. She's a wife and mother, and she tells you over and over how being a wife and mother is the most important thing. Children are the future. We live and sacrifice for them. And my husband knows that. Vote for the wonderful man that I'm vouching for.

There's no indication that this woman, like her husband, has a J.D. from Harvard. Her undergraduate degree is more impressive than his. As a lawyer she was senior to him: She served as his mentor when he was a summer associate at a fancy Chicago law firm where she was a permanent associate. She has (or had) professional stature and legal expertise. No trace of that showed in the speech she gave.

Isn't it ironic? The Obama campaign has relied on a theme called "the war on women," within which the Republicans want to shove women back into the past and Democrats represent the future where women are the full equals of men. Yes, yes, yes, that's all very nice, but the man has an election to win, and his woman must reenact — one more time — the role of the traditional, modest, little-lady, helpmeet housewife.

At the Pioneers-of-the-Future Café...

... la la la la la.

The next day... at the Pioneer Café...

... bring the whole family.

***

Here's the closeup of the sculpture, which you were commenting on last night, saying things like:

I'd rather see people representing that ideal than statues. But perhaps those two figures were as close to a Romney/Ryan photo as Althouse could get.

In the wider view, you can see the 2 figures are father and son. (Romney and Ryan do look a bit father-and-son when they stand side-by-side, not that Ryan seems in any way under the tutelage of Romney.)

The sculpture, called "The Pioneer Family" stands on the grounds in front of the North Dakota State Capitol, which you see in the background. It's rather unusual architecture for a state capitol. The old capitol burned down in 1930....

North Dakota Secretary of State Robert Byrne was able to save the original copy of the state's constitution, but he suffered cuts and burns on his hands while breaking a window to reach the document.

His name was Byrne and he was burned.  He saved the Constitution!

Building a new capitol in the early 1930s, the architectural style they chose was art deco. It was the tallest building in the state of North Dakota. It still is.

At the Z&Broz Café...

... you have a ghost of a chance.

Last night in Fargo.

We saw Bob Dylan again.



And now, we're back in Madison, having driven 4,000+ miles in 12 days.

Does a landlord have an ethical obligation to disclose that the previous tenant died in the apartment you're thinking of renting?

The NYT ethicist thinks the obligation is "seemingly obvious" or even "compulsory." He's responding to somebody who wasn't informed before signing the lease and now finds it "unsettling and slightly disturbing" to know that the previous tenant died. Of an overdose. Not a murder, just an overdose. A forgotten man slipped away through the portal to the beyond that exists within that rental unit... and everywhere else on the face of the earth.

This last week, we've been driving quite a distance across that face. Maybe an eyelid's expanse of earth-face. Much of the eyelid has been Montana, where the Montana American Legion has been carrying out its White Cross Highway Fatality Marker Program since 1953.

The unique idea of marking fatal traffic accident sites with a white cross was the brain child of Floyd Eaheart, a member of the American Legion Hellgate Post #27, Missoula, Montana; after six lives were lost in the Missoula area over the 1952 Labor Day Holiday. The safety program started out as a county and later district project for the Missoula American Legion Post. However, the idea was so good that it was soon adopted as a statewide program. The Montana Highway Commission (now Department of Transportation) approved the program in January 1953, with the blessing of the then 13th governor of Montana, J. Hugo Aronson (the Galloping Swede)....

The program is intended as a highway safety, not a memorial program.  Still, many families place wreaths or other decorations on the white crosses, which may be considered a memorial to a loved one lost in an accident.  Obstruction of the white cross with these decorations defeats the purpose of the safety program.  

You appropriate an individual's death for your message of traffic safety, with the state's approval, and you don't like when the people who loved that person pile on a message of their own. Either it's a speech forum, where viewpoint discrimination is banned or it's the state's own speech, and it's an Establishment Clause violation (unless the courts say it's not).

The white crosses serve as a public service message, reminding drivers to “Please Drive Carefully.”  They are a sobering reminder of a fatal traffic accident, a place where a human being lost his/her life....

Not all highway fatalities are marked.  Due to a federal ruling, white crosses are not allowed along interstate highways.

Here's some discussion of the case. I don't see what the interstate has to do with it. The Constitution applies off the off ramp. But the crosses are all over the place in Montana, reminding us where people have died. How unsettled the skittish NYT reader might feel, driving in Montana, knowing about all that death. Or perhaps it's soothing to see so few doorways to oblivion have opened up in the years since 1953. Half a century has gone by and yet there are long spaces on the road that have never swallowed a human being. Often you can traverse an entire eyelash on the face of the earth without seeing a white cross.

Seeing the white crosses, I wonder about the places where there has been death. What if you could — everywhere — see who (and what) has ever died on that spot. How covered with death would the earth be? I'm blogging in the breakfast room of a Holiday Inn Express in Bismarck, North Dakota. Am I sitting on a dinosaur carcass?

"They argue that the [property] tax is unpredictable, inconsistent, counter to the concept of property ownership..."

"... and needless in a state that, thanks in part to wildly successful oil drilling, finds itself in the rare circumstance of carrying budget reserves."

An unusual coalition of forces, including the North Dakota Chamber of Commerce and the state’s largest public employees’ unions, vehemently oppose the idea, [questioning] precisely how lawmakers would make up some $812 million in annual property tax revenue; what effect the change would have on hundreds of other state laws and regulations that allude to the more than century-old property tax; and what decisions would be left for North Dakota’s cities, counties and other governing boards if, say, they wanted to build a new school, hire more police, open a new park.

ADDED: Rush Limbaugh connected this story to the aftermath of the recall in a segment of yesterday's show, which I blogged about here. Here's the part about North Dakota and taxes:

[North Dakota has raised] sales tax revenue 86%... And they did it, of course, without raising the sales tax rate. There's just all kinds of new economic activity going on....

Basically, it's a lot of oil fracking, but the liberal voices are playing in the media, scaring people about pollution:

It's an effort to get people opposed to the boom that's happening in North Dakota. It's like Scott Walker. After the Scott Walker recall debacle for the Democrats, what is the Democrat headline, what's the media headline? "Romney is Going to Cut Public Sector Jobs." That's the way they're trying to instill fear. Yeah, Romney's gonna cut public sector jobs.

But Scott Walker's recall victory steeled conservative nerve, so that a strong argument against public sector unions is now being made by other state governors. The point about North Dakota is that it could be a basis for building an argument about economic development as the best way to build tax revenue using sales tax — with no increase in the tax rate and justifying the reduction or elimination of other forms of tax.

North Dakota votes on ending the property tax today (exactly one week after the Wisconsin recall), so it's possible that there will be a big victory there that will give conservatives confidence to argue boldly for lots of fracking and tax-cutting. Rush mentions the North Dakota governor as someone who, like Walker, could become a hero for this line of conservative argument. There's just one big problem! North Dakota's Governor Jack Dalrymple — a Republican — has opposed the property tax ban:

“It’s mind-boggling, really,” he said, in an interview, of the effects of such a ban. “We’d be changing everything, frankly.”

Dalrymple is no Scott Walker.

The notion, he said, that the state has enough surplus to replace property taxes for localities around the state without raising other taxes is false. For starters, he said, much of the state’s benefits from the oil boom are already dedicated legally to particular funds and cannot simply be transferred to support schools, counties, towns, park districts and the like.

Cannot simply? Like you can't change whatever these limits are? Is it complicated? Do it complicatedly.

“I have to say that we totally understand that North Dakotans are very concerned about their property tax payments,” Mr. Dalrymple said. “You have a tension there, and people say this can’t keep on.”

This guy is no Scott Walker. Rush Limbaugh needs to attend to this detail.

What's wrong with these kids today?

Todd G. Buchholz and Victoria Buchholz complain about "The Go-Nowhere Generation":

The likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped well over 40 percent since the 1980s... The stuck-at-home mentality hits college-educated Americans as well as those without high school degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit. Even bicycle sales are lower now than they were in 2000.

Why don't people pick up and move to the places where the jobs are? Everyone's heard of North Dakota. Why don't they go there?

In the most startling behavioral change among young people... an increasing number of teenagers are not even bothering to get their driver’s licenses. Back in the early 1980s, 80 percent of 18-year-olds proudly strutted out of the D.M.V. with newly minted licenses, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. By 2008 — even before the Great Recession — that number had dropped to 65 percent.

Isn't that what the Boomer generation told them to do? Cars are bad. They are destroying the planet. Then, when they avoid driving, we scold them for being — what? — sedentary? unambitious? incurious?!

Perhaps young people are too happy at home checking Facebook. In a study of 15 countries, Michael Sivak, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (who also contributed to the D.M.V. research), found that when young people spent more time on the Internet, they delayed getting their driver’s licenses....

If they were supposed to believe that movie — "An Inconvenient Truth" — that was showed to them by one public school teacher after another, why aren't we celebrating them now for their teeny tiny carbon footprint? Just give them a tiny room and a computer with high-speed internet, and they'll be perfectly happy.

But Generation Y has become Generation Why Bother....

Etc. etc. These kids today! Speaking of "Why Bother," why did we boomers bother to teach them to sneer at aggressive capitalism, consumeristic acquisitiveness, and driving powerful cars if we were going to turn around and whine about their not competing vigorously enough?

Notice how popular the word “random” has become among young people. A Disney TV show called “So Random!” has ranked first in the ratings among tweens. The word has morphed from a precise statistical term to an all-purpose phrase that stresses the illogic and coincidence of life. Unfortunately, societies that emphasize luck over logic are not likely to thrive.

I blame the Baby Boomers, my generation. We propagated doubt that you could work hard and get ahead. Random? That sounds like hippie talk to me.

In the mid-’70s, back when every high school kid longed for his driver’s license and a chance to hit the road and find freedom, Bruce Springsteen wrote his brilliant, exciting album “Born to Run.”

Hello? Have you ever listened to the lyrics on "Born to Run"?! Yes, movement is involved in running, but it was scarcely an optimistic attitude. Springsteen had us running from the "death trap," the "suicide rap" that was the "runaway American Dream." That home town of yours supposedly "rips the bones from your back." Yeah, that's exciting. Hell is exciting. Springsteen wanted to go for a ride on his motorcycle — his "suicide machine" — and then "die with you Wendy on the streets tonight." Yeah, those were the days!

"My wife's parents are very frequently suggesting that we should move from Minneapolis to North Dakota..."

"... because they keep hearing that there's an oil boom out there and we need to go be part of it."

When I saw this article, I briefly thought that I should send it to them with a note along the lines of "THIS IS WHY WE DON'T WANT TO MOVE TO NORTH DAKOTA."

But I immediately realized that their response would be: "WHY NOT? IT HAS AN OLIVE GARDEN!"

If Obama wants a "Nixon goes to China" opportunity, here it is!

Instapundit has this:

NPR: New Boom Reshapes Oil World, Rocks North Dakota. “Two years ago, America was importing about two thirds of its oil. Today, according to the Energy Information Administration, it imports less than half. And by 2017, investment bank Goldman Sachs predicts the US could be poised to pass Saudi Arabia and overtake Russia as the world’s largest oil producer. Places like Williston are the reason why.”

Wow, I knew it was big, but I had no idea it was that big. But read the whole thing.

It's big! Go big on oil, Obama. It's the new energy economy. Drill baby, drill! Prosperity lies ahead. Make this one yours. Hope and change! Dreams! Dreams of oil! Can't you taste it?!