Do you remember in primary school when you were castigated for doing something you knew full well was both wrong and intensely stupid? Do you remember trying to implicate as many of your friends as you possibly could so as to lighten your personal load? Headmaster's offices throughout the world were filled with cries of pre-pubescent anguish: "Stebbins made me do it, sir!"

Now it seems as though Stebbins has improved his lot somewhat from making us sell his older brother's pornographic playing cards behind to gym and hanging broccoli from the overhead projector screens to making industrial conglomorates spew their offal into rivers and drink-mad fathers massacre their entire families with pellet guns. Stebbins has taken over from the disused home gym-cum-liquid carbonator as the most common household item. What exactly is the logic behind an old trout defrosting her dog instead of drying it and then blaming the company who manufactures the microwave oven? Everywhere, because of clueless, ill-informed idiots, I am forced to wade through a pile of warnings and cautionary leaflets which will eventually take over from Danielle Steel fiction as the most prevalent pieces of literature.

We're supposed to be living in an era where freedom - your own and that of others - is of paramount concern for everyone. But still we are curtailed, by an outdated Quaker-morality, from doing that which humans do best - endanger themselves. Our cars won't start until we've done up our seatbelts, we're not allowed to eat more than a few milligrams of Red Dye No 4, we can't even watch artificial scenes of death and carnage in our favourite splatter movies (and all this while CNN strives to bring us closeups of Iraqi war casualties on national TV). Christ, we were so worried about the creeping threat of communism that we didn't even notice our guaranteed civil rights being eroded.

So I've decided to be a fascist dictator when I grow up. Yes indeed. I'm going to take over the country and, in the tradition of most dictators, I'm going to maintain that it is a republic. The Dominican Republic. Fuck, there's already one called that. Never mind, we'll call it something else. The only rule in this hypothetical country is that you take responsibility for your own actions. If you decide not to wear your seatbelt and then end up as an organic bus advertisment on the M1 Highway, you know who to blame. If you decide to eat sand, don't glance around for a scapegoat Stebbins when you get cyanide poisoning and go blind. Of course, industry will equally be forced to comply to my responsibility rule: if the houses they build fall over and the kids get asbestos in their corn flakes, they know who to blame.

A corrollary to this one rule will be: you cannot substitute God for Stebbins. He-he-and-It was all three taken behind the philosophical barn and shot by a turn-of-the-century German who then died of syphillus and will no longer be accepted as a substitute. The same goes for mad dishtowel-heads who quote passages in their holy book when they murder women for showing their shoulders. Now, more than ever, we need a free choice, even if it is the choice to bungee jump.

And people are so philanthropic they'll even be offended on someone else's behalf. But we all know who we're protecting, don't we? The Kids. One specific Kid, actually. The imaginary twelve-year-old who would be offended by pornography, shocked by swearwords, disturbed by representations of murder and sent into permanent daycare by anything which doesn't fit into your preconceived notions of morality. This same kid is also the one who would have been damned to hell if he read the word 'shit' on our editorial page. Well fuck that! In future, we will not accept this as an excuse, because we hired goons to find him. We kidnapped the twelve-year old and we've got him tied up in front of the TV and we're showing him footage of concentration camps, Rwandan refugees, Palestinian suicide bombers and Iraqi POWS. Maybe now he'll get a perspective on the word 'shit'.