A man flicks a cigarette butt off a P&O cruise ship and is thrown off the ship, leaving his wife to travel onward alone, sobbing in her room.  Huh?

The first time I crossed the Pacific (23 days to Okinawa) was on Naval MSTS with 3,000 other Marines on board, most of whom were smoking topside all the time and all of whom had their cigarette butts swept over the side into the ocean every two hours.  Indeed, I can still hear that voice over the ship’s horn: “sweepers, man your brooms...” 

But that was then, and this is now, and today, a single cigarette butt can be defined as a crime by the P.C. police.  Not the empty plastic spring water bottles you see bobbing around, which the better people drink from, or the psychotropic drugs you can detect in the ocean fifty miles off Beverly Hills – not to mention Rio's "Crap Line," which encompasses the Olympic sailing venue forcing competitors to do their best not to get that water in in their mouths.  But a single accidental cigarette butt! 

And so 57-year-old Mark O'Keefe, a man of limited means who saved up for this holiday, and who apologized profusely for a thoughtless moment, was frog-marched ashore in Bali without an any way to get home.  The former Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company – P&O – had a long, proud history serving its customers dating from the nineteenth century, but now, as P&O Cruises, owned by Carnival, their primary interest seems to be making common cause with the P.C. mob.

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD See it Here.  He lives and writes in the colonial era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York, blogs here and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.com