Occasionally I do like to slip on my anti-bacterial floaties and my best Vera Wang one piece, and wade into the piss-scented and vaguely warm kiddie pool that is the Corner.
Currently, Michael Walsh is standing in the shallow end, screaming his lungs out like a toddler who dropped his lollipop in the water and had it land on a turd floater, and doing a fine variation on that old favourite, "Wimmins is not birthin' enough and we're all going to die".
On the one hand — as NRO’s resident demography bore has been tirelessly pointing out — the Western world is facing an unparalleled demographic crisis brought on by a feminist-inspired modern twist on Lysistrata (showering sex but withholding children), while at the same time, the West’s vaunted “safety net” is collapsing because the system has been turned upside-down and a bevy of great-grandparents now coos over a single child.
Surely, this is the ultimate expression of the suicide cult that is the modern Left, a subset of libertine takers that so loathes itself that it will dragoon the makers into underwriting the chalices of tasty hemlock it’s so eager for everybody to quaff in order to put itself out of its misery. If, as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody, it feels good, do it! Alas, it does hurt somebody — it hurts society, by robbing it of its future and burdening those lucky kids who make it through the contraceptive/abortifacient gantlet with an unpayable debt to the very people who tried to get rid of them.
And for what? So that somebody might not be “punished” by a baby as a consequence of his or her personal behavior?
Self-centered Baby Boomer liberalism emerged from the “sexual revolution” of the sixties, and for the past half century Boomers have been trying to escape the consequences of no consequences, which now threaten the underpinnings of the Left’s beloved, bankrupting welfare state. And yet, at the same time, women of child-bearing age demand that somebody — insurance companies, Washington, the pope in Rome — pay for universal contraceptive and abortion services in the name of “women’s health.”
If this is not the definition of a suicide cult — one driven by the leftist insistence that sexual license be, well, licensed by the state, non-judgmentally and consequence-free — it’s hard to know what is. The Shakers had nothing on these people; at least they made furniture. But it’s what comes from treating pregnancy as a preventable disease, and viewing people as carbon-based pollutants instead of beings created in the image and likeness of God.
You left-wing sluts out there are trying to kill us all, with your desperate need to control your own birth cycles, with your libidinous concupiscence and your filthy backroom orgies (often, I am told, involving the wanton use of abortifacients and condoms), and your pathetic reliance upon government handouts because you have failed to produce enough children to look after you when you are old and have been brought low by syphilis and the other deservéd wages of your sin.
The answer?
The trick will be restoring what, in the days of family-owned farms and small businesses, was once true: that babies are an asset rather than a burden. Imagine a society in which parents get to keep more of the human capital they form by investing in their children. Imagine a society in which the family is no longer just a consumer unit, but a productive enterprise. The society that figures out how to restore the economic foundation of the family will own the future.
“A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” That was the witticism that passed for cleverness back in the day. Who needs men in the Brave New World? We’re about to find out.
Of course. All you lefty women need to do is stop it with your baby hatred and remember that kids are exploitable labor. If nothing else, you could get good prices on the organ market. Do you know what a baby kidney goes for today in Marrakesh? Imagine how many hip replacements that could pay for. Worst comes to worst, we can always eat the little fuckers.
The Corner's links are always interesting, and today I ended up at the Wall Street Journal. Frankly, I didn't even know they were still publishing that rag. The last time I got a decent tip out of it was just before I brought 3 shipping containers worth of Cuban cigars in through Canada in September 1960.
Anyway, Mary Eberstadt is doing sterling work, first pointing out that there are lots of women out there who reject the tyrannous grip of government over their uterus on the basis that they much prefer the tyrannous grip of the Church, before loudly singing from the same hymn book as Mr Walsh.
It is not only a series of popes but also a number of prominent secular thinkers who believe that the birth-control pill has been one of the major milestones in human history—a diverse group that runs from public intellectuals of a previous generation like Walter Lippmann to such contemporary scholars as Francis Fukuyama and Robert Putnam. As many pundits had occasion to observe in 2010, the 50th anniversary of the pill, it is hard to think of anything else that has changed life so quickly and dramatically for so many.
In other words, this isn't just a Catholic thing. In severing sex from procreation, humankind set into motion forces that have by now shaped and reshaped almost every aspect of life in the Western world. Families are smaller, birthrates have dropped, divorce and out-of-wedlock births have soared. Demography has now even started to work against the modern welfare state, which has become harder to sustain as fewer children have been produced to replace aging parents.
This is in service of an argument that, I shit you not, women today are unhappier than they were in the seventies, and are therefore restoring to whining on blogs about their husbands, impregnating themselves with turkey basters and popping Xanax, all of which must, in Ms Eberstadt's mind, link back to the fact that the sexual revolution gave women the opportunity to think about other opportunities, rather than just accepting their prescribed role as baby mills for a man their parents chose.
Why do the pages of our tonier magazines brim with mournful titles like "The Case for Settling" and "The End of Men"? Why do websites run by and for women focus so much on men who won't grow up, and ooze such despair about relations between the sexes?
Why do so many accomplished women simply give up these days and decide to have children on their own, sometimes using anonymous sperm donors, thus creating the world's first purposely fatherless children? What of the fact, widely reported earlier this week, that 26% of American women are on some kind of mental-health medication for anxiety and depression and related problems?
Or how about what is known in sociology as "the paradox of declining female happiness"? Using 35 years of data from the General Social Survey, two Wharton School economists, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, made the case in 2009 that women's happiness appeared to be declining over time despite their advances in the work force and education.
The authors noted that women (and men) showed declining happiness during the years studied. Though they were careful not to draw conclusions from their data, is it not reasonable to think that at least some of that discontent comes from the feeling that the grass is greener elsewhere—a feeling made plausible by the sexual revolution?
My final via-the-Corner linkage is to an article by
Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe in which Jeff laments the fact that young people today aren't selfish enough to care only about themselves and vote Republican, a problem to which, I am happy to say, the answer is apparently the example of our Holy Lord Ronnie:
But while “young = liberal’’ may be a familiar equation, it isn’t chiseled in granite. Indeed, it wasn’t all that long ago that the nation’s youngest voters solidly backed the most influential conservative in modern American politics. In 1984, voters under 30 supported Ronald Reagan by a whopping 20-point margin. Not until Obama’s election 24 years later would young voters so strongly line up behind any presidential candidate.
Romney laments that he’s not “connecting with young people across the country.’’ Somehow the Gipper did it, and in spades. What was his magic?
If memory serves me correctly, the answer to Ronnie's success was blatant pandering to greed and avarice, the demonizing of anyone sufficiently "other", frequent outright lying, and a sweet sprinkling of tax cuts and other left wing policies which would now be considered so socialist as to render him unelectable for any office above that of treasurer of the Burbank Republican Ladies Association.
Mitt's got the first few things down pat. Now if only he could manage that last bit without alienating the wingnuts or looking like a flip-flopper, the election would be in the bag.
[Cross posted at Sarah, Proud and Tall.]