After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (33 page)

Return to those auto statistics: GM has one worker for every ten retirees and dependents. That math is Detroit’s math, too. The city’s population has fallen by over 50 percent since 1950.24 So who’s left? Thirty percent of the population are government workers.25 According to the
Detroit News
, another 29 percent are out of work, “using the broadest definition of unemployment.”26 According to Dave Bing, Mayor Young’s successor as MFIC, the real unemployment number is “closer to 50 percent.”27

An unemployable, dysfunctional citizenry, a rapacious government, crime-ridden streets, and an education system that dignifies moronization as a self-esteem program: in Detroit, everything other than government is dead.

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Decay sets in imperceptibly, but it accelerates, and, by the time you notice it, it’s hard to reverse. Somewhere like Detroit isn’t Somalia, not yet. But like other parts of the country it is en route to Latin America—a society with a wealthy corrupt elite that controls the levers of power, and beneath it a great swamp of poverty, whose inhabitants divide into two species—predators and prey. The Motor City is the Murder City, with one of the highest homi-cide rates on the planet—and 70 percent of them go unsolved.28

It will not seem quite such an outlier in the future.

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BiG LoVe

The end-game for statists is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you’re assuring yourself of the votes both of the welfare recipient and of the mammoth bureaucracy required to process his welfare. But extend that principle further, to the point where government intrudes into everything: a huge population is receiving more from government (in the form of health care or college subventions) than it
thinks
it contributes, while another huge population is managing the ever expanding regulatory regime (a federal energy-efficiency code, a transfat monitoring bureaucracy, a Bureau of Compliance for this, a Bureau of Compliance for that) and another vast population remains, nominally, in the private sector but, de facto, dependent on government patronage of one form or another—the designated “community assistance” organization for helping poor families understand what minority retraining programs they qualify for, or the private manufacturer from whom the TSA buys disposable latex gloves for enhanced patdowns. Either way, what you get from government—whether in the form of a government paycheck, a government benefit, or a government contract—is a central fact of your life.

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But, if you’re not on welfare, or working in the welfare office, or working for a “green solutions” business that’s landed the government contract for printing the recycled envelopes in which the welfare checks are mailed out, or the trial lawyers behind the class action suit after the green-friendly recycled latex gloves cause mass Chlamydia outbreaks at Newark, O’Hare, and LAX, it’s not an attractive society to be in. It’s not a place to run a small business—a feed store or a plumbing company or anything innovative, all of which will be taxed and regulated into supporting the state sector. After all, what does it matter to them if your business goes under? Either you’ll join the government workforce, or you’ll go on the dole. So you too will become part of the dependent class, or the class that’s dependent upon the dependent class. Whichever it is, Big Government wins.

We’re told that America’s and the world’s economy depends on “consumption.” Hence, the efforts of the government and the Federal Reserve to stampede recalcitrant consumers back into the malls. But consumption is a manifestation of an economy, not the cause of it. In order for something to be consumed, it first has to be produced—which is why healthy societies make wealth before consuming it. Big Government prefers to “stimulate”

the public into consuming because it’s easier than stimulating them into producing. But the latter is what matters.

What happens when you consume without producing? You can see it on any American Main Street, whose very inhabitants would startle a time-traveler from 1890 long before he noticed any of the technological marvels.

A time-traveler from 1950 might have a more specific reaction: back in those days, a signature image of sci-fi movies and comic books was the enlarged brain, the lightbulb cranium with which a more evolved humanity would soon be wandering around. Evolvo Lad had one in his tussles with Superboy. So did Superman’s sidekick in a futuristic fantasy called “The Super-Brain of Jimmy Olsen.” “With his super-intelligent brain, Jimmy has me at his mercy!” gasps Superman. But Clark Kent’s gal pal felt differently about her colossal noggin when it showed up in “Lois Lane’s Super-Brain.”

“The evolution ray that made me super-intelligent turned me into a freak!”

she sobs, clutching her unsightly Edisonian incandescent of a head.

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There’s good news and bad news, Lois. As any visitor from the Fifties would soon discover, in a bleak comment on the limits of predictive fiction, our brains didn’t get bigger. But our butts did. If DC Comics had gone with

“The Super-Ass of Jimmy Olsen,” they’d have been up there with Nos-tradamus. “Our culture’s sedentary character—our strong preference for watching over doing, for virtual over real action—seems closely correlated to our changing physical shape,” wrote the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson. “We now consume significantly more fats and carbohydrates than we actually need. According to the standard measure of obesity, the body-mass index, the percentage of Americans classified as obese nearly doubled, from 12 percent to 21 percent, between 1991 and 2001. Nearly two-thirds of all American men are officially considered overweight, and nearly three-quarters of those between 45 and 64. Only Western Samoans and Kuwaitis are fatter.”29 We are our own walking (or waddling) metaphor for consumption unmoored from production.

Dependistan is an unhealthy land. In America, obesity starts earlier and earlier: it’s doubled since 1980.30 According to some surveys, a third of all children over two are obese.31 Libertarians instinctively recoil from a nanny state that presumes to lecture you on eating your vegetables, and red-state conservatives have a natural cultural antipathy to effete, emaciated coastal metrosexuals nibbling their organic endives—and that was before Michelle Obama decided to make an anti-obesity crusade the centerpiece of her time as First Lady. They’re not wrong to be suspicious. Almost all public health behavioral campaigns end up as either bullying or brain-dead or both: half a century ago, nobody thought smokers would wind up huddled on the sidewalk outside windswept office buildings. Few foresaw that high-school

“zero tolerance” policies for drugs would lead to students being punished for having Aspirin in their lockers. In 2008, a bill in the British House of Commons attempted to ban Tony the Tiger, longtime pitchman for Frosties, from children’s TV because of his malign influence on young persons.32

Why not just ban Frosties? Or permit it by prescription only? Or make kids stand outside on the sidewalk to eat it? Already, San Francisco’s city council has voted against life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals by attempting 228

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to criminalize fast-food menu items that offer free children’s toys.33 It’s not far-fetched to imagine government attempting to alter the contents of our stomachs: in fact, they already do. The Public Health Agency of Canada requires that white flour, enriched pasta, and cornmeal be augmented by folic acid to help women lessen the risk of neural-tube defects in their babies.34 It’s also not far-fetched to predict the usual unforeseen consequences: a Norwegian study published in
The American Journal of Medicine
found that folic-acid fortification could increase your risk of cancer.35 Oh, well.

Our “changing physical shape” (in Ferguson’s words) seems an almost literal rebuke to the notion of republican self-government. Never mind the constitution, where are
our
checks and balances?

What might restore the unprecedented size of contemporary Americans to something closer to mid-twentieth-century Americans? The family meal, with mom, dad, and the kids all ’round the kitchen table, like
The Partridge
Family
or
The Brady Bunch
? More competitive sports at school? A paper round? “Social media” novelties that don’t require you to sit on your butt and look at a screen all day? A summer of farm work before six years of Fat Studies at George Mason University?

None of these things is going to happen. So instead we’re left with Mrs.

Obama as Marie Antoinette for an age of PC Bourbons: “Don’t let them eat cake.” What will that do? Push the percentage of obese kids up to 60 percent?

Seventy? Senator Richard Lugar, one of the GOP’s Emirs of Incumbistan, demands more “federal child nutrition programs.”36 But the National School Lunch Act (whose very name nineteenth-century Americans would have regarded as a darkly satirical fancy from dystopian science fiction) dates back to 1946. The bigging up of American schoolchildren happened on Washington’s watch. Yet we’ll fight the “war on obesity” as we fight the

“war on poverty”—with more dependency and more government programs. While we’re “fighting” all these phony wars, it’s not even clear we could fight the old-fashioned kind anymore: according to the U.S. Army’s analysis of national data, 27 percent of Americans aged 17 to 24 are too fall 229

overweight for military service.37 Even running for our lives is beyond many of us.

There is already an almost surreal disconnect between the emaciated sirens of popular culture and those who gather in the dark to watch small stars on the big screen. The largest people on the planet outside the hearty trenchermen of Western Samoa pay ten bucks to watch all-American stories set in all-American towns featuring increasingly un-American boys and girls who bear less and less resemblance to them. It seems likely that trend will continue, and a vast mass of vast mass will sink to the bottom while an ever more cadaverous elite gets all the best jobs. It also seems inevitable that, in response, Big Nanny will decide that she’s the one who needs to get bigger and bigger, and to micro-regulate her 350 to 400 million charges ever more coercively. It’s not such a leap to imagine the GAUNT Act (Government Assistance for Universal Nutritional Transformation) passing Congress circa 2020 to lessen strains on health-care costs.

It won’t work. You can’t reduce the citizen’s waist through government waste—not absent anything this side of a nationwide famine. But it won’t stop the statists trying.

The landscape will adjust to accommodate: there will be more class action suits, and your local multiplex and car manufacturers and discount airlines will change their seat configurations every ten, five, two years. This is a cultural phenomenon arising from socio-economic changes that would be difficult to reverse even if our elites accepted the legitimacy of attempting to reverse them.

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dependiStan

From the English-language edition of
Pravda
: Family Becomes Extinct, To Be Replaced with Feminism and Gender Equality38

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Year on year, there are fewer Russian weddings and, for those that do take place, in regions from Kirov to Krasnoyarsk some three-quarters end in divorce. As the reporter put it, “It is not ruled out that the institute of marriage will vanish in the near future.” That’s the way to bet—and not just in post-Soviet dystopias. More and more children are raised by single mothers.

Well, huff the elites, what’s wrong with that? Are you stigmatizing these women? Are you saying they shouldn’t have the rewards of a fulfilling career?

Whether or not juggling (as many of my North Country neighbors do) three minimum wage jobs—a checkout clerk, some part-time waitressing, a bit of off-the-books house cleaning—is every woman’s idea of a fulfilling career, it doesn’t leave a lot of time for hands-on parenting. Yet instead of trying to correct the structural flaws we will increase dependency—because single women are the most reliable voters for Big Government, even as it turns them into junkies for the state pusher and ensures their kids will reach their adulthood pre-crippled.

When America was hit by economic depression in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson was fascinated by how the struggling republic’s energy was visible even on the fringes of society: “The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of the household life, are the topics of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign—is it not?—of new vigor, when the extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and feet. . . . ”39

In the disease-ridden Dependistans of the new America, there are fewer signs of currents in the extremities. Western societies already face an explosion in health costs. From a report on Canada in
The Economist
: “Health spending, which is administered by the provinces, has increased from nearly 35 percent of their budgets in 1999 to 46 percent today. In Ontario, the most populous province, it is set to reach 80 percent by 2030, leaving pennies for everything else the government does.”40

Eighty percent, huh? Add Chinese debt interest payments and that would be the entirety of U.S. government revenues spoken for. Beleaguered fall 231

health administrators drowning in deficits will be way beyond death panels by then, and into living-death panels: Diabetes? Take three aspirin and call us when your legs drop off.

For a peek at the future, wander ’round the public housing in any American city: look at the number of wheelchairs, and the predominantly black men and women with missing limbs. And then look in their faces, and see how young they are. In ten years’ time, there will be more, and they will be younger, and they will be wheeling in from the projects and the derelict husks of post-industrial cities, and a familiar sight almost everywhere in the United States.

The unhealthiness of Dependistan underlines the real problem with the modern welfare state: it’s not that it’s a waste of money but that it’s a waste of people. There is a phrase you hear a lot in Canada, Britain, and Europe to describe the collection of positive “rights” (to “free” health care, unemployment benefits, subsidized public transit) to which the citizens of western democracies have become addicted: the “social safety net.” It always struck me as an odd term. Obviously, it derives from the circus.