The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
August 1st
TOO MANY PEOPLE!
By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential
candidate
Syndicated
by Acme Features
“That
which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed on it.”
-
Aristotle
This ol’ gray and gassy
planet’s passed another milestone a while back… and plague be damned... it now
houses eight billion of us. Eight billion!
And change.
If there's a common
environmental root to Entropy's many noxious weeds, it's the ancient problem of
unrestrained population growth. When Mancunian textile wages plummeted in the
calamitous decade following the American and French Revolutions (during which emigration
of labor's surplus was sharply curtailed), Mr. Adam Smith, beholding a vista of
desperate, starving and riled-up proletariati,
remarked: "The minds of men are contracted and rendered incapable of
elevation, education is despised or, at most, neglected, and the heroic spirit
is almost utterly extinguished."
And crowned heads
started rolling.
Smith's contemporary,
Thomas Malthus, espoused that Christian principle (as also, although he would
have cringed at the prospect, was and remains encountered among certain other
Asiatic faiths) equating life with suffering; suffering pleases God, so those
who ratchet up body counts by war or plague or famine or dealing bad fentanyl or kicking dogs, do Godly work. Upon themselves or
others - no
difference! – and it is more felicitous to inflict suffering than suffer
oneself, just like the root flaw of Communism was and remains that Dictators of
the Proletariat turn out to prefer being dictators to proletarians and
eventually turn to… well… dictatorial measures to prevent the sort of deadly
competition as results. Them as limit
the extent of the suffering do Satan's work. Tommy Malt advocated lower classes
be forcibly made celibate, like certain Chinese of the day, or like feral cats
of our own; "peaceable and orderly... less inclined to tumultuous
proceedings in seasons of scarcity... less influenced by inflammatory and
seditious publications..." and wasn’t thought a danger to reproductive or
civil rights because there were no such rights back then. In
fact, Tommy Malt exceeded even present biotech dystopianism
by advocating that minds, as well as genitals, be altered or abolished; perhaps
by lasers or nanoparticles as will eventually solve that thinking problem. Swallow that, Info Wars! England's high mucky-mucks...
having just lost their American colonies and resenting the cost of transport
to Australia for all but the most persistent problem people, not to mention
seeing the French aristocracy losing its heads over too much democracy... found
Malthus a fine, useful fellow. They bought enough of his books so... with his
pay as propagandist for the East India Tea people (that Tea Party progenitor
being a sort of early spin doctor)... he was able to raise up and feed his own
family of three kids (as defenders say) or up to eleven (according to his
enemies who, then as now, hastened to employ the politics of personal scandal
to attack his ideas).
Fortunately for
Britain... as also Germany and Italy, Ireland, France, Spain and Russia, among
other nations... the Louisiana Purchase happened and America would soon again
absorb their Eurosurplus plus a few handy-dandy
Africans and the occasional Chinee. But that frontier
is populated, now... fields enclosed, rents skyrocketing, water rationed during
those endemic (trending towards pandemic) West Coast droughts, and the cities
of the plain teem with men as cry for work and bread where there is none. Complicating the situation is the drift into idleness
of working
We don't have an
America to ship our undeserving poor off to... we are America.
Stability in
population is a precondition of prosperity, which is a precondition for
democracy. James Madison, a defender of democracy in the Athenian sense... that
it be extended only to rich, white male citizens... thought population growth
dangerous at a time when we had less than a tenth as many people as we do now. "An
increase of population will, of necessity," predicted li'l
Jemmy, "increase the proportion of those who
will labour under all the hardships of life and
secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings."
Them sighs ain't so secret anymore... and are apt to be followed by
singing bullets in such places as are less and less burdened by identification
principality as more and more surplus Americans realize that their once (and
probably future) President has played them for fools and the guy who replaced
him has a lot of aspirations, but somewhere less inspiration. On other hand, the pivot as has occurred since
2016 from a class war to a race war will engender problems of its own.
Former maquila zones along the Mexican side of the Rio Grande,
which tasted just enough prosperity before runaway Amerijobs
re-migrated to China, have sunk into lawlessness bad as some parts of Honduras
(or Chicago) - narcoterrorists gunning it out over
control of the lucrative arthritis, blood pressure medicine and egg smuggling
trade. India and Pakistan's population war (as usually precedes shootin' war), Chancellor Jofl's expulsion
of Muslims out of Austria, them food wars over most of Africa and Mr. Tillerman's folks as privately patrol both borders... there being this dispute about those two weedy Quebecoís
crucified to maples in Maine... all augur a certain, well... discontent?
Ukraine? North Korea? Let’s not go there, not just yet...
Clean air, water
and... as some believe... clean genepools are birthrights for which Americans
fought a war of independence, cleared the continent from sea to shining sea
and... well, you get that picture too. "Most
people are not qualified to have children," said that late "monkeywrencher" of the Ubergreen
persuasion, Edward Abbey, following Mr. Aristotle's premise that "Equality
consists in the same treatment of similar persons," as ranks up
there in present-day pre-MAGA Teabag Party relevance (its conspiracy zone
population, of course, excepted) with the Tragedy of the Commons.
Tho',
as columnist Myriam Marquez had a lack of political
correctness to observe: "if we don't want people coming here illegally,
then we have to be willing to pay Americans more for back-breaking work that
desperate immigrants are willing to do."
Or lock them up and then
make them “arbeit
mach frei”. It might be that the problem isn’t the
population surplus, it’s the deficit of smart people as can do things like
write the code that robots (who never need to urinate!) use to sort packages
for Amazon and the Fed Express (or fix plumbing fixtures). Do we have to wait until those clever robotics
people… mostly in Japan where a sudden population drop has left a shortage of minimum
and subminimum wage caretakers for the elderly and young folk as to carry on
the breed… ride to our rescue? That
they’ve also been developing sex robots (think of the Austin Powers movie)
isn’t helping either. Maybe we could
ship a few shiploads of those critters over to Pakistan or Zimbabwe to cool the
testeronian passions of the dictators there once the
prices go down – or to Mad Vlad Putin or, even, to Mister Trump if his marital
problems persist!
Clearly there's a
need for hard decisions as to whose lives
need be preserved, for how long, and at what cost. We might handle our old
folks' problem and solve Mexico's awhile... ship aging Americans off to Baja to
roast on beach chairs in brightly-colored Depends while their social security checks
get deposited directly into Mexican banks. And, after a particularly vitriolic round
of voting on the partial-birth, back in the day, I proposed a cheap deal: toss
any pregger as third-trimester aborts (raped, incested or health-menaced, and their li'l
doctors, too) under a jail, so long as Virtuecrats swallowed
simple "morning-after" contraceptives like the RU-486. I did so knowing
both sides were masterminded by fanatics, so chances for compromise on the
RU-486, not to mention that new pill from Switzerland for guys, was nil
– meanwhile, the rebirthers and their pals at SCOTUS
conquered the first and second trimester and are advancing on the contraception
while liberals do what they do best... cringe, cry and march around in circles
rattling their coathangers.
During my stint in
Congress, I also met an Egyptian with UN/New World Order strings and an
un-Islamic whiskey/cocaine problem as provoked him into unpleasant truthfulness
now and again. "Rome and Mecca will never consent even to the safest means
of contraception," he said, "for there has been only one means of
population control acceptable to God for the last fifteen centuries… and that
is war. To pretend otherwise would cause the man to lose his status as master
of the household, no matter which God he prayed to."
Then he said that
the problem is that women took control of their lives in parts of the world
where they shouldn't have been expected to have... and over the strenuous
objections of men, God and... especially... men of God. Pretty much all
religion, I've figured out... Patriarch Kirill to
Jerry Falwell to the muzzahs
in Tehran... boils down to old, long-bearded, self-appointed holy lechers in
dirty robes and adult diapers wantin' all the
ripe l’il cherries – daughters, neighbors, strangers,
howsoever. To keep' most of the young bucks out'n their
orchard, they have to develop causes to go to war, so the surplus can either
lose and die in the fighting, or win and get to rape the vanquished.
Meaning that, when
all's said and done, there remain only two solutions to the population crisis
that the President and next Congress will steer away from as they wrangle with immigration...
birth control or death decontrol. If, as
Austin Tillerman suggests, government ties the tubes
of welfare queens… shouldn’t we also chop the li’l jerries off Jerry Sandusky or li’l
bernies off’n Bernie
Madoff? (Or Sanders?...
the MAWA-men might grunt and Elizabeth Warrens agree… but that’s a different
story, and for a different bedtime.)
Them rumblings as are
tumblin’ out’n the deep Green
State about just letting the Omega plague have its way or, in fact, even helpin’ it along some instead of killing it daid… well, as the day traders are proving, it only takes a
few nerd turds to blank out a power grid. Or an election. Or a species.
There is, of course,
the possibility of shooting the unwanted off into space viz. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Richard Branson in their competition to
colonize Mars. But Mars is a cold and
hostile place, and the involuntary astronauts will probably want to be paid for their sufferings and risk. That’s what comes of letting women go flouncing
about with shootin’ irons, but without veils.
"Put simply,"
remarks Jeremy Rifkin, population futurwurster,
"does every member of society, even the poorest among us, have a right to
participate in and benefit from increases in productivity brought on by the
information, communications and technology revolutions?"
If not, cautions
Judy Goldsmith, former president of NOW: "These disadvantaged children
will be the caretakers of the world in which we spend our later years."
CLICK the CATFISH to go
to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS |