The Journal
Serving the Metropolitan Area
Since 1872
February 2nd
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… it now houses seven
billion of us. Seven 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 start
rolling.
Smith's
contemporary, Thomas Malthus, espoused that Christian principle (and, although
he would have cringed at the prospect also 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 heroin, 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 that Dictators of the Proletariat turned out to prefer being
dictators to proletarians and eventually turned to… well… dictatorial measures
to prevent that development. 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, he 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 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, and
seeing France 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, water rationed during those periodic West Coast
droughts, and the cities of the plain teem with men as cry for work and bread
where there is none.
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 former President has played them for fools and the guy just installed
last month has a lot of aspirations, but somewhere less inspiration.
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 and blood pressure medicine 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?
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 the picture. "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 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 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 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 the
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 conquered the second
trimester and are advancing on the first while liberals do what they do best...
cringe, cry and rattle 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, boils down to old, long-bearded, self-appointed holy patriarchs 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
for a different bedtime.)
Them rumblings as
are tumblin’ out’n the deep
Green State about just letting the 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. I hear that Jeff Bezos has joined 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 |