The sand is going pit-pat
Writing by treason on Monday, 23 of October , 2006 at 1:15 pm
“My old - very old - friend George Abbott, the director of On the Town, Damn Yankees, and Pal Joey, died in 1995 at the age of 107 while working on a revival of The Pajama Game. Several years earlier, in his late nineties, he’s given up playing tennis because all his partners had died. That’s the position America is facing in respect of its transnational social life: It’ll be turning up at the G-8, NATO, and other summits only to find that all its partners have died.”
– Mark Steyn, National Review/October 23, 2006
Steyn’s essay in NR is a good one - adapted from his most recent book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. In it he describes “the rapid aging of almost every developed nation other than the United States: Canada, Europe, and Japan…” Says Steyn, “A society ages when its birth rate falls and it finds itself with fewer children and more grandparents.” A stable population, he explains, requires a Total Fertility Rate of 2.1 live births per woman. America’s hovering around there right now, but Canada is at 1.48, Europe is at 1.38, Japan is at 1.32, and Russia’s at 1.14. “These countries,” writes Steyn, “or, more precisely, these people, are going out of business.”
Just looking at recent celebrity deaths (Jane Wyatt, 96; Red Buttons, 87; June Allyson, 88; Shelley Winters, 85; Aaron Spelling, 83; Darren McGavin, 83) one can’t help get the feeling that we’re turning into a nation of geezers. I know of what I speak: I just had another birthday last week and if someone had told me that my mother would be celebrating her 83rd this year, I would have sneered. Some of us are just refusing to go gentle into that good night.
I’ve been aware of this trend for quite a while because Italians have been wringing their hands over their plummeting birth rate for years. Why aren’t Italian women breeding, the Italian government keeps asking. Well, I’m half Italian and I’ve never bred, and I can tell you my take on the subject. But that’s neither here nor there. Steyn’s concern is that society has chosen to “outsource its breeding.” After spending several days doing clinicals in local hospitals’ Labor & Delivery and Mother & Baby units, I can tell you that there is plenty of breeding going on where I live.
Very young women, mostly, unemployed, uninsured, unmarried, undereducated, and — in many cases — unable to speak English. Steyn cites Islam as “the principal supplier of new Europeans, and currently the second biggest supplier of new Canadians.” It reminds me of the scene in The Lion In Winter where the aging Henry is discussing strategy with the young, inexperienced Phillip.
“I can’t lose Henry. I have time. Just look at you. Great heavy arms. Each year they get a little heavier. The sand goes pit-pat in the glass. I’m in no hurry, Henry. I’ve got time.”
I think I just heard this week that Spain’s government is offering cash to Spanish women to breed. (Perhaps America’s Southwest could send them some of our fourteen year-old pregnant Mexican girls. After all, their roots go back to Espana. Deal?)
I understand the concern that the West is going to disappear. It’s tempting, I guess, to adopt a defeatist attitude and decide that since a Third World underclass, and then Islamo-Imperialists, will inherit the earth, why worry about the planet? Hell…should I even be wasting my time recycling?
My immediate concern, though, is the death of our culture. So many Americans are unfamiliar with the history and geography of their own country, the regional dialects and customs. The taste treats. If I were to ask the average Nuevo Mexican to tell me about the Southern tradition of MoonPies and RC Cola, or a Chicago-style hot dog or Italian beef sandwich, I’d get blank stares. But they’d be able to tell me all about biscochitos, empanadas, posole, and sopaipillas.
I’m reminded of a friend who’s always been involved in theatre and has her two daughters enrolled in a local performing arts school. One night they left a late rehearsal and were driving home when one of her daughters, age twelve, asked about some lights off in the distance.
“Oh, those,” said Mom. “That’s where they hold drag races.”
“Really? Drag racing?,” her daughter asked. “But how do they run in those high heels?”
At first I thought it was one of the funniest lines I’d ever heard, but then I was horrified that the girl knew about drag queens, but had never heard of drag racing. You know, the thing they do on a track with cars?
Call me sentimental, but I like parts of our culture. In college I minored in art and spent hours researching and writing about works of art that exist only in textbooks. I remember the horror of learning that the photo of the painting I was looking at in one of my books could never be seen because it was gone. Destroyed in the war. Blown off the face of the earth. Like the two thousand year-old Bamiyan Buddhas blown to bits by the Taliban.
I revealed my concerns to a T and a friend last Friday:
“I’m afraid we’re going to lose our art. Paintings, sculptures, architecture. The Louvre will be destroyed and Mona Lisa will be gone forever.”
“It’s just a painting.”
“No! It’s Mona!”
“And David’s a chunk of marble.”
“No!!!”
“And what if the Statue of Liberty is destroyed, so what?”
“I don’t ever want to see that.”
“I know you love the thing, but it’s only a symbol. If the Statue of Liberty blew up tomorrow, nothing would change. We’d still be Americans, we’d still go on.”
“But…”
“It’s really nothing more than pack ratting. We have a lot of stuff, that’s all. And if some Islamic radicals destroy it all, so what? It’s just stuff.”
Liberty? Big Ben? The Leaning Tower? The Brooklyn Bridge? Wrigley Field? The Arch? Fine. Call me a pack rat. It’s stuff, frankly, that I don’t want to part with.
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