After America

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 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.

DEPENDISTAN

From the English-language edition of Pravda: Family Becomes Extinct, To Be Replaced with Feminism and Gender Equality.³⁸

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 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.

But life isn’t really a high-wire act, is it? Or at least it didn’t use to be. If you put the average chap—or even Barack Obama or Barney Frank—in spangled leotard and tights and on a unicycle and shove him out across the wire, he’s likely to fall off. But put the average chap in spangled leotard and tights out into the world and tell him to get a job, find accommodation, raise a family, take responsibility, and he can do it. Or he used to be able to, until the government decided he was “vulnerable” and needed a “safety net.”

When did human life become impossible without a “safety net”? My neighbor’s family came to my corner of New Hampshire in the winter of 1767–68 when her great-great-great-whatever dragged his huge millstones up the frozen river from Connecticut to build the first gristmill on a swift-running brook in the middle of uncleared forest in a four-year-old township comprising a dozen families. And he did it without first applying for a federal business development grant. No big deal. Her family’s nothing special, my town’s nothing special: that’s the point. It was routine—in a pre-“safety net” society.

In his book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift, Paul Rahe writes, “Human dignity is bound up with taking responsibility for conducting one’s own affairs.”⁴¹ But today the state cocoons “one’s own affairs” so thoroughly as to remove almost all responsibility from modern life, and much of human dignity with it. And, if personal consequences have been all but abolished, societal consequences are harder to dodge.

The welfare state is less a social safety net than a kind of cage—a large cage but a cage nonetheless. And its occupants are not a trapeze act but more like an expensive zoo animal. Think of a panda. He’s the most expensive item in any zoo’s budget: those American institutions lucky enough to host a big cuddly panda spend some three million per annum on the cute l’il feller.

They feed him, they protect him, they give him everything he could possibly want—except a purpose. Eventually, like Europeans, he can’t even be bothered to breed. You put the comeliest lady panda you can find in the cage with him, and he’s not interested. He just lies around all day. To reprise Charles Murray’s line, Big Government “drains too much of the life from life.”

Look, by historical standards, we’re loaded. We’re the first society in which a symptom of poverty is obesity: every man his own William Howard Taft. Of course we’re “vulnerable”—by definition, we always are. But to demand a government organized on the principle of preemptively “taking care” of potential “vulnerabilities” is to make all of