Hot Midnight Coffee, Oil City

The police are hell in Egypt

So I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself when the gas company down the road went BOOM

At the time, I had just experienced a few moments of powerful, thick squeezing pain in my chest, my throat and my right eyeball, simultaneously, and I was extremely annoyed with myself.  It was stress-induced, something common to many people, and I was therefore irritated with myself for wasting away perfectly good minutes with something as melodramatic as chest pain when I could be working on a cover letter, the successful accomplishment of which would reduce anxiety -- the angina pectoris was the bodily equivalent of an angry customer yelling at an airline agent who's trying her best to help. 

It was at that point that, as the man said, a screaming came across the sky.  It sounded as if a squadron of jets had broken the sound barrier expressly to crash into our yard.  But the roar wouldn't waver or end.  A nuclear missile?  No one would waste a missile on the Delta.  A meteor?  Too industrial a noise.  I ran outside.  One van was speeding away down the road at twice the limit.  From around about the gas company.

Pretty soon, the word was that the cops had blocked off the road, and were evacuating the whole south of town.  I went north to my mother's workplace and took Addie, while my dad held the fort.  Addie played with two beagles, then cheerfully embarrassed me senseless by running down the hallway and into a lawyer's office where said lawyer was meeting with two clients.  (All of them laughed, though.)  I spent some sweltering time in a conference room trying to concentrate on the work I'd been doing, but by the time I'd settled down with all the dogs, the evacuation was called off.  I piled together my stuff again, cleaned up after an errant beagle, then headed back home.  Of course my chest had stopped being sore within ten minutes of the explosion, and for that I was grateful.  Perspective too can be somatized.

(Sorry there's not an actual news article.  What exactly happened, whether anyone was injured or even killed at the plant, will have to wait for tomorrow.  But the general population is okay.)

Update: the gas company says it was a routine accident and didn't even send its workers home.  But I smelled gas outside our place, and I can't imagine it would have been a good idea to smoke a cigarette just then.

And yet

"Marriage is for white people."  A heartbreaking article about the human costs in the breakdown of the American family.  Why don't libertarians like me have good answers for this kind of problem -- good socially grounded answers?  (Besides gay marriage, of course, which I support.)  This is where the patriarchal and retrograde gets its foothold -- in despair, ruin and longing for stability.

The ones who walk away from First Baptist Church

I've been thinking about this Foreign Policy article by Phillip Longman, of which I saw surprisingly little discussion on my favorite blogs, although it was in A&L Daily.  In brief, it posits that a society's long-term survival chances depend on a patriarchal family structure.  Phrased so baldly, it sounds identical to what you might hear some nasty old relative of yours saying about "the [Ethnic Slurs] outbreeding us, just popping out babies faster than anybody else can keep up."  What makes this article bearable is that Longman does not exhort the maidens of the fatherland to bear blond children; he merely explains the theory:

Declining birthrates also change national temperament. In the United States, for example, the percentage of women born in the late 1930s who remained childless was near 10 percent. By comparison, nearly 20 percent of women born in the late 1950s are reaching the end of their reproductive lives without having had children. The greatly expanded childless segment of contemporary society, whose members are drawn disproportionately from the feminist and countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s, will leave no genetic legacy. Nor will their emotional or psychological influence on the next generation compare with that of their parents.

Meanwhile, single-child families are prone to extinction. A single child replaces one of his or her parents, but not both. Nor do single-child families contribute much to future population. The 17.4 percent of baby boomer women who had only one child account for a mere 7.8 percent of children born in the next generation. By contrast, nearly a quarter of the children of baby boomers descend from the mere 11 percent of baby boomer women who had four or more children. These circumstances are leading to the emergence of a new society whose members will disproportionately be descended from parents who rejected the social tendencies that once made childlessness and small families the norm. These values include an adherence to traditional, patriarchal religion, and a strong identification with one’s own folk or nation.

This dynamic helps explain, for example, the gradual drift of American culture away from secular individualism and toward religious fundamentalism. Among states that voted for President George W. Bush in 2004, fertility rates are 12 percent higher than in states that voted for Sen. John Kerry . . .

Rather than rejecting his thesis out of hand, I thought to myself: let me put aside my high enlightened dudgeon and consider whether he may be right.  If so, what then?  Is it worth one's liberty of thought, of behavior, to maintain a stable patriarchal society?  If Longman's thesis is correct, then a society experiences a period of flowering in which mores are loosened and thought correspondingly freed.  It comes at the cost of the survival of that segment of society who, in pursuing their individual destinies and giving the age its character, neglect to have enough progeny to replace themselves.  If societies suffer and die, just as people do, is it worse to enjoy the period of decay rather than the sustainable period?  Is it not worth it for the explosion of culture, the fireworks of human freedom, even if it must all fall to ashes and the great-great-grandchildren must take up the struggle again?

This isn't to say that I necessarily believe Longman.  Even without a grounding in demographics, I find his theory problematic in the details.  He says, for example:

Tomorrow’s children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents’ values, as always happens. But when they look around for fellow secularists and counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.

I don't think he has a full grasp of the single most powerful motivator in the life of a young American with two brain cells to rub together: getting yourself the hell away from anything that reminds you of your parents.  A suburban red-state Church of Christ is as much a cauldron of seething resentment and rebellion as any college campus; the smart kids just have their mouths clamped shut.  As soon as they have anything to say about it, they'll move to New York, become the kind of New Yorkers who read Gawker and complain about "Disneyfication" of the city, and the cycle will begin anew.