It All Dovetails

If you’ve ever watched The Larkin Chronicles (the Brit TV series that was the breakout hit for Catherine Zeta Jones) you’ll remember the fatuous woman character, Mrs Jerebohm, who kept insisting that it all dovetailed.

But sometimes it really does dovetail.

Here we are in 2007 and we are up to our keisters in problems:

• Murdering hordes from south-west Asia
• Welfare state that has wrecked the working class
• Dumbed-down education
• Murdering adolescents in college
• Corrosive adolescent music/movie/video-game culture
• A corrupt, powerful academic ruling class

At a time like this it always seems that there’s no way out.  Except if you are a Republican.  Then you have a nasty feeling that Republicans are on their way out—of power.

But usually in the course of human events the solution to our problems is right in front of us.  Some people—Christians, Zen Buddhists, that sort—go even further.  They say that the solution is always right in front of us.

For people of a literary turn, solutions mean books, and the suspicion that the books are already out there.  Indeed they are. 

•  William W. Lewis, The Power of Productivity. Education is important, but not critical for most people.  You can train people on the job for most things in this world.  So why spend $750 billion on government education that doesn’t care?
• David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State.  It’s amazing, but the respectable lower-middle and working class built their own welfare state in the 19th century and it worked pretty well. So why spend $400 billion on a welfare system that just doesn’t care?
• Judith Rich Harris, The Nurture Assumption. Where did we get the idea that children were soft clay in the hands of their parents.  Children model themselves on older children, and when we crowd them together in factory schools, we create the adolescent culture that is rotting our youth.  That $750 billion again.
• Robert Epstein, The Case Against Adolescence.  We are shamefully infantilizing our teenagers.  Like we used to infantilize blacks and women.  We should reverse this and emancipate children as soon as they can pass competency tests.

Books are all very well, but what is in it for conservatives?

Quite a lot.  First of all there is the challence of Islamofascism.  Do we really think we are going to win the war on terror until we take the beam out of our own eye, the dreadful western culture of dreck?  First step in doing that will be to get our children away from their adolescent culture.  And how do you do that, make teenagers responsible?  Why, you break up the adolescent culture by pitching the adolescents into the adult culture.  You give teenagers responsibility as soon as you think they can handle it.  Conservatives all all in favor of responsibility, right?

But here’s the kicker.  Suppose we emancipate children. Suppose we reduce the years of compulsory education.  Suppose we let kids work.  Suppose we let them start businesses.  Suppose we let them drive, and drink, and smoke, and love, and suppose we abolish the juvenile justice system so that when kids break the law they get the adult justice system they deserve?

Who is going to be really crossed up?  Why the Democrats, of course.  They are the guys sitting in all those educational, justice, welfare sinecures.  If we abolish the adolescent society, Democrats will be out of a job.

Then we’d have purged the corrosive adolescent culture, which will help on the terror front.

And guess what.  All those working teenagers will help pay for the baby boomers’ retirement.

It all dovetails, like I said.