                             The American Spectator

                                 October, 1994

SECTION: FEATURE

LENGTH: 6000 words

HEADLINE: Fashionable Worries;
If meat is murder, are eggs rape?

BYLINE: P.J. O'Rourke;
P.J.  O'Rourke is the author of numerous works and a member
of the editorial board of The American Spectator.  This
essay is adapted with permission from his new book, All the
Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation,
Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and
Poverty, to be published in October by the Atlantic Monthly
Press.

BODY:

This is a moment of hope in history. Why doesn't anybody say
so? We are no longer in grave danger of the atomic war
which, for nearly fifty years, threatened to annihilate
humanity and otherwise upset everyone's weekend plans. The
nasty, powerful, and belligerent empire that was the Soviet
Union has fallen apart. It's nothing now but a space on the
map full of quarreling nationalities with too many ks and zs
in their names--armed Scrabble contestants.  The other great
malevolent regime of recent days, Red China, has decided
upon conquest of the world's shower flip-flop market as its
form of global domination. The bad political ideas that have
menaced our century--Fascism, Communism, Ted Kennedy for
President--are in retreat.  Colonialism has disappeared, and
hence the residents of nearly a quarter of the earth's
surface are being spared visits from Princess Di. The last
place on the planet where white supremacy held sway has
elected a president of rich, dark hue. Apartheid-style
racism is now relegated to a few pitiful and insignificant
venues such as the U.S. Senate (and, if you think Caucasians
have any claim to genetic superiority, imagine majoring in
U.S. Senate Studies).

   Things are better now than things have been since men
began keeping track of things.  Things are better than they
were only a few years ago. Things are better, in fact, than
they were at 9:30 this morning, thanks to Tylenol and two
Bloody Marys.

   But that's personal and history is general. It's always
possible to come down with the mumps on V-J Day or to have,
right in the middle of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a piece
of it fall on your foot. In general, life is better than it
ever has been, and if you think that, in the past, there was
some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would,
if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single
word: "Dentistry."

We know the truth of these matters from stories we've heard
in our own homes. Existence has improved enormously within
the lifetimes of our immediate family members. My
Grandfather O'Rourke was born in 1877 and born into a pretty
awful world, even if we don't credit all of his Irish
embroidery upon the horrors. The average wage was little
more than a dollar a day. That's if you worked.

O'Rourkes were not known to do so. The majority of people
were farmers, and do you know what time cows get up in the
morning?

   Women couldn't vote, not even incredibly intelligent
First Ladies who were their own people and had amazing inner
strength plus good luck playing the cattle futures market.
(For all we know, Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes had quite an eye
for beef on the hoof.)

   Without voting First Ladies, there was no health-care
reform. Of course, there was also no health care. And not
much health.  Illness was ever-present. and the most trivial
infection might prove fatal.  The germ theory of disease as
argued by Pasteur was just another wacky French idea with no
more effect on the people of the 1870s than
Deconstructionism has on us. Men customarily wed multiple
wives, not by way of philandering but because of deaths in
childbirth. The children died, too, sometimes before a
suitable foot-long nineteenth-century name could be given
them. A walk through an old graveyard shows our ancestors
often had more dead children than we have live ones.

   Pollution was unchecked and mostly unthought of. Sewage
was considered treated if dumped in a river. Personal
hygiene was practiced, when at all, on the face, neck, and
hands up to the wrists. My mother's mother (from the
indoor-plumbing side of the family) said that, when she was
little, a hired girl had told her to always wear at least
one piece of clothing when washing herself "because a lady
never gets completely undressed."

   Everything was worse for everybody. Blacks could no more
vote than women could and were prevented from doing so by
more violent means.  About 10 percent of America's
population had been born in slavery.  "Coon," "kike,"
"harp," and "spic" were conversational terms.  It was a
world in which "nigger" was not a taboo name, but the second
half of "Beavis and Butt-Head" would have been.

   Nowadays we can hardly count our blessings, one of which
is surely that we don't have to do all that
counting--computers do it for us. Information is easily had.
Education is readily available. Opportunity knocks, it
jiggles the doorknob, it will try the window if we don't
have the alarm system on.

   The highest standards of luxury and comfort, as known
only to the ridiculously wealthy a few generations ago,
would hardly do on a modern white-water rafting trip. Our
clothing is more comfortable, our abodes are warmer,
better-smelling, and vermin-free.  Our food is fresher.  Our
lights are brighter.  Travel is swift.  And communication is
sure.

   Even the bad things are better than they used to be.  Bad
music, for instance, has gotten much briefer.  Wagner's Ring
cycle takes four days to perform while "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" by
the Crash Test Dummies lasts little more than three minutes.

   Life is sweet. But you could spend a long time reading,
going to the movies, and watching TV and not hear this
mentioned. Especially, watching daytime TV. Of course, if
you're watching a lot of daytime TV your life probably is
dreadful. But, as I pointed out, that's your problem, not
history's. History is on a roll, a toot, a bender. No doubt
it will all come crashing down around our ears one day when
a comet hits the earth or Sally Jessy Raphael becomes Chief
Justice of the United States. But, in the meantime, we
should be enjoying ourselves, and we are not.

I hear America whining, crybaby to the world. I behold my
country in a pet beefing, carping, crabbing, bitching,
sniveling, mewling, fretting, yawping, bellyaching, and
being pickle-pussed.  A colossus that stood astride the
earth now lies on the floor pounding its fists and kicking
its feet, transformed into a fussy-pants and a
sputterbudget. The streets of the New World are paved with
onions. Everybody's got a squawk. We have become a nation of
calamity howlers, cr pe hangers, sour guts, and mopes--a
land with the grumbles.

   On the Fourth of July 1993, the lead story on the front
page of the Boston Globe read:

The country that celebrates its 217th birthday today is
free, at peace, relatively prosperous--but deeply anxious. .
. . the American people are troubled, beset by doubts, full
of anger.

   And any peek into the media produces examples in plenty
of the same sobs and groans, often from improbable Jeremiahs.

   In the April 24, 1994 issue of the New York Times Book
Review, Fran R. Schumer made reference to "the modern era,
when anomie, caused by any number of factors--the decline of
religion and community, the anonymity of modern life gave
rise to selfish, obsessive, 20th-century man." Ms.  Schumer
writes the "Underground Gourmet" column for New York
magazine.  All she was doing in the NYTBR was reviewing a
book about food.

   "In a world with the cosmic staggers, where the Four
Horsemen .  .  . are on an outright rampage" began a profile
of harmless comedian Jerry Seinfeld in the May 1994 Vanity
Fair.

   "Ecological ruin, shrinking white-collar job market and
fear of intimacy confronting his generation" is how that
journal of deep thinking, People, describes the subject
matter of Douglas Coupland, latest young writer to complain
his way to literary prominence. Coupland's first novel,
Generation X, was a detailed account of how wretched and
lousy life is for middle-class white kids born after 1960.
"Our Parents Had More" is the title of chapter two.

   In case you missed the point (or fell asleep while the
plot ossified), Coupland included several pages of
depressing statistics at the back of Generation X.  For
example, according to a Time/CNN telephone poll taken in
June of 1990, 65 percent of 18-to-29-year-old Americans
agree that "given the way things are, it will be much harder
for people in my generation to live as comfortably as
previous generations." Of course, it's difficult for these
youngsters to know if they're going to live as comfortably
as their parents did because the kids are so immobilized by
despair over ecological ruin, shrinking white-collar job
market, and fear of intimacy that they're all still living
at home.

   But William T.  Vollmann--the youthful author of An
Afghanistan Picture Show, Whores for Gloria, Butterfly
Stories, and numerous other books (who has been acclaimed a
genius by the sort of people who acclaim those
things)--knows it will take more than a split-level in the
suburbs to redeem our ghastly existences. "I'd say the
biggest hope that we have right now is the AIDS epidemic,"
Vollmann told Michael Coffey in the July 13, 1992 issue of
Publishers Weekly.  "Maybe the best thing that could happen
would be if it were to wipe
out half or two-thirds of the people in the world. Then the
ones who survived would just be so busy getting things
together that they'd have to help each other, and in time
the world would recover ecologically, too."

Maybe we should also take dope.  Listening to Prozac, by
Peter Kramer, spent six months on the New York Times
best-seller list. An article in the May 5, 1994 "Drugs in
America" special issue of Rolling Stone said, "Given the
psychic condition of the nation today [heroin] may be just
what the doctor ordered. 'With heroin,' as a former user
points out, 'your life can be falling apart around you and
everything's still fine with you.'"

   But no. It's worse than that. Being and creation are so
horrible, even heroin can't make them better. Otherwise
Nirvana lead caterwaul Kurt Cobain would still be with us.
And what a tortured cry of existential despair that was when
Kurt took a twenty-gauge and splattered his brains, or
whatever it was he had in his skull, all over the Cobain
guest house.

   "That was his message, that life is futile," a
26-year-old named Bob Hince told Washington Post reporter
Jonathan Freedland.  Freedland was writing a feature piece
for the April 24, 1994 Sunday Show section titled
"Generation Hex." He found Mr. Hince drinking in one of the
Seattle bars where Nirvana got its start. "We all feel the
monotony, we all feel we cannot control our circumstances,"
said Mr.  Hince, who is clearly a spokesperson not just for
his generation but for all of America and maybe for space
aliens.

   Freedland reported that "[Hince] has completed six years
of study in molecular biology but is now headed for Alaska
to work as a salmon fisherman. His dyed red hair nearly
covers his eyes, falling behind the lenses of his retro,
Buddy Holly glasses.  .  .  .  'It's just ambivalence,' he
says. 'What am I supposed to be?'"

   Personally, I think Bob Hince won't have to worry about
what he'll be if the people who paid for his six years of
studying molecular biology get their hands on him. But, as
Nirvana would say, "Never mind." The whole world is rotten.
Everything stinks. Nobody loves me. Everybody hates me. My
name is Legion. I'll be your server tonight.  The special is
worms.

   Why are we so unhappy? Is it, as that Cassandra of food
critics, Fran R. Schumer, would have it, "anomie" caused by
"the decline of religion and community"? Sure. Going to
church was always one of my favorite things to do.
Zoning-board meetings are also a blast. And what is it with
this anomie stuff anyway? We all know perfectly well we've
got no idea what the word means. We might just as well say
we're suffering from yohimbine or rigadoon or Fibonacci
sequence.

   Are we disheartened by the breakup of the family?  Nobody
who ever met my family is.

   Are we depressed by lower expectations? Back in the
sixties I expected Permanent Woodstock--a whole lifetime of
sitting in the mud, smoking Oaxacan ditch weed, listening to
amplifier feedback, and pawing a Long Island chiropodist's
daughter who thought she'd been abducted by creatures from
outer space. Show me somebody with lower expectations than
mine.

Here we've got all this material well-being, liberty, and
good luck, and we're
still our crummy old selves--flabby around the middle,
limited out on our VISA cards. The job is a bore. The house
is a mess. And "Melrose Place" is in reruns. It's not our
fault, it's life's. The world is an awful place so we're not
much good either.

   Fretting makes us important. Say you're an adult male and
you're skipping down the street whistling "Last Train to
Clarksville." People will call you a fool. But lean over to
the person next to you on a subway and say, "How can you
smile while innocents are dying in Tibet?" You'll acquire a
reputation for great seriousness and also more room to sit
down.

   And worrying is less work than doing something to fix the
worry. This is especially true if we're careful to pick the
biggest possible problems to worry about.  Everybody wants
to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes.
Thus, in fin de si cle civilization, we find ourselves with
grave, momentous concerns galore. The Clinton State
Department has created a position of Worry-Wart-in-Charge,
an "undersecretary of global affairs" who is to be
responsible for "worldwide programs in human rights, the
environment, population control and anti-narcotics efforts."
Timothy E. Wirth, nominee for this dreary post, testified
before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.  Fussed
Wirth, "Growth that is all-too-capable of doubling--even
tripling--today's global population in the next century is
already a force contributing to violent disorder and mass
dislocations in resource-poor societies. Some of the
resulting refugees are our near neighbors." Oh those
massively dislocated Nova Scotians, breeding like mink.
"Other refugees-in-waiting," said Wirth, "press hungrily
against the fabric of social and political stability around
the world." And that suit's going to have to go to the
cleaner's.

   The Parliament of the World's Religions, meeting in
Chicago in 1993, issued a statement called "Towards a Global
Ethic" that opined, "We must move beyond the dominance of
greed for power, prestige, money and consumption to make a
just and peaceful world." A just and peaceful world full of
powerless nobodies who are broke and have empty shopping
malls.

   On Earth Day, 1994, the National Council of Churches
suggested that Protestants make a "confession of
environmental sins": "We use more than our share of the
Earth's resources.  We are responsible for massive pollution
of earth, water and sky. We thoughtlessly drop garbage
around our homes, schools, churches, places of work, and
places of play." (Which is why Episcopalian neighborhoods
are always such dumps.)

   Everywhere we see the imposition of grave concern into
the most mundane and trivial aspects of life. Lightning
Comics, a Detroit publisher of funny books, has created a
super hero, Bloodfire, who is HIV positive. Which should
cool Lois Lane.

   A TV revival of "Bonanza" had as its villain a man who
wanted to strip-mine the Ponderosa.

   Hanna-Barbera has a "Captain Planet and the Planeteers"
cartoon about saving the you-know-what.  Margot Kidder
supplies the voice of "Gaia," the Spirit of the Earth. "I am
worried about the planet for my daughter's future,"
announced Kidder in an interview with the Chicago Tribune.
Kidder said her daughter had once told her, "Mom, when we
grow up, the world may not be here."


   The May 1994 issue of Barbie comics, featuring the
adventures of the doll by that name, had a story about how
deaf people are discriminated against.  There was a page at
the end where Barbie gave a lesson in sign language, showing
us the signs for "push-up bra," "Let's go shopping," and
''diamond tennis bracelet from middle-aged gentleman
admirer." Just kidding.  Barbie showed us the signs for
''Friend," "Hello," "Thanks," and that sort of thing.

The April 1994 issue of Washingtonian ran an article by my
friend Andrew Ferguson about corporate "multicultural
training." Andy quoted one of the trainers (or facilitators,
as they like to be called), whose job it is to instill
"sensitivity" about age, race, gender, disability, sexual
orientation, and the kitchen sink into employees of
Washington businesses:

   "It's a function of capitalism, isn't it?" says the
facilitator. ''Capitalism requires scarcity to function.
It's built into the system--no scarcity, no profit.

   "That's the kind of power relationships capitalism
creates. Sharing power is not something a male-dominated
culture naturally gravitates towards, is it?"

   The facilitator, a male, was being paid $2,000 a day.

   And here is my favorite tale of pained solicitude, from
an AP wire story that appeared in the Arab News in Saudi
Arabia during the Gulf War, and which I have been saving
ever since:
Game wardens and wildlife biologists were among those
gathered for nearly eight hours on a farm in northwestern
Louisiana to save what they thought was a bear 50 to 60 feet
up in a pine tree. A veterinarian fired tranquilizer darts
at the critter in an effort to get it down. Deputies and
wildlife agents strung a net to catch the bear when the
tranquilizers took effect. . . .  "People really wanted . .
. to help and protect that bear and get him where he was
supposed to be," Norman Gordan, the owner of the farm said.
. . . It wasn't until the tree was chopped down . . . that
they discovered they were rescuing a dart-riddled garbage bag.

   Some of the folks propounding the above-listed anxieties,
cavils, and peeves are amateurs: New Agers who will believe
in anything but facts, environmentalist softies who think
the white rats should be running the cancer labs, or
bong-smoke theorists who would have the world be as stupid
as they are.  But many of the fretful--the "multicultural
training facilitator" is an appalling example--are pros.
Professional worriers put our fears to use. Masters of
Sanctimony have an agenda.  The licensed and certified
holier-than-thou work toward a political goal.  And whether
these agony merchants are leftists (as they usually are) or
rightists (as they certainly can be) or whether they head
off in some other and worse direction (the way religious
fundamentalists do), the political goal is the same.

   In fact, if we use the word politics in its broadest
sense, there really is only one political goal in the world.
Politics is the business of getting power and privilege
without possessing merit. A politician is anyone who asks
individuals to surrender part of their liberty--their power
and privilege--to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or
whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the
planet will then be run by . . . politicians.

   Politicians are always searching for some grave alarm
that will cause individuals to abandon their separate
concerns and prerogatives and act in concert so that
politicians can wield the baton.  Calls to mortal combat are
forever being sounded (though only
metaphorically--politicians don't like real wars, too much
merit is involved). The idea is that people will drop
everything for a WWII. Remember the War on Poverty?  And how
Jimmy Carter asked Americans to respond to a mere rise in
the price of crude oil with "the moral equivalent of war"?
(What were we supposed to do, shame the gas station
attendant to death?) Now we're "fighting pollution,"
"battling AIDS," "conquering racism," et cetera.

   Ralph Nader is as much a politician as Senator Robert
Packwood, even if Ralph isn't as smooth with the ladies.
Such professional worriers as Al Gore, Paul Ehrlich, Jeremy
Rifkin, Joycelyn Elders, Barry Commoner, Jesse Jackson, and
Captain Planet want our freedom, on the grounds that they
are better than us. (You may have noticed how politicians
are wiser, kinder, and more honest than you are.) Because
politicians worry so much about overpopulation, famine,
ecological disaster, ethnic hatred, plague, and poverty,
they must be superior people. And because they worry so
much, they must be experts, too.  (Said the Austrian
political economist Friedrich Hayek, in his 1944 book The
Road to Serfdom: "There could hardly be a more
unbearable--and more irrational--world than one in which the
most eminent specialists in each field were allowed to
proceed unchecked with the realization of their ideals.")

   The bullying of fellow citizens by means of dreads and
frights has been going on since paleolithic times.
Greenpeace fund-raisers on the subject of global warming are
not much different than tribal wizards on the subject of
lunar eclipses. "Oh, no, the Night Wolf is eating the Moon
Virgin. Give me silver and I will make him spit her out."

The grave worries facing the world today mostly don't have
solutions. That is, they don't have solutions outside
ourselves. We can't vote our troubles away. Or mail them to
Washington either.  We can't give fifty dollars to the
Sierra Club, read Douglas Coupland, and sing the Captain
Planet theme song and set everything right. Instead we have
to accept the undramatic and often extremely boring duties
of working hard, exercising self-control, taking care of
ourselves, our families, and our neighbors, being kind, and
practicing as much private morality as we can stand without
popping.

   To the extent that our worries do have public, collective
solutions, the solutions are quite simple.  Though, like
many simple things (faith, grace, love, souffl s), they are
difficult to achieve. It was Thomas Robert Malthus himself,
arguably the father of modern worrying, who set forth these
solutions in the 1803 revision of his Essay on the Principle
of Population:

The first grand requisite to the growth of prudential habits
is the perfect security of property; and the next perhaps is
that respectability and importance which are given to the
lower classes by equal laws, and the possession of some
influence in the framing of them.   We have been miserably
deficient in the instruction of the poor, perhaps the only
means of really raising their condition.

   Property rights, rule of law, responsible government, and
universal education: that's all we need. Though no society
has achieved these perfectly. Our own nation is notably
lacking on the fourth point. (And such things as
huge federal regulatory agencies and the Menendez jury
aren't helping items one through three.)

   Let us seek out the worries but avoid the worriers.  They
are haters of liberty and loathers of individuals.  They
wish to politicize everything. Imagine Bill Clinton
conducting your love life for you. And watch out, he may be
trying to.

   To quote Malthus again:

The most successful supporters of tyranny are without doubt
those general declaimers who attribute the distresses of the
poor, and almost all the evils to which society is subject,
to human institutions and the iniquity of governments.

   We should wipe the gnostic smirk of self-righteousness
off the faces of the moral buttinskis. Anyone who thinks he
has a better idea of what's good for people than people do
is a swine.  Let's give the professional worriers something
to worry about.  (And memo to Generation X: Pull your pants
up, turn your hat around, and get a job.)

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