Musings Of An Indie WriterSaturday, August 28, 2010
Vacation Vagaries
Vacation Vagaries
1. Our Accommodations.
Good Saturday morning from Berkshire County, Massachusetts! And it is a good morning: the C.S.O. and I had a more or less pleasant drive here from Long Island, settled in satisfactorily at our hotel, ate a nice dinner yesterday evening at the Dakota, slept well, and have just enjoyed the “complimentary Continental breakfast,” replete with foods no European has ever seen on his breakfast table. We’ve planned our peregrinations for the day, I’ve confirmed our reservations for this evening’s repast and the Mass time at St. Ann’s tomorrow, and are looking forward to the rest of the weekend.
But best of all…indeed, dwarfing every other aspect of the trip so far:
Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow.
2. Ambivalences.
Upon perusing this morning’s edition of the Berkshire Eagle, a delightfully thin publication of relentlessly local focus, I noted that an old musical hero of mine, Tom Paxton, is scheduled to play at the Guthrie Center in Barrington this very evening. I was immediately overcome by that most terrible of tensions, reverence for an old and much beloved icon counterpoised against more recent memories and fears.
It’s been three years since the C.S.O. and I saw (and barely heard) Gordon Lightfoot. That concert was a melancholy affair for us; its memory lingers with me today. Lightfoot’s deterioration was so pronounced that there was no disguising it. The clash it made with our memories of the virile and powerful troubadour he’d been had us on the edge of tears throughout.
Yet, just last year, Tony Bennett, arguably the finest singer of his time and idiom, thrilled us with a concert to be remembered forever. The 83-year-old Bennett was living proof that time need not enfeeble all of us. To which of those poles would Paxton come nearer?
Ultimately, I decided against the concert. Paxton has become ever more political as he’s aged—hard-left, contemptuous of America, of freedom, and of capitalism—and if anything is more likely to spoil my enjoyment of a concert, I can’t imagine what it might be. And Paxton, after all, was the composer of this ditty, which he called “the voice of Nixon’s Silent Majority.”
I suppose we’ll just visit a few art galleries, have dinner, and call it a day.
3. The Dwindling.
According to the Berkshire Eagle, we’re steadily moving toward European rates of reproduction:
Forget the Dow and the GDP. Here’s the latest economic indicator: The U.S. birth rate has fallen to its lowest level in at least a century as many people apparently decided they couldn’t afford more mouths to feed.The birth rate dropped for the second year in a row since the recession began in 2007. Births fell 2.6 percent last year even as the population grew, numbers released Friday by the National Center for Health Statistics show.
“It’s a good-sized decline for one year. Every month is showing a decline from the year before,” said Stephanie Ventura, the demographer who oversaw the report.
The birth rate, which takes into account changes in the population, fell to 13.5 births for every 1,000 people last year. That’s down from 14.3 in 2007 and way down from 30 in 1909, when it was common for people to have big families.
The situation is a striking turnabout from 2007, when more babies were born in the United States than any other year in the nation’s history. The recession began that fall, dragging down stocks, jobs and births.
“When the economy is bad and people are uncomfortable about their financial future, they tend to postpone having children. We saw that in the Great Depression the 1930s and we’re seeing that in the Great Recession today,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University.
“It could take a few years to turn this around,” he added.
That’s the sort of “insight” one must expect from the typical sociology professor. He probably hasn’t even heard of Mark Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. If he has, I doubt he’s read it.
Americans are slowly ceasing to breed for the same reason Europeans, Russians, and the Japanese have ceased to breed: We’ve become present-satisfaction obsessives who are losing confidence in our future. The laissez les bon temps roulez mindset that’s undone the “more advanced” welfare states is taking hold of us, too.
Our political course is integral to this development. With the rise of the Obamunists, we’ve passed a “knee” in our satisfactions-versus-investments curve and have begun to barrel downhill. The semiconscious conviction that there’s no point to working hard, or producing children who’ll enjoy a brighter future than the present in which we beget them, seizes ever more Americans and turns them away from the challenges and pleasures of family, of saving, and of belief in human advance.
Steyn posited that socialized medicine is the point of no return for that progression. Does that ring any alarm bells, Gentle Reader?
And to think I dragged the C.S.O. up here to get away from all this crap!
