Should We Fear David Brooks' "Population Implosion"?

Danny O'Keefe shared an article by David Brooks titled "The Fertility Implosion" which expresses Brooks' growing trepidation about birthrates falling worldwide. Danny offered the following intro: "A major point in this article is that when people expand their income ability (usually with the benefit of greater education) they rely less on large families. The Earth could use less people. If the capacity to create and retain wealth grows, then the only real problem with maintaining an equity standard would seem to be fair distribution. If that sounds like socialism then let your granny starve."

I responded:
Danny, I agree with your analysis of the issue, but I don't think Brooks does. Perhaps I am just so jaded by all the recent assaults on women's rights, but this reads to me like a subtle admonishment to the advocates of birth control that we are controlling ourselves out of "prosperity."

The irony of this way of thinking is that it is predicated on the interpolation or conflation of the perceived need for large families due to the low life expectancy juxtaposed with the capitalistic fantasy of endless growth for prosperity. The irony stems from the fact, as you have pointed out, that increased population does not mean increased economic growth when the wealth is siphoned off by a tiny percentage and the trajectory of the "trickle" ceases to be "down."

It is likely that, with the technology that David Brooks acknowledges, we could, indeed, feed the world and not only successfully sustain life but improve living conditions for all. This cannot occur, however, when the system designed to provide that sustenance is predicated on promoting predators and sacrificing workers to a slave-like subsistence.

Brooks laments the fertility implosion because the system he supports demands a perpetual supply of an ever cheaper and harder working labor force (i.e., the hilarious misnomer: increased productivity) who do not share in the profits that their labor creates. Adam Smith would not recognize this grotesque perversion of his theory of capitalism as distorted by the amoral and immoral elevation of greed and selfishness by the likes of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand, two unlikely but sympathetic bedfellows, whose acolytes recite snippets of their philosophies like mantras without an inkling of understanding.

In OUR TOWN, Wilder has an angry man ask Editor Webb (the play's most centered and level headed character, played, incidentally, by Ronny Cox in the excellent 1977 TV production), "“Is there no one in town aware of social injustice and industrial inequality?” To which Editor Webb replies:

"I guess we’re all huntin’ like everybody else for a way the diligent and sensible can rise to the top and the lazy and quarrelsome sink to the bottom. But it ain’t easy to find. Meantime, we do all we can to take care of those who can’t help themselves."

In the last thirty years, we have completely reversed these goals, rewarding and promoting corruption and fraud as the methodology of the quarrelsome and lazy gamers of the system while the diligent and sensible see their prospects squeezed out of them as that desire to help others is seen as a foolish weakness and unaffordable indulgence: Socialism, if you will.

My guess is that the only way to turn this delusional, self-destructive juggernaut around is by simultaneously and wholeheartedly supporting workers rights, women's rights, immigrants' rights, LGBT rights everywhere in the world, coupled with a profound respect for and aggressive protection of the environment. If we can do those "simple" things, we just might overcome this offensive glitch in the slow but inevitable evolution of freedom on this little speck of dust.

Ants, Antipathy, Antagonism, and The Vinegar Man

After sharing a brief story about feeling sorry for having to kill a fusillade of attacking ants, and then quoting a verse from “Six-Year Drought” by James McMurtry, Craig Bickhardt (Ninety-Mile Wind blog—see “My Blog List” below right) said:

“Sentimentality is wrung out of this and left to evaporate on the parched earth. McMurty’s lines are as hard and pitiless as the Texas plains, and yet they still touch something pulsating with life inside. I bet he sees his struggling ants and sheds no tears for them.

While I hold McMurtry's standard in the highest esteem and wouldn't change a word of it, I suppose I’m just a sucker. I’ve flirted with sentimentality all of my writing life, and maybe I’ve even crossed the line sometimes. The truth is it’s damn hard not to cross it if you feel any pity at all for the world.

Softer art for harder times? Probably won't fly. Yet we must feel something in order to be human. There must be emotion when it is warranted, and there is indeed a perceptible difference between emotion and sentimentality even though it sometimes takes a microscope to see it. After all, it’s our compassion that keeps the human race going, and we don’t want to lose that.

In the writing we can err both ways. On either side of the good, observant narrative there are pitfalls; effusiveness or stolidity. The line between is walked with a cold eye and a warm heart.”



©2009 by Craig Bickhardt

What follows is my comment:

Sentiment in the defense (or pursuit) of art is no vice! Okay, it can be...but I would make the distinction between pathos and bathos—between sentiment and sentimentality—between moving and manipulative. My guess is that for the clever, story-song teller, a certain kind of self-imposed restraint is necessary to prevent a powerful and moving story from becoming a maudlin mess.

Last time I shared my Gogi Grant story, this time I offer one of the earliest poems that I remember being moved by. I found it in a hard cover book of poems "for children" that my parents had bought for me when I was about seven. It had the typical Stevenson poems and those by Edward Lear and Eugene Field, but it also had poems by Thomas Augustine Daly in Italian dialect ("Two 'Mericana Men—about immigrants and stereotyping, and "Leetla' Giorgio Washington" with a clever twist on the cherry tree story) and one of my all-time favorite pieces, "The Vinegar Man" by Ruth Comfort Mitchell. I still use these pieces with my students and have done so for going on forty years.


The Vinegar Man

The crazy old Vinegar Man is dead! He never had missed a day before! 

Somebody went to his tumble-down shed by the Haunted House and forced the door.
There in the litter of his pungent pans, the murky mess of his mixing place,
Deep, sticky spiders and empty cans with the same old frown on his sour old face.

"Vinegar—Vinegar—Vinegar Man!
Face—us—and—chase—us—and—catch—if—you—can!

Pepper for a tongue! Pickle for a nose! 


Stick a pin in him and vinegar flows! 

Glare—at—us—swear—at—us—catch—if—you—can!
Ketchup—and—chow-chow—and—Vinegar Man!"




Nothing but recipes and worthless junk; greasy old records of paid and due;
But down in the depths of a battered trunk, a queer, quaint valentine torn in two.
Red hearts and arrows and silver lace, and a prim, dim, ladylike script that said,
(Oh, Vinegar Man, with the sour old face!) 
"With dearest love, from Ellen to Ned!"




"Steel—us—and—peel—us—and—drown—us—in—brine!
He pickles his heart in” a valentine! 


“Vinegar for blood! Pepper for his tongue!
Stick a pin in him and” once he was young! 


Glare—at—us—swear—at—us—catch—if—you—can!”
"With dearest love" to the Vinegar Man!

Dingy little books of profit and loss (died about Saturday, so they say),
And a queer, quaint valentine torn across…torn, but it never was thrown away! 

"With dearest love from Ellen to Ned" "Old Pepper Tongue! Pickles his heart in brine!" 

The Vinegar Man is a long time dead: he died when he tore his valentine. 




Ruth Comfort Mitchell


Yes, it verges on sentimentality, that little catch in the throat, but the wonderful juxtaposition of the older narrator recalling his own childhood voice and then merging the two into an adult recognition of a tragic life suddenly revealed (a little like Kane's "Rosebud"), stays well on the right side of the line. The complex interplay of internal and end rhyme is also masterful as are the alliteration and the parenthetical caesura (the matter of fact, "died about Saturday”) that pulls it back to the harsh reality.

When I heard Danny O'Keefe's "Valentine Pieces," from his second album, O'Keefe, It evoked a very similar feeling, except that it was written in the first person, and the hurt was more immediate:

"The valentine pieces litter the floor of my room...
I should go get the broom..."

I’d say, keep your art ever to the fore, and the sentiment will take care of itself!

PS: I got so carried away (as usual), I forgot about the ants. I think you have inspired me to make my first posting of one of my short stories on my blog. It is a cautionary tale about a man with feelings about killing ants that are very similar to yours (and whose feelings, of course, mirror my own). I'll let you know when it's posted; you might get a kick out of the "similar minds" experience.
Tim