The Monster and the Nursery

Wonderful article at Tech Central Station: bq. Monsters, like leftists, don't reproduce naturally. Ordinary uncontraceived heterosexual relations do not create little vampires and zombies. Monsters perpetuate themselves through blasphemous acts, like assembling dead body parts into human form, or sharing ancient curses through biting. Indeed, much of the pathos inherent in horror movies and fiction springs from the parasitic manner in which monsters absorb non-monsters into their unholy fold. It's bad when George Romero's zombies rise from the dead to eat you, but when their bites transform your friends and your wife and, eventually, you into a zombie � that's scary. And Dracula is just a weirdo with a fang fetish until his nocturnal prowlings turn your fianc�e into the Bloofer Lady. Deformation is creepier than plain ol' death. Douglas amplifies this a bit and then gets to the heart of the matter: bq. By now, it's a right-wing pundit clich� to point out that birth rates on the Left are plummeting rapidly. Over in flawlessly liberal Europe, the non-Arab population treats childbearing the way the Atkins diet treats carbohydrates. Here in the states, the reproduction rates among the Religious Right - and in the red states generally - greatly outpace the reproduction rates of our over-educated latte-sipping superiors. But in one-man one-vote democracies, small populations either discard their political power, or discard democracy. bq. Moreover, history teaches us that children are the most successful way to ensure that your cultural and ideological preferences survive after you depart. Eventually, the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers will die, and their preferences for big government and laissez-faire social morality will die with them. If, in 50 years, the home-schooled and Sunday-schooled outnumber the boarding schooled and Ivy Leagued, who can doubt that conservatism will own the future? bq. What's a non-reproducing leftie to do? Discarding leftism is out. Having more � ick � children � with their stinky diapers and expensive college educations and drain on the world's limited resources and whiny tantrums right in the middle of All Things Considered � is out, too. So the Left is, er, left with two options for ensuring the survival of their ideology: the Bride of Frankenstein option and the Dracula option. A bit more: bq. The Bride of Frankenstein option is immigration. By importing hordes of proto-citizens unassimilated into the prevailing culture, the Left hopes to create an overclass of ethnic leaders dependent on affirmative action and government jobs to maintain their mandarin status. bq. The problem, of course, is that the Bride of Frankenstein reviles the monster it was created to marry. The Europeans are learning to their horror that their Arab immigrants detest and revile the socially liberal ideology that their presence permits. Similarly, the American left is discovering that most blacks and Hispanics want no part of the radically heterodox morality that leftist intellectuals promulgate. Whereas the left wants to reform (or, in the extreme, abolish) bourgeois middle-class American morality, most American minorities want to embrace that morality more fully. As the '60s generation of minority leaders passes away, a new, independent-minded, and conservative-friendly generation of leaders is coming to take their place. And this new generation of leaders will not be bought off as easily as their parents were. And the other option -- what was it again... bq. The remaining option is the Dracula option: the hijacking of little red-state kids through academia and the mass media. It's the lament of conservatives since time out of mind, and it's the plot of Tom Wolfe's latest novel: every year, conservative families spend outrageous sums in order to send their smartest, most capable children to elite colleges, wherein radical leftists brainwash them into newly-minted blue-staters. And the less-capable red-state kids hear the siren call of leftist values every time they flip the "on" switch on the idiot box. Prime-time television and the network news highlight the glamour and appeal of liberal places, beliefs, and lifestyles, while conservative values are either ridiculed ("dumb old Dad"), reviled ("The priest did it? The businessman was corrupt? Who'd've guessed?"), dismissed ("We at CBS News stand by our story"), or ignored (insert any aspect of religious life here). The old song is still mostly true: How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen a TV show about Paree? bq. In the movies and in the book, Dracula dies when a stake is driven through his heart. Sadly, we won't be staking Harvard or CBS anytime soon. But there's another way to kill a vampire: starve him. Without fresh blood, vampires wither into irrelevance. At the beginning of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Dracula was weak and enfeebled for want of fresh blood. Keep the fresh blood away, and the vampire ceases to be a problem. I'm just cherry-picking some choice bits -- read it for the full blast.