The 'Earth First!' Candidate vs. the 'Birth First' Candidate

(A Satire, with apologies to Jonathan Swift)

Thank Heaven. Really. I hope we all understand by now that it can only be the Almighty, acting through his modern-day Messenger on earth, Rick “Sanctus” Santorum, who has rescued us from what was becoming a far-too-complex and esoteric campaign debate about Big Government versus Small Government and shifted the focus back to where it belongs. Back to people. To a choice between the people candidate and the anti-people candidate. Santorum versus Obama. Let no one claim any longer that they can't  understand the stakes of this presidential campaign.

And for this moment of clarity we  must also thank Rick Santorum himself. Deploying the brilliant intellect that led Senate staffers in 2006 to vote him “no rocket scientist” (he came in second after Jim Bunning, whose brilliance was entirely limited to his pitching arm)-- a mind that Santorum has used impressively, day after day, to wrench the annoying complexities of the real world into an unchanging and consistent ideology (check out, most recently, his masterful condemnation of all government bailouts) – he has criticized Obama for a “phony theology” that “elevates the earth above man.” We had long suspected this to be true of our profoundly inhumane and un-American president, of course. Even back in Chicago, when Obama was a community organizer, it was said that he favored inner-city buildings over their occupants. As president Obama has opted for banks over borrowers, the health care system over the insured, and of course government before individuals. Anti-people through and through.

Rick Santorum, by contrast, is all about supporting people. Grownup people. Unborn people. It doesn't matter. We want them all here with us, as many of them as we can muster, to assume their rightful dominion over the earth and its animals. After all, it says so right in Genesis (or chapter one of the Santorum campaign platform). He has opposed amniocentesis and prenatal testing as mere precursors to abortion. One of Santorum's supporters, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, expanded on Santorum's remarks today by denouncing China's one-child policy as immoral, saying that Beijing needs to let more people be born so they can come up with "creative ideas." 

Make no mistake: This is an election between the "Earth First!" candidate and the "Birth First!" candidate.

There's just one sticky problem with this inspiringly pro-people view, a minor detail that I'm sure we can easily address. There are already a lot more people than our high-tech, increasingly automated and robotized world economy can employ. We have a couple generations of "left-behinds" who can't find work. and now that there are computers that can score better than most of humanity on IQ tests, it's going to get tougher. As the New York Times noted recently, quoting a study by researchers at MIT, "automation is rapidly moving beyond factories to jobs in call centers, marketing and sales — parts of the services sector, which provides most jobs in the economy." That is one reason why even as corporate spending on equipment and software has increased 26 percent since the end of the recession, payrolls have remained flat. Even jobs as simple as truck driving aren't safe any longer, the Times says: Google recently announced it has developed robot-driven cars that have logged thousands of miles on American roads "with only an occasional assist from human back-seat drivers." Even our new drone-heavy military--traditionally a place to offload our many young people without job prospects or education--is going to need fewer of them. 

So if we're going to have a lot more people under a Santorum presidency, we need to figure out what to do with them. As a devout (there is no other word for it) Santorum supporter, I have done considerable research on this question of how to take care of all these people whom we love and treasure. At first, I wondered whether we could adapt Jonathan Swift's ingenious  "Modest Proposal" for ending the problem of overpopulation and food shortages in Ireland in the 18th century.  As Swift wrote, with the same sort of brilliant simplicity that our very own Rick applies to hard issues, why not solve both problems with one solution? "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London," Swift wrote, "that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled."   

There is a lot to this idea, even today. After all, if people are so loveable, they must be tasty too. But, let's be practical: culinary tastes have moved on since then, and there might be some moral quibbles about such a solution in our very advanced, modern world. (Rick might not like it either.) So I would like to offer my own Modest Proposal. We don't have enough jobs, the islands of the world are all inhabited already, and yet it wouldn't do to have all these unoccupied new people flooding our cities, causing traffic jams and crime waves.

What if, instead, we gathered all these wonderful excess people in one place, so they could all be together, and those of us who are lucky enough to still have jobs wouldn't have to worry about them? I seem to recall  solutions like that in the past, which worked quite well for a time and were described by their designers as very pro-people, or at least humane. I think they were called concentration camps. Hmm. Rick, Tony and I will have to look into that further and get back to you...