...I'm okay with being REALITY-based.




Monday, May 02, 2005
      ( 4:36 PM )
 
David Brooks: Seer of Chaos

I just read David Brooks' column from April 28 - which was just in our local paper today. He warns about the collapse of society in Russia because of its years of dictatorship. The people are left leaderless and without personal discipline or social structure and things are going to get bad. Fast. It's even worse with China.

On the surface, China looks much more impressive than Russia. But this is a country that will be living with the consequences of totalitarianism for some time. Thanks to the one-child policy, there will be hundreds of millions of elderly people without families to support them. Thanks to that same policy, and the cultural predilection for boys, there will be tens of millions of surplus single men floating around with no marital prospects, no civilizing influences, nothing to prevent them from assembling into violent criminal bands.

Criminal bands of Chinese men! Aaaahhh!! Run!

Brooks' social critique of other nations soon to be chaos in the streets with men running wild in violent bands of criminal elements seems to discount American society and the problems we face with immiment national bankruptcy, the collapse of a health care system people can use, and the loss of thousands of jobs and income. China's threat to us isn't random gangs of hormonal single men, it's the fact that China could try to cash in our debt and literally OWN us if it wanted to. Not to mention the fact that it can buy up oil and steel supplies faster than we can negotiate for them. Priorities, Mr. Brooks? Nah - it's easier to focus on the irrelevant fantasies of conservative denial.

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