After America полностью

And, come to think of it, isn’t it unreasonable to expect 30-year-olds who’ve been sexually active since sixth grade to assume responsibility for their sexual activity? As the Washington Post reported: High school students and college-age adults have been complaining to District officials that the free condoms the city has been offering are not of good enough quality and are too small and that getting them from school nurses is “just like asking grandma or auntie.”

So DC officials have decided to stock up on Trojan condoms, including the company’s super-size Magnum variety, and they have begun to authorize teachers or counselors, pref-erably male, to distribute condoms to students if the teachers complete a 30-minute online training course called “WrapMC”—for Master of Condoms.

“If people get what they don’t want, they are just going to trash them,” said T. Squalls, 30, who attends the University of the District of Columbia. “So why not spend a few extra dollars and get what people want?”⁹⁵

That last paragraph deserves to be chiseled on the tombstone of the Republic. As April Gavaza, the blogger Hyacinth Girl, responded: “Hey, T., why don’t you spend a few extra dollars and buy your own, jackass?”⁹⁶

Fair enough. Why should T. Squalls, thirty, bill D.C. taxpayers for his sex life? Thirty is so old you’re not even eligible for Obama’s child health-care coverage. Thirty is what less evolved societies used to call “early middle age.”

Why is Washington Post chairman Donald Graham (to pluck a D.C. householder at random) buying condoms for 30-year-old men he doesn’t know?

Because that’s Big Government for you: you start a free-condom program for sexually active fourth graders, and next thing you know elderly swingers in the twelfth year of Social Construct Studies want in. The D.C. condompalooza is a perfect example of progressive thinking’s malign paradox: it both destroys childhood and infantilizes adulthood, leaving a big chunk of the populace as eternal teenagers.

What was it the hippies said? Never trust anybody over thirty? Advice to D.C. women: Never trust anybody over thirty who expects the government to buy his condoms.

As the recession hit, the Los Angeles Times ran a profile on a hip new social phenomenon: “funemployment.”⁹⁷ They had good jobs, great pay, and then they lost them. But if you’re not married and your parents have kept your old bedroom open, what’s the diff? Two of the funemployed, Andy Deemer, thirty-six, and Amanda Rounsaville, thirty-four, connected through Facebook and took off in search of Asian mystics. They visited a fortuneteller in Burma, a tarot card reader in Thailand, some Saffron Revolution monks on the border, and, after spending ten days tracking her down, a reindeer-herding shaman in Mongolia.

Only the last advised them to “go back to work.”

Whoa! Heavy, man! But maybe they went off to Bhutan to get a second opinion from a shaman-herding reindeer.

In the Sixties, privileged youth used to go off to find themselves in the year before college. Now they go off to find themselves when they’re pushing forty. They seek the company of reindeer-herders at the age previous generations sought the company of Elks Lodgers.

“They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their thirties and forties, and even fifties, clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies,” writes Adam Sternbergh in New York. “It’s about a brave new world whose citizens are radically rethinking what it means to be a grown-up and whether being a grown-up still requires, you know, actually growing up.”

I think we know the answer to that.

For H. G. Wells’ late Victorian traveler, what was most striking about the Eloi was how they had evolved beyond sex: I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb…. In all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike….

Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force; where population is balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure, there is less necessity—indeed there is no necessity—for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children’s needs disappears.