The Top 40

Stephen Hunter has long been chock-full of pithy stuff.

Near the end of I, Sniper a character delivers himself of this one. Chewy.

The West...has been destroyed by the people it was built to protect: its women.

The West lasted from AD 732, when Charles Martel defeated the Muslims at Tours, until 1960, where it fell without a battle. In 1960, the birth control pill became widely available. Many think of it as heaven, sexual nirvana, the route to self-expression, wish fulfillment, and liberation for millions of women. I think of it as Auschwitz in a bottle. It was and is genocide, as, using it, the women of my generation happily traded off 1,200 years of unparalleled growth, wealth, security stability, scientific and ethical progress for a second BMW in the garage. The West ceased producing at a sustainable rate, while Islam continued to populate the world. You may look elsewhere for the demographics. This fact cannot be avoided: we Westerners currently may be analogized to upper-class Brits on the deck of the Titanic, April 12, 1912. My, my, why is the great ship tilting a bit? Why, dear, it's probably some minor malfunction that the handsome young men will soon fix. Meanwhile, may I have another aperitif, steward?

But not only did the pill doom the West from without by limiting population, it destroyed the culture from within by destroying the gyroscope of civilization - that is, the balance between the sexes. The sexes had existed for that glorious 1,200-year span in a kind of brilliant equipoise: men provided and protected, women nourished and nurtured. It was a sublimely efficient system, if harsh. The result was generation after generation of bold, intelligent, hardy risk takers, driven by their fathers' sense of duty but made compassionate by their mothers' mercy. They were afraid of nothing, committed to a larger thing than themselves, all united in their confident sense of destiny. The men did what they had to do, the women did what they had to do. Together, they built a thing called civilization. In all realms, from the scientific to the industrial to the aesthetic to the military to the intellectual and the medical, Western thought and culture prevailed. It was extraordinary, and it seems even now absurd that we threw it away in a single generation.

After 1960, the dominos fell quickly. Once the size of a family could be controlled, it shrank; women returned to the workplace. Soon - believe me, I am not arguing that they are "dumb" or in any way "inferior" - they were making equal or even more than the males, so male authority was challenged and, metaphorically, that leveraged and ultimately destroyed the whole concept of authority. Simultaneously, with small family size, more was invested in each of 2.4 children, so that the death of one meant a shattering emotional wastage. Soldiers could no longer died in the thousands, much less the hundreds. Without defenders, we are doomed.

How's that for something in an adventure novel?

One more Breitbart has decided to start his own Narrative. Go support Carnivale screen writer Daniel Knauf.

He,hehe...yea, Carl must have been Alfreds boomer son.

Ooops.....

That quote was taken from Dead Zero.

Thanks for the reminder. I bohgut it in July (along with Further Training, Empire Module, Rolodex, & Sniper Support) after confirming & doing research about it from Social Networking like Facebook & Youtube. As well as reading up on the Warrior Forum, & reading Websites.It works, trust me. You will not be disappointed.