PRO-DEATH REPUBLICAN. It's rare indeed (or should I say "heh indeed") when I admit a debt of gratitude to the Ole Perfesser over t' the U of Tenn. But one of his posts has alerted me to an entertaining character named Clayton Cramer.

The Perfesser, it seems, had written a TCS piece about his desire to have his life extended to infinity and beyond via government-funded research -- said moneys to be taken, one imagines, from boondoggles like Workmen's Compensation. But let us move on -- the Perfesser's own lunacy is a tired subject.

Cramer argues that life is not worth extending. Now, this is a defensible position based on an understanding of human nature. But Cramer doesn't want a shorter life on valid Motorhead "Ace of Spades" grounds ("That's the way I like it baby/I don't want to live forever") -- he wants it because kids today are having all kinds of deviant sex, probably because they can't easily buy guns, thanks to "smart, arrogant, and immoral" judges. And it's only going to get worse:

When I was growing up, there was drug abuse. There were orgies and other forms of casual sex, where people were just used, and feelings got hurt. But that was largely high school and college, not junior high and upper grades of elementary school. I am not sure that I want to live another hundred years, and see the evil that will become the norm.

Perhaps Cramer would be less exercised if the target demographic for orgies were trending older rather than younger. But that seems unlikely. Note the world-weariness of his opening remarks:

When I was 23, I got married. We drove away from the church in our 1979 Pontiac Grand Am for our honeymoon... It is 24 years later, and I am still married to that same woman. Life was fresh and new, full of optimism and hopes.

As you get older, your high hopes and ambitions inevitably collapse around you. The wonders of travel turn into a series of disappointments. Your high hopes for your children come crashing down, especially when you discover the moral ugliness of the culture in which you are raising them.

That paragraph break seems awkward, and I like to think that, in an early draft, two sentences in Cramer's middle section were inverted:

Life was fresh and new, full of optimism and hopes. It is 24 years later, and I am still married to that same woman. As you get older, your high hopes and ambitions inevitably collapse around you.

Doesn't that sound more natural? Then Cramer weeps over the tedium of having to work for a living:

The job that you enjoyed at 23, and 25, and even 28, by 35 or 40 has lost its luster. You do it because you need the money to pay your bills.

People working to make money to live! Forbid it, almighty God! Yet the thought of changing jobs also terrifies Cramer: "Imagine having to do a career change 30 or 40 times over a lifetime! No thank you!" Actually, that's called the New Economy, or the Old Poverty, and millions of us are stuck in it. Maybe we should all just kill ourselves. Between the orgies and the careers, what's left for us?

How did I miss this guy before?