The last scary book I read

was Richard Preston's The Hot Zone, about the Ebola virus.

I just got another one the other day and I'm reading it now. America Alone, by Mark Steyn. This paragraph from page 3 is a good summation of the story so far:

In the fourteenth century, the Black Death wiped out a third of the Continent's population; in the twenty-first, a larger proportion will disappear--in effect, by choice. We are living through a rare moment: the self-extinction of the civilization which, for good or ill, shaped the age we live in. One can cite examples of remote backward tribes who expire upon contact with the modern world, but for the modern world to expire in favor of the backward tribes is a turn of events future anthropologists will ponder, as we do the fall of Rome.

Perhaps I should also cite the passage in which Steyn distinguishes his own doomsaying from that of Al Gore, etc:

For Al Gore and Paul Ehrlich and Co., whatever the problem, the solution is always the same. Whether it's global cooling, global warming, or overpopulation, we need bigger government, more regulation, higher taxes, and a massive transfer of power from the citizen to some unelected self-perpetuating crisis lobby. Not only does this not solve the problem, it is, in fact, a symptom of the real problem: the torpor of the West derives in part from the annexation by government of most of the core functions of adulthood.... When the foreign policy panjandrums talk about our enemies, they distinguish between "rogue states" like Iran and North Korea and "non-state actor" like al Qaeda and Hezbollah. But those distinctions apply on the home front too. Big governments are "rogue state," out of control and lacking the wit and agility to see off the threats to our freedom. Citizens willing to be "non-state actors" are just as important and, as we saw on Flight 93, a decisive part of our defense, nimbler and more efficient than the federal behemoth. The free world's citizenry could use more non-state actors.

So this is a doomsday book with a twist: an apocalyptic scenario that can best be avoided not by more government by by less--by government returning to the citizenry the primal responsibilities it's taken from them in the modern era.

Steyn speaks my language.

On the other hand, I'm afraid he looks, at this early stage of the book, to be pushing for a big American presence abroad.

I'm willing to see if the "Surge" in Iraq works, but by "works" I mean, allows us to leave Iraq in the hands of the Iraqis, with no worse problems than we had with gangsters in Chicago during Prohibition.

Some interesting thoughts on prohibition here, btw.

And, as long as we're by the way, I bought John Stossel's Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity at the same time. It should scare me just as much, but I'm pretty inured to the picture he's painting. Actually, Stossel's main thesis is that we're too afraid of the pictures we get from The Media, so it's the antithesis of a "doomsday book."

Reading the two simultaneously will probably destroy me. If The Media report a nuclear explosion in Minneapolis in the next few days, don't suspect al Qaeda. They're too busy basking in the glorious demographic news from Steyn.