Sunday, February 19, 2012

Too Many to Choose From

Today's Quote of the Day comes from Victor Davis Hansons's Works and Days column The New Commandments on the Barn Wall. There are too many to choose from in that short, pithy, depressing piece, but I'm going with this one:
8) Neanderthals need nerds. The cool gang banger who is knifed on Saturday night suddenly in extremis worships the surgeon who stiches up his liver and kidneys — a target whom he would otherwise have robbed earlier that Saturday afternoon. The thug who strips the copper wire from our streetlights nonetheless assumes a nerdish engineer will keep designing the wiring scheme that runs his car’s CD. For the good life to go on, each illiterate punk demands one corresponding graduate student at MIT to take care of him. When the former outnumber the latter, then civilization usually winds down.
"The worst thing about living in the declining era of a great civilization...is knowing that you are." - R.A. Heinlein

1 comment:

Temnota said...

The Sons of Mary always outnumber the Sons of Martha, but Kipling's engineers were simply unappreciated, not actively pursued by zombies.

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.