David Brooks in Xanadu's Pleasure Dome

David Brooks was up late last night. Tearing through a chest of drawers, he finds Samuel, a brown tub of industrial glue. He cannot suppress the facial tick and good God, why is there so much blood drying beneath his finger nails? The moon is bright and David is thirsty and aroused. The back of his head itches but, of course, it has become a sun-bleached melon. In the distance, a clap of thunder rattles the synapses of his brain. A can of tuna sits alone on the floor, sinister and conspiring. David is called to the hyperventalating typewriter:

What would happen if a freak solar event sterilized the people on the half of the earth that happened to be facing the sun.

Sniff. Sniff. The beetles are getting rowdy again. They've always underestimated David's abilities.

Some people might try to perpetuate their society by recruiting people from the fertile half of the earth. But that wouldn’t work. Immigration is the painful process of leaving behind one culture and way of living so that your children and children’s children can enjoy a different future. No one would be willing to undertake that traumatic process in order to move from a society that was reproducing to a society that was fading. There wouldn’t be the generations required to assimilate immigrants. A sterile culture could not thrive and, thus, could not inspire assimilation.

And then the horizon explodes. David sobs uncontrolably and throws away his condescending umbrella, but god dammit, they've thought of everything; gravity has been turned back on just to spite him.

But no, it is just the rising sun. The jittering slows and the all the furniture resume their former positions. David protectively clutches his genitals but in his heart of hearts, he knows that everything is going to be alright.

But, of course, that’s the beauty of this odd question. There are no sterilizing sunspots. Instead, we are blessed with the disciplining power of our posterity. We rely on this strong, invisible and unacknowledged force — these millions of unborn people we will never meet but who give us the gift of our way of life.

David puts on the kettle and returns to the living room. Sighing contentedly, he settles back into his recliner and lights his pipe. "Ah, to depart on occasion from the quotidian frim-fram of political machinations," he muses contentedly. "The Philosophe is truly the soul of the representative democratic system." And then, beckoned by the whistle, David returns to the kitchen for his Earl Grey while contemplating a reasonable moderation on the abortion debate.