This multicultural squeamishness is most instructive. Illegal immigrants are providing a model for survival in an impoverished statist America, and on the whole the state is happy to let them do so. In Undocumented America, the buildings have no building codes, the sales have no sales tax, your identity card gives no clue as to your real identity. In the years ahead, for many poor Overdocumented-Americans, living in the Shadowlands will offer if not the prospect of escape then at least temporary relief. As America loses its technological edge and the present Chinese cyber-probing gets disseminated to the Wikileaks types, the blips on the computer screen representing your checking and savings accounts will become more vulnerable. After yet another brutal attack, your local branch never reconnects to head office; it brings up from the vault the old First National Bank of Deadsville shingle and starts issuing fewer cards and more checkbooks. And then fewer checkbooks and more cash. In small bills.

The planet is dividing into two extremes: an advanced world—Europe, North America, Australia—in which privacy is vanishing and the state will soon be able to monitor you every second of the day; and a reprimitivizing world—Somalia, the Pakistani tribal lands—where no one has a clue what’s going on. Undocumented America is giving us a lesson in how Waziristan and CCTV London can inhabit the same real estate, like overlapping area codes. There will be many takers for that in the years ahead. As Documented America fails, poor whites, poor blacks, and many others will find it easier to assimilate with Undocumented America, and retreat into the shadows.

It will not merely be states and sub-state jurisdictions that secede, but individuals, too.

COUGAR TOWN

In 2003, Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev got together for an all-star recording of Prokofiev’s beloved children’s classic, Peter and the Wolf.⁹⁷ In the original, Peter and his friend the duck are out frolicking in the meadow when the slavering wolf shows up and embarks on his reign of terror. He gulps down the duck as his hors d’oeuvre, and has the cat lined up to follow.

But fortunately, Peter gets hold of a rope and uses it as a noose with which to muzzle the wolf and take him into captivity.

In the Clinton version, you won’t be surprised to hear, Peter realizes the error of his lupophobia and releases the creature back into the wild. The wolf howls a friendly goodbye. Which is jolly sporting of him when you consider that it’s all our fault in the first place. “Forgetting his triumph, Peter thought instead of fallen trees, parched meadows, choked streams, and of each and every wolf struggling for survival,” narrates our Bill, addressing the root causes and feeling the wolf’s pain. “The time has come to leave wolves in peace.”

How about the duck? Is she left in peace? Or in pieces?

Do you recall the weeks before September 11, 2001? On the Eastern Seaboard, it was the summer of shark attacks. Jessie Arbogast, an eight-year-old lad from Pensacola, Florida, had his arm ripped off, but his quick-witted uncle wrestled the predator back to shore, killed him, and retrieved the chewed-up limb from his jaws. The New York Times, in an eerie aquatic pre-echo of the left’s reaction to 9/11, came down on the side of the shark: “Many people now understand that an incident like the Arbogast attack is not the result of malevolence or a taste for human blood on the shark’s part,” explained the Times editorial. “What it should really do is remind us yet again how much we have to learn about them and their waters.”⁹⁸

Why do they hate us? (Underwater version.)

There is a fairly recent journalistic genre, specimens of which now turn up on the news pages with numbing regularity. A cougar kills a dog near the home of Frances Frost in Canmore, Alberta.⁹⁹ Miss Frost, an “environmentalist dancer” with impeccable pro-cougar credentials, objects strenuously to suggestions that the predator be tracked and put down. A month later, she’s killed in broad daylight by a cougar who’s been methodically stalking her.

“I can’t believe it happened,” wailed a fellow environmentalist. But why not? Cougars prey on species they’re not afraid of. So, if they’ve no reason to be afraid of man, they might as well eat him. He’s a lot easier to catch than a deer. Taylor Mitchell, a singer-songwriter, was killed by coyotes in Cape Breton National Park in Nova Scotia.¹⁰⁰ “It’s hard to understand why this may be happening,” said Derek Quann, a resource conservation manager, after a second attack. “We don’t think there’s been a significant increase in the population. There could be a larger problem in the ecosystem at play.”

That was his coy way of suggesting that coyotes are losing their traditional fear of man, and with it their tendency to stay out of his way.