STEYN'S YEAR part two
Here's the second part of my annual stroll down memory lane: the point in the year, I'd say with hindsight, when a significant sliver of the Republican coalition began to wonder just what it was getting for its biennial loyalty in the voting booths. "Immigration" - ie, illegal immigration - was in the headlines in the US. In the rest of the English-speaking world, we were celebrating the Queen's 80th birthday and the first Canadian Prime Minister anyone's ever wanted to decapitate: uneasy lies the head that lies below the head that wears the crown. But in the spring a young man's fancy turns to love of country, and language, and in April I was struck by the Democrats' and media's ever more frantic use of a transparently phony Thomas Jefferson quote:
Mitch Albom of The Detroit Free Press thundered:
We need to stop slicing this country in half, and saying those who support this act or this politician are ‘good’ Americans, and the rest are not. Sometimes ‘dissent is the highest form of patriotism.’ I didn’t make that up. Thomas Jefferson did.
Er, no. You made up that he made it up…
It’s truer to say that these days patriotism is the highest form of dissent – against a culture where the media award each other Pulitzers for damaging national security, and the only way a soldier’s mom can become a household name is if she’s a Bush-is-the-real-terrorist kook like Cindy Sheehan, and our grade schools’ claims to teach our children about America “warts and all” has dwindled down into teaching them all the warts and nothing else. Or as The Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin concluded its ringing editorial on the subject:
Thomas Jefferson got it right: ‘Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.’ And teaching children how to be thoughtful and effective dissenters is the highest form of education.
Teaching them authentic Jefferson quotes would be a better approach.
The Chicago Sun-Times, April 30th
Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, gave a typical western government official’s speech the other day explaining that “a large number of Muslims in this country were – understandably – upset by those cartoons being reprinted across Europe and at their deeply held beliefs being insulted. They expressed their hurt and outrage but did so in a way which epitomized the learned, peaceful religion of Islam.”
“The learned, peaceful religion of Islam”? And that would be the guys marching through London with placards reading “BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM” and “FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IS WESTERN TERRORISM” and promising to rain down a new Holocaust on Europe..? At a basic level the Foreign Secretary’s rhetoric does not match reality. Government leaders are essentially telling their citizens: who ya gonna believe – my platitudinous speechwriters or your lyin’ eyes?
The Chicago Sun-Times, April 2nd
You know what’s great fun to do if you’re on, say, a flight from Chicago to New York and you’re getting a little bored? Why not play being President Ahmadinejad? Stand up and yell in a loud voice, “I’ve got a bomb!” Next thing you know the air marshal will be telling people, “It’s okay, folks. Nothing to worry about. He hasn’t got a bomb.” And then the second marshal would say, “And even if he did have a bomb it’s highly unlikely he’d ever use it.” And then you threaten to kill the two Jews in row 12 and the stewardess says, “Relax, everyone. That’s just a harmless rhetorical flourish.” And then a group of passengers in rows four to seven point out, “Yes, but it’s entirely reasonable of him to have a bomb given the threatening behavior of the marshals and the cabin crew.”
The Chicago Sun-Times, April 16th
Two books have just hit the shelves - While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying The West From Within by Bruce Bawer, and Menace In Europe: Why The Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too by Claire Berlinski… Neither is a xenophobic yahoo: Miss Berlinski “divides her time” – as the book jackets say – between Paris and Instanbul; she has a doctorate in international relations from Oxford. Bawer is a homosexual who moved to the Continent because he was weary of the theocratic oppressiveness of redneck America and wanted to live his life in the gay utopia of the Netherlands. Alas, when he got there he found the gay scene had gone belly up and, theocratic oppressor-wise, Pat Robertson has nothing on some of the livelier Amsterdam madrassahs… Bruce Bawer is reluctant to give up on the idea that a bisexual pothead hedonist utopia is a viable concept rather than, as it’s proving in the Netherlands, a mere novelty interlude; his book might have been better called While Europe Slept Around.
Maclean’s, April 10th
The broad reality is that Americans provide their foreign aid privately and Canadians and Europeans leave it to the state, just as Americans provide their health care privately and Canadians and Europeans leave it to the state. Americans get no credit for this because in transnational-speak there is literally no way to express it. By transnational definition, “aid” is statist: only governments can do it. So, in the international league tables, no matter how generous Americans are their form of generosity is, by definition, inadmissible. Indeed, as Mr Egeland sees it, “aid” is defined exclusively as cheques made payable to his office.
This is a remarkable state of affairs. The UN and other transnational agencies were mostly designed by America at the dawn of the American era and continue to be funded principally by America to this day. Yet they’re such an explicit rejection of American values that their language can’t even embrace such routine American activities as private philanthropy.
The Western Standard, April 22nd
Here’s my immigration “compromise”: We need to regularize the situation of the 298 million non-undocumented residents of the United States. Right now, we get a lousy deal compared to the 15 million fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community. I think the 298 million of us in the overdocumented segment of the population should get the chance to be undocumented. You know when President Bush talks about all those undocumented people “living in the shadows”? Doesn’t that sound kinda nice? Living in the shadows, no government agencies harassing you for taxes and numbers and paperwork.
The Chicago Sun-Times, April 9th
If The New York Times and ABC and Knight-Ridder are the equivalent of the Wal-Marts and Home Depots, they’re getting picked off five, ten, a hundred customers at a time by a gazillion mom’n’pop outfits – the Drudge Report, Powerline, realclearpolitics.com and a myriad of other Internet wallahs. Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, was one of the first of the big-time bloggers – or, as we old-media bores say, “bloggers”. He hung out his shingle in the summer of 2001 as Instapundit. By September 10th, he had some 1,600 readers a day. On September 11th, it tripled, and in the weeks after that it soared. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world now dial him up first thing in the morning and throughout the day. That’s a lot fewer than, say, the seven million viewers who tune in the “CBS Evening News”. But, on the other hand, Professor Reynolds’ overheads are less than the budget for Dan Rather’s hairdresser. Hurricane Dan recently retired, of course, and his successor Bob Schieffer is more modestly coiffed, but it will take more economies than that to negate my point: a guy with a laptop and some friendly e-mailers from Hollywood to Afghanistan can pull an audience a tenth of the size of a mega-global news operation located in a big skyscraper in New York full of thousands of employees with lavish benefits.
Maclean’s, April 3rd
Looking at those Lizzie-with-the-laughing-face photos of Robin Nunn’s 80th birthday Royal pictorial souvenir reminds me of one Queenly volume I’d be interested to see: We Are Amused: The Royal Sense Of Humour. I’m especially fond, in our over-celebrified culture, of her hilariously subversive attitude to alleged cultural icons. Last year, the Queen found herself in a room full of legendary rock guitarists, and hadn’t a clue who they were. Introduced to Eric Clapton, she politely enquired, “Have you been playing a long time?” Passing on to Led Zeppellin’s Jimmy Page, the monarch asked, “And are you a guitarist, too?”
Magnificent. The increasingly desperate Hollywood should sign her to host the Oscars: “Ladies and gentleman, to present the Award for Best Sound Editing in a Documentary Short please welcome George Clooney! Don’t tell me you’re another one of these actors, Mr Clooney!”
Maclean’s, April 24th
MAY
I don’t expect Republicans to shred the tax code and reform social security within one term. But as the decades roll on I would like them at least to pay lip service to the notional goal of so doing. And I would admire their restraint if they could desist from adding one more disastrous short-sighted pseudo-reform to reform last year’s disastrous short-sighted pseudo-reform, as they’re now doing with their campaign-finance-reform reform. And, if that’s not possible, I would appreciate it if at the very very minimum Trent and Arlen and co could stop sounding like Presidents-for-Life of the one-party state of Incumbistan.
National Review, May 1st
By some counts, up to five per cent of the US population is now “undocumented”. Why? In part because American business is so over-regulated that there is a compelling economic logic to the employment of illegals. In essence, a chunk of the American economy has seceded from the Union. But, even if you succeeded in re-annexing it, a large-scale “guest worker” class entirely drawn from one particular demographic has been a recipe for disaster everywhere it’s been tried… Pointing out that America has a young fast-growing Hispanic population and an aging non-Hispanic population, The Washington Post’s Bob Samuelson wrote that “we face a future of unnecessarily heightened political and economic conflict”.
The key words are “unnecessarily heightened”. In Europe, the political class sowed the seeds of massive social upheaval for the most short-sighted of reasons. If America’s political class wants to do the same, it could at least have the integrity to discuss the issue in honest terms.
The Chicago Sun-Times, May 21st
As a subject of Her Britannic Majesty, I hate to keep walloping you guys over the head with my imperialist pith helmet. But, because you were short-sighted enough a century ago to disdain nation-building in Mexico, Mexico is now nation-building in America. President Fox has every incentive to keep outsourcing what would otherwise be his domestic instability north of the border – and thus any illegal immigration deal the Mexican government goes along with will be, almost by definition, not in America’s interest…
The President's position implicitly delegitimizes the basic notion that a state has the right to determine which non-citizens shall cross its borders. In practical terms, the Bush view concedes that the southern border is the American version of the Pakistani tribal areas, a land where the state's de jure sovereignty can only ever be honored in the breach. And, beyond that, it communicates the same lack of will we rightly bemoan from the Europeans vis a vis the Islamists.
National Review, May 15th
Racked by cancer, Oriana Fallaci spends most of her time in one of the few jurisdictions in the western world where she is not in legal jeopardy - New York City, whence she pens magnificent screeds in the hope of rousing Europe to save itself. Good luck with that. She writes in Italian, of course, but she translates them herself into what she calls “the oddities of Fallaci’s English”, and the result is a bravura improvised aria, impassioned and somewhat unpredictable. It’s full of facts, starting with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when Mehmet II celebrated with beheading and sodomizing, and some lucky lads found themselves on the receiving end of both… Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam – for example, Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Blue Book” and its helpful advice on romantic matters: “If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer.” I’ll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.” Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way.
Maclean’s, May 1st
The American Prospect’s Mark Leon Goldberg penned an almost comically agonized piece fretting over the circumstances in which he’d be prepared to support a Bush intervention in Darfur: Who needs the Janjaweed when you’re prepared to torture your own arguments the way Goldberg does? He gets to the penultimate paragraph and he’s still saying stuff like this:
The question, of course, is whether the United Statesseeks Security Council support to legitimize such airstrikes…
Well, no, that’s not the question. If you think the case for intervention in Darfur depends on whether or not the Chinese guy raises his hand, sorry, you’re not being serious. The good people of Darfur have been entrusted to the “legitimacy” of the UN for over two years and it’s killing them.
The Australian, May 5th
I’m a strong believer in privacy rights. I don’t see why Americans are obligated to give the government their bank account details and the holdings therein. Other revenue agencies in other free societies don’t require that level of disclosure. But, given that the people of the United States are apparently entirely cool with that, it’s hard to see why lists of phone numbers (ie, your monthly statement) with no identifying information attached to them is of such a vastly different order of magnitude. By definition, “connecting the dots” involves getting to see the dots in the first place.
Senator Pat Leahy feels differently. “Look at this headline,” huffed the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “The secret collection of phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. Now, are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaeda?”
No. But next time he’s flying from DC to Burlington, Vermont on a Friday afternoon he might look at the security line: Tens of millions of Americans are having to take their coats and shoes off! Are you telling me that tens of millions of ordinary shoe-wearing Americans are involved with al-Qaeda?
The Chicago Sun-Times, May 14th
Three years ago, the Bush Administration at least believed in its compassionate crusaderism; any action in Iran will start out far more tentative. As for the wilier types in the Middle East, they’ve figured that if they can just run out the clock on the 43rd Presidency whoever’s next will shove the Bush Doctrine in the bottom of the filing cabinet and be glad to get back to “stability”.
National Review, May 29th
Four years ago, The Economist ran a cover story on the winner of the Brazilian election, the socialist leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. It was an event of great hemispherical significance. Hence the headline: “The Meaning Of Lula”.
The following week, a Canadian reader, Asif Niazi, wrote to the magazine: “Sir, ‘The meaning of Lula’ in Urdu is penis.”
No doubt. An awful lot of geopolitics gets lost in translation… Hence, Russo-Chinese support for every troublemaker on the planet, from Iran’s kooky President to Chavismo in America’s backyard. The meaning of Chavez in just about any language is “opportunity”.
Maclean’s, May 15th
Europeans want an answer to the question: What will save us from the hell of a second American century? Answer: China. No-one can stop the rise of the Chinese behemoth, but fortunately Jacques Chirac has volunteered the wise old European Union to serve as Greece to Beijing’s Rome, and together they will rule the world. It’s not entirely clear what the EU brings to the table in this deal. Nonetheless, in Britain’s Guardian, Martin Jacques was panting orgasmically for 2050, when China will bestride the planet and America will be a wheezing lardbutt unable to rouse itself from its rusted-up E-Z-Boy Recliner. Jacques’ reasoning rests on the fact that the Chinese are an “ancient civilization” whereas America is a mere “settler society”, which sounds awfully like the line the Germans used to take when they compared their ancient volk with America’s “half-degenerated sub-race” (as Kant put it). Or the argument of French philosophers such as Cornelius de Pauw that Americans were physically “stunted” and “in a fight, the weakest European could crush them with ease”. Two centuries later, Europeans still believe America’s stunted sub-race can be crushed with ease, but they’d rather leave the actual crushing to Johnny Chinaman while they hold his coat and coo appreciatively from the sidelines.
Maclean’s, May 29th
If you’re a conservative government in a profoundly unconservative culture, you can’t just follow the approval numbers. If you do, you’ll wind up like Frau Merkel, winning approval only for abandoning your beliefs. Anyone can be liked for being likeable. What counts for conservatives is whether they still like you when you’re being conservative.
The Western Standard, May 20th
Take the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert. Last week, something very unusual happened: There was a story out of Washington that didn’t reflect badly on the Republican Party’s competence or self-discipline. It was about a Democrat! Fellow from Louisiana called William Jefferson. Corruption investigation. Don’t worry, if you’re too distracted by “American Idol”, it’s not hard to follow, you just need to know one little visual image: according to an FBI affidavit, this Democrat Congressman was caught on video taking a hundred grand bribe from a government informer and then storing it in his freezer. That’s what the scandal’s supposed to be: Democrat Icecapades Of 2006. All the GOP had to do was keep out of the way and let Jefferson and his Dem defenders skate across the thin ice like Tonya Harding with her lumpy tights full of used twenties. It was a perfect story: No Republicans need be harmed in the making of this scandal.
So what does Hastert do? He and the House Republican leadership intervene in the case on behalf of the Democrat: They’re strenuously objecting to the FBI having the appalling lese majeste to go to court, obtain a warrant and search Jefferson’s office. In constitutional terms, they claim it violates the separation of powers. In political terms, they’re climbing right into the Frigidaire with Jefferson’s crisp chilled billfold. What does the Republican base’s despair with Congress boil down to? That the Gingrich revolutionaries have turned into the pampered potentates of pre-1994 Washington, a remote insulated arrogant elite interested only in protecting the privileges of the permanent governing class. But how best to confirm it? Hmm. What about if we send the Republican Speaker out to argue that Congressmen are beyond the jurisdiction of US law-enforcement agencies?
After all, the GOP's 1994 Contract with America stated pretty plainly that henceforth “all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress.”
But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?
The Chicago Sun-Times, May 28th
JUNE
If you’re one of the ever swelling numbers of molting hawks among the media, the political class and the American people for whom Haditha is the final straw, that’s not a sign of your belated moral integrity but of your fundamental unseriousness. Anyone who supports the launching of a war should be clear-sighted enough to know that, when the troops go in, a few of them will kill civilians, bomb schools, torture prisoners. It happens in every war in human history, even the good ones. Individual Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians did bad things in World War Two, and World War One. These aren’t stunning surprises, they’re inevitable: it might be a bombed mosque or a gunned down pregnant woman or a slaughtered wedding party, but it will certainly be something. And, in the scales of history, it makes no difference to the justice of the cause and the need for victory.
The Chicago Sun-Times, June 4th
Their fury with Joe Lieberman suggests a corrosion that goes far deeper than mere Bush Derangement Syndrome. The Democrats may be prepared to go along with some Clintonian pseudo-warmongering – the desultory lobbing of a few Cruise missiles at Slobodan or that Sudanese aspirin factory – but, when it comes to the projection of hard power in the national interest, the left cannot get past Vietnam. Indeed, the reaction to Peter Beinart’s ringing call for a reassertion of “liberal internationalism” – ringing in the sense that nobody’s picking up – confirms that even his quaintly dated Eurocentric September 10th ineffectually respectable multilateralism has few takers among today’s left.
The Chicago Sun-Times, June 18th
When Abu Musab al Zarqawi winds up pushing up daisycutters, the media don’t go to Paul Bigley, who rejoiced that the man who decapitated his brother would now “rot in hell”, nor the splendid Aussie Douglas Wood, who called his kidnappers “arseholes”, nor his fellow hostage Ulf Hjertstrom, a Swede who’s invested 50,000 bucks or so in trying to track down the men who kidnapped him and visit a little reciprocal justice on them. No, instead, the media rush to get the reaction of Michael Berg, who thinks Bush is “the real terrorist” rather than the man who beheaded his son.
Maclean’s, June 26th
The Deputy Secretary General’s speech was an artful one, arguing that, in a world where “new national security challenges basically thumb their noses at old notions of national sovereignty”, the USneeds the UN. On closer inspection, what he means is that the UN needs the US– to supply money, troops, money, equipment, money, technology and money. In a complicated world, the USisn’t big enough to go it alone, but it is big enough to give everything it’s got to the UN, and in return the UN will hold meetings explaining why the UScan’t go it alone or with anyone else…
Forget Darfur, and Iraq and Iran. We’re all men of the world here, we can all understand why certain powers might feel it was in their interest to be pro-Saddam or pro-genocide or pro-nuking Israel. Instead, take an issue on which the permanent members of the Security Council were in perfect harmony: the tsunami. Even the French aren’t pro-tsunami. And yet Mark Malloch Brown’s permanent 24/7 lavishly funded humanitarian bureaucracy was useless. The only actual relief effort – you know, saving lives, restoring the water supply, providing shelter – was done by the US, Australia and a handful of others.
National Review, June 26th
A few weeks ago, le Conseil de la Souverainete du Quebec produced a new study guide for school children, Parlons de souverainete a l'ecole. Naturally, it was published with financial assistance from the federal government. But, that aside, have you ever heard such a sad excuse for a nationalist movement? As to the suggestion that this sort of propaganda is inappropriate for schools, the author Robert Cadotte compares his study guide with sex education pamphlets. Brushing off the controversy, he says, “It was the same reaction when condom machines were introduced in high schools in 1991.”
There’s another history-making moment: Has any other secessionist movement ever compared itself to a condom dispenser? Has M Cadotte thought this one through? If sovereignty is a condom, that would make Quebec a penis? And the Pequiste prophylactic enables Quebec to enjoy continued relations with Canada without picking up anything nasty? As a separatist, M Cadotte believes in practicing safe sep.?
If Quebec separatism were a condom, it would be easy to discard, to judge from the Sunday morning detritus around some of the seedier stretches of St Catherine Street. But unfortunately the fact that Quebec secession is never actually consummated became the central dynamic in Canadian politics: other countries have to cope with separatist movements; Canada has to cope with a never-quite-separating separatist movement.
The Western Standard, June 4th
I believe the old definition of a nanosecond was the gap between a New York traffic light changing to green and the first honk of a driver behind you. Today, the definition of a nanosecond is the gap between a western terrorist incident and the press release of a Muslim lobby group warning of an impending outbreak of Islamophobia. After the London Tube bombings, Angus Jung sent the Aussie pundit Tim Blair a note-perfect parody of the typical newspaper headline:
British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.
Maclean’s, June 19th
The Great Ontario Terror Plot sounds like the kind of ingenious fancy a gifted satirist might concoct… The plotters planned to kidnap Canadian bigshots and behead them? Why bother? Judging from their reactions, much of the Canuck establishment have already parted company from their heads, or at any rate their brains. It would surely be superfluous formally to decapitate, say, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair when, with his cervical vertebrae still apparently intact, his principal reaction to the arrests was to brag about how scrupulously PC the press conference was: “I would remind you that there was not one single reference made by law enforcement to Muslims or Muslim community.”
Hey, that’s grand, isn’t it? I mean, the great thing about these terrorist plots is that they give us even more opportunities to demonstrate how impeccably multicultural we are. You know how it goes: Eight guys called Mohammed and three called Ahmed fly a plane into the Alfonso Gagliano Centre for Quebec Grant Application Studies and the RCMP commissioner can’t wait to say, “These men come from the broadest strata of Canadian society, stretching from young men with full beards to young men with slightly trimmer beards. So there’s no obvious link between them. We’ve got nothing to go on. There are no leads. But we’re pulling in a redneck Albertan, a Ukrainian, an Inuit and two gays for the line-up. There are eight million stories in the naked city and we intend to hear all of them. No sense narrowing it down too quickly.”
The Western Standard, June 18th
Last week John Kerry revealed his plan to “redeploy” US forces from Iraq. This plan is different from fellow Defeaticrat Jack Murtha’s plan to “redeploy” US forces from Iraq to Okinawa, which Congressman Murtha seems to think is in the general neighborhood of Iraq. Iraq’s in the Middle East, Okinawa’s in the Far East: c’mon, how far can it be to get from the Far to the Middle? After all, the distance between the farthest fringe of the kook left and the center of the Democratic Party seems to be closing up every week.
Anyway, Senator Kerry doesn't want to waste time "redeploying" to Okinawa. When America “redeploys”, it’s not going to take a connecting flight via Japan and risk its luggage getting “redeployed” to Bratislava. No, sir, in John Kerry’s America, we “redeploy” non-stop, straight back to Main Street in time for the Redeployment Day parade.
You gotta hand it to these guys: “redeployment” is ingenious. I’ll bet the focus-group consultants were delirious: “surrender”, “lose”, “scram”, “scuttle ignominiously”, “head for the hills” all polled poorly, but “redeploy” surveyed well with all parts of the base, except the base in Okinawa, where they preferred “sayonara” - that’s “redeploy” in any language. The Defeaticrats have a clear message for the American people. Read da ploy: no new quagmires.
This is the most artful example of Leftspeak since they came up with “undocumented immigrant”. In fact, if it catches on, I’ll bet millions of fine upstanding members of the Undocumented-American community now start referring to themselves as Redeployed Mexicans.
The only teensy-weensy problem is this: If America ever adopts the Kerry plan, the Murtha plan or some variation thereof, does anyone think al-Jazeera, the BBC, Le Monde, Der Spiegel et al will be using the word “redeploy” in their headlines? Or will they use a word closer to what’s actually going on?
The Chicago Sun-Times, June 25th
For part one, click here. For part three, click here. For part four, click here.
Hot off the presses!
Mark's new book
Mark's new book
America Alone:
The End Of The World As We Know It
To order your autographed copy,
click here