STEYN'S YEAR part four
Here's the final part of my annual stroll down memory lane: I spent most of the fall on book-plug duty, though that didn't prevent me taking time for a Ramadan break in Gitmo and a pre-election trip to the Oval Office. What was interesting (and fortuitous) was the way so many events of the year's close connected with my book's themes - demography, will and re-primitivization. Not exactly a happy ending for 2006
OCTOBER
An Australian reader wrote the other day to say he was beginning to feel as Robert Frost did in “A Minor Bird”:
I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day.
My correspondent’s incessantly cheeping bird is Islam. He’s fed up waking every morning and reading of the latest offence taken by the more excitable Mohammedans. In the most recent case, it was a ruminative disquition by the Pope on the relation between faith and reason, which needless to say the usual types took the wrong way. So, resentful at having allegedly been slandered as irrational and violent, they reacted by shooting a nun in the back.
National Review, October 2nd
The President’s view is that before it was Iraq it was Israel; with these guys, it’s always something. Sometimes it’s East Timor – which used to be the leftie cause du jour. And, riffing on the endless list of Islamist grievances, President Bush concluded with an exasperated: “If it’s not the Crusades, it’s the cartoons.” That’d make a great slogan: it encapsulates simultaneously the Islamists’ inability to move on millennium-in millennium-out, plus their propensity for instant new “root causes”, and their utter lack of proportion.
The Chicago Sun-Times, October 29th
When visitors like yours truly swing by Gitmo, the camp likes to serve them the same meal the prisoners get. This being Ramadan, Admiral Harris was particularly proud of the fresh-baked traditional pastries his team had made for the holy month. And he was right: the baklava was delicious. “Baklava” is said by some linguists to come from the Arabic for “nuts” – and, indeed, in that sense this entire war can sometimes seem like one giant baklava… It surely requires a perverse genius to have made the first terrorist detention camp to offer home-made Ramadan pastries a byword for horror and brutality.
The Chicago Sun-Times, October 1st
Norway, for example, is meant to be participating in the Afghan campaign. But, because its troops are “not sufficiently trained to take part in combat”, they haven’t done any actual fighting. However, they have been in the general vicinity of regions where fighting is ongoing so now the Norwegians have demanded a modification of their rules of non-engagement and insisted that their soldiers be moved to parts of Afghanistan where no fighting whatsoever is taking place… Norway is an all-too typical Nato “ally”: it’s willing to fight shoulder to shoulder with the Americans, as long as it doesn’t involve any actual fighting and there are two or three provinces between their shoulders and the US ones.
The Western Standard, October 9th
I’m glad General Musharraf was able to take time out of his hectic book tour to meet with President Bush at the White House. But he showed more respect for his contract with Simon & Schuster than he did for the Pakistani constitution, rolling out the book’s explosive revelations on his publicity team’s schedule with the same poise and discipline as old hands like Bob Woodward: if it’s Tuesday, it must be the disclosure that on September 12th 2001 the Bush Administration threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age”. It wouldn’t have surprised me to discover that he’d captured and executed Osama bin Laden in the spring of 2002 but that due to his book deal he wasn’t allowed to disclose it until the publication day interview with Katie Couric.
Maclean’s, October 16th
Early in the 2004 US election season, a publisher took me to lunch and pitched me a book. She wanted me to write a John Kerry election diary. Easy gig. All I had to do was follow him around and mock him mercilessly. Well, I hemmed and hawed and eventually she got the picture and said, “Okay, what would you like to write a book about?”
And so I said, “Well, I’ve got this idea for a book called ‘The End Of The World’.” And there was a pause and I could feel her metaphorically backing out of the room, and shortly thereafter she literally backed out of the room. But not before telling me, somewhat wistfully, “You know when I first started reading your stuff? Impeachment. Your column about Monica’s dress was hilarious.” She motioned to the waiter. “Check, please.” And I got the impression she was feeling like the great pop guru Don Kirshner when the Monkees came to him and said they were sick of doing this bubblegum stuff and they needed to grow as artists. My Monica’s dress column was one in which I did a mock interview with said object: the dress had entered the witness protection program, had had reconstructive surgery and was now living as a pair of curtains in Idaho. The late Nineties was a lot of fun for a columnist. A third Clinton term and I could have retired to the Virgin Islands. But I feel like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, when she tells Bogey, “I’ve put that dress away. When the Germans march out, I’ll wear it again.” I’ve put Monica’s dress away. When the Islamofascists march out, I’ll wear it again.
Maclean’s, October 9th
“At 300 million,” noted the professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California, “we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality-of-life degradation.”
I, on the other hand, was feeling pretty chipper about the birth of the cute l’il quality-of-life degrader. The previous day, my new book was published. You’ll find it in all good bookstores – it’s propping up the slightly wonky rear left leg of the front table groaning under the weight of unsold copies of Peace Mom by Cindy Sheehan. Anyway, the book – mine, not Cindy’s – deals in part with the geopolitical implications of demography – ie, birth rates. That’s an easy subject to get all dry and statistical about, so I gotta hand it to my publicist: arranging for the birth of the 300 millionth American is about as good a promotional tie-in as you could get and well worth the 75 bucks he bribed the guy at the Census Bureau.
The Chicago Sun-Times, October 22nd
Time wasn’t interviewing Willie Nelson about music but in his capacity as one of the great thinkers of the age. He recently published The Tao Of Willie, “a book covering Nelsonian philosophy”, and Time wanted to know what “the big lesson” was. You know, the secret of life and all that jazz. Here’s Mr Nelson’s answer in full:
I’ve always been the kind of guy that looks for the easy way, and it seems to me the easiest way to get through life is just to accept it and live in the moment.
Remind me to cable Darfur with that one… But the Time guys had a penetrating follow-up: “Talking about your Tao seems a long way from your Methodist roots.”
“I believe that all roads lead to the same place,” expounded Willie. “We’re taking different ways to get there, but we all end up in the same place. It’s kind of like Kinky Friedman’s statement, ‘May the God of your choice bless you.’ That’s the main thoughts that I have about life.”
Willie’s Big Thought seems to be that you don’t want to clutter your head with too many of them.
National Review, October 16th
As the Speaker I take responsibility for everything in the building. The buck stops here… That is why I directed the Clerk of the House to establish a hotline for reporting any information concerning Pages or the Page program. As of this morning, the Clerk of the House has activated the tip-line… The Page program tip line is 866-348-0481.
Dennis Hastert actually stood up in public and made that announcement. And, of course, the Democrats immediately denounced the notorious Gay Pedophile Ringleader of the House for the pitiful inadequacy of his Page tip-line: oh, sure, now he wants to set up 1-800-GAY-PAGE and invite anyone with info to use the secure log-in at www.GOPpredators.com, but where was he when the buck stopped here en route to the end-of-legislative-session communal showers? Speaker Hastert called in the FBI, the CIA, the DEA and announced an emergency bill to rename the BATF the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Pages. He declared Mark Foley’s pants a Federal disaster area. He voted a $4 billion reconstruction earmark to the Congressional page program and invited Dubai Page World in to run it. And, with every press conference designed to get himself out of the hole he’d dug at the previous press conference, the 50 per cent of Americans who pay minimal attention to politics (which, if there’s any justice, will be up to 93 per cent by now) caught Hastert floundering on the evening news and thought, “So that’s the gay pedophile, eh? Disgusting. There oughtta be a law against it.”
The Chicago Sun-Times, October 8th
To be honest, the election campaign has felt a bit like an out-of-body experience, or an out-of-body-politic experience. I’ve never been terribly partial to that Bertolt Brecht line about how it’s time to elect a new people. Nevertheless, as Donald Rumsfeld might say, you go to the polls with the electorate you have. And, if this electorate decides to anoint the Democratic Party of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Howard Dean, that’s their prerogative.
And, if that comes to pass, Republicans should at least be grown-up enough not to take refuge in what seems to be a fast metastasizing Comforting Delusion of the Month – that if the Dems do happen to take Congress, in 2008 voters will be so disgusted after two years of Speaker Pelosi et al that there’ll be a GOP landslide. I doubt it. If Democrats win even one chamber in ’06, it will position them very well for both plus the White House in ’08. Unless, of course, Des Moines is wiped out in a nuclear strike, and Nancy says this proves we need to get a really strong resolution in the Security Council, and that causes a decisive point-oh-oh-oh-oh-whatever swing to the Republicans in a tight Senate race in South Dakota and a critical House seat in Georgia.
But let’s not move on to the new Comforting Delusion of the Month too early.
National Review, October 23rd
NOVEMBER
The President had begun his remarks by saying that “we need to be on the offense all the time.” And, for those of us who agree, that’s part of the problem. “You say you need to be on the offense all the time and stay on the offense,” I began. “Isn’t the problem that the American people were solidly behind this when you went in and you toppled the Taliban, when you go in and you topple Saddam. But when it just seems to be a kind of thankless semi-colonial policing defensive operation with no end… I mean, where is the offense in this? Instead of talking to Syria, can’t Syria get some payback for sending all these guys over the border to subvert Iraq? Shouldn’t Syria be getting subverted in return?”
“Now you’re thinking,” said the President, and laughed.
Maclean’s, November 13th
To be sure, the progressives deserve credit for having refined their view of the military: not murderers and rapists, just impoverished suckers too stupid for anything other than soldiering. The left still doesn’t understand that it’s the soldier who guarantees every other profession – the defeatist New York Times journalist, the anti-American college professor, the insurgent-video-of-the-day host at CNN, the hollow preening blowhard Senator. Kerry’s gaffe isn’t about one maladroit Marie Antoinette of the Senate but a glimpse into the mindset of too many Americans.
The Chicago Sun-Times, November 5th
Well, my petard was hoist a long time ago. I said months back that the Republicans would hold both houses, and I’m stuck with that even if the polls show Rosie O’Donnell winning the Utah Senate race by a landslide. But fortunately for me the GOP will come out ahead on the night, more or less. I figure a Republican majority in the House of three-to-five seats, and the Senate not so different from what it is now, except for the loss of Lincoln Chafee’s seat. To be honest, I’m not even sure Chafee will lose, but he ought to…
If I’m wrong, of course, it will be a sobering moment: the American people will have chosen to reward a September 10th party mired in sour oppositionism and cobwebbed boomer pieties.
National Review, November 6th
There are two George W Bushes: there’s the Bush of the global media, the swaggering Texan cowboy Zionist warmongering madman; and then there’s the other Bush, the one of whom I wrote a couple of years ago, “90% of the time he’s Tony Blair with a ranch”.
In a stroke of strategic genius, both Bushes managed to get themselves defeated on November 7th. The “security moms” and all the other features of the post-9/11 landscape vanished, wearied by a war that’s dwindled down into a thankless semi-colonial policing operation with no end in sight… And with the war off the table, what’s left on the GOP bill of fare is the Tony-Blair-with-a-ranch stuff: big porked-up entitlement-crazed Federal government, blowing gazillions in health care, education and every other area… A lot of Republican voters had stuck with Bush and the GOP Congress on the war despite grave misgivings about everything else. When they soured on the war, all that was left was the everything else.
National Review, November 20th
“Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Really? It’s unclear whether that’s the case in Gaza and the Sunni Triangle. But it’s absolutely certain that it’s not the case in Berlin and Paris, Stockholm and London, Toronto and New Orleans. The story of the western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government “security”, large numbers of people vote to dump freedom – the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, seat belts and a ton of other stuff. I would welcome the President using “Freedom is the desire of every human heart” in Chicago and Dallas, and, if it catches on there, then applying it to Ramadi and Tikrit.
The Chicago Sun-Times, November 19th
Unlikely as it seems, I’ve been spending time on the US bestseller lists recently, and, as is the way, after the thrill of discovering one has reached big hit position Number Six at Amazon, one naturally wants to discover what blockbuster is preventing one rising even further. “What’s Number Five?” I asked. “Barack Obama,” said my trusty minion. “The Audacity Of Hope.” Well, I roared my head off… Mr Obama’s book title is an ingenious parodic distillation of an entire genre of political writing. I take my hat off to him. He fully deserves to whup me on the literary Hit Parade.
What’s it about? Hey, who cares? During the 1992 election, a Reagan/Bush speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, happened to remark that that year it was a choice between depression (if Republicans win) and anxiety (if Democrats win), and that “Americans would take anxiety over depression any day, because it’s the more awake state.” Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s running mate, got wind of the line and started using it on the stump. Word for word. Except for one word. He changed “anxiety” to “hope”. “Politicians kill me,” said Miss Noonan.
Maclean’s, November 20th
Bond, James Bond. Contemplating the cover of The Man Who Saved Britain, you’re struck by the apparent ingenuity of Simon Winder’s concept: it is weird, when you think about it, that the great enduring iconic figure of the Cold War, the very embodiment of the espionage profession, should be a Brit. The country was, after all, pretty peripheral in the vanquishing of Communism, and indeed at the height of the Soviet threat was lapsing into a grim Brezhnevite decay of its own. And even the dolly birds were more honored in the breach: if Kim Philby and co are anything to go by, Her Majesty’s Secret Service inclined more toward Plenty O’Toole than Pussy Galore.
And yet, if one were to say the words “secret agent” to almost anyone within range of western popular culture this last half-century, he or she would conjure a suave Englishman (mostly played by Scotsmen, Welshmen, Irishmen and Australians) ordering martinis and shagging his way around the world on behalf of a nation all but shagged out.
The Wall Street Journal, November 24th
Plugging my new book in the Great Satan in recent weeks, I’ve taken to dropping by the local Borders or Barnes & Noble just to check the thing’s in stock. And praise the Lord (if Rosie will forgive the expression) you can usually find it in there somewhere, though you have to wade past a huge front-table display of tomes about the imminent Christianist takeover of America: The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege by Damon Linker, Kingdom Coming: The Rise Of Christian Nationalism by Michelle Goldberg, American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips… Damon Linker’s book is the funniest, albeit unintentionally. “Theocons” are like neocons, only not Jewish but sinister Catholics with a well advanced plan to conscript American conservatism for a political project that will transform the nation beyond recognition. They were the ones who spotted George W Bush as the perfect stooge for their Christianist coup and then surrounded him with Jews to confuse the media. Oh, sure, go ahead laugh.
Maclean’s, November 27th
“How many members of the Episcopal Church are there?”
“About 2.2 million,” replied the Presiding Bishop. “It used to be larger percentage-wise, but Episcopalians tend to be better educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than other denominations.”
This was a bit of a jaw-dropper even for a New York Times hackette, so, with vague memories of God saying something about going forth and multiplying floating around the back of her head, a bewildered Deborah Solomon said: “Episcopalians aren’t interested in replenishing their ranks by having children?”
“No,” agreed Bishop Kate. “It’s probably the opposite. We encourage people to pay attention to the stewardship of the earth and not use more than their portion…”
Even in their vigorous embrace of gay bishoprics and all the rest, I don’t recall the Episcopalians formally embracing the strategy that worked out so swell for the Shakers and enshrining a disapproval of reproduction at the heart of their doctrine. Here’s the question for Bishop Kate: if Fatima Omar has 41 grandchildren and a responsible “better educated” Episcopalian has one or two, into whose hands are we delivering “the stewardship of the earth”? If your crowd isn’t around in any numbers, how much influence can they have in shaping the future?
The Chicago Sun-Times, November 26th
The epitaph they’ll chisel on Europe’s grave was delivered with characteristic insouciance the other day by the writer Oscar van den Boogaard in an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr van den Boogaard is a Dutch gay atheist, which is more or less the triple jackpot in the Euro-lottery. But alas, contemplating the remorseless Islamization of the Continent, the great man can do no more than give a fatalistic shrug and surrender to the inevitable. “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he told his interviewer. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”
That’s the western world’s problem in a nutshell.
The Western Standard, November 20th
Another monument: the Arizona 9/11 Memorial. It is a remarkable sight. Five years after the slaughter of thousands of Americans, one had long ago given up all hope that the nation might rouse itself to erect, as James Lileks put it at National Review Online, “a classical memorial in the plaza with allegorical figures representing Sorrow and Resolve, and a fountain watched over by stern stone eagles”. But, even so, the Arizona memorial is an almost parodic exercise in civilizational self-loathing, festooned in slogans that read like a brainstorming session for a Daily Kos publicity campaign: “You don’t win battles of terrorism with more battles.” “Foreign-born Americans afraid.” “Erroneous US airstrike kills 46 Uruzgan civilians.” And this is the official state memorial. Governor Napolitano called it “great” and “honorable”. It isn’t. It’s small and contemptible. Assuming it survives, future generations will stand before it and marvel – either that the United States is still around or that such an obviously deranged country even needed an enemy to lose to.
National Review, November 6th
DECEMBER
So there you have it: an Iraq “Support Group” that brings together the Arab League, the European Union, Iran, Russia, China and the UN. And with support like that who needs lack of support?
The Chicago Sun-Times, December 10th
Speaking softly – as in State Department-softly – is fine if you’re carrying the big stick. But, when your big stick is a snapped-off twig, it makes less sense. In a way, you’ve already spoken volumes. There are differences within the “Talks Now!” faction, from outright defeatists to those who figure a weak hand is better played round the poker table than in a fist fight. But for the most part “realism” is a euphemism for inertia. And too many “realists” have already accepted a nuclear North Korea, a nuclear Iran, a resurgent neo-totalitarian Russia, a reSyrianized Lebanon, a perceived American defeat in Iraq. The talks would be merely the signing ceremony.
National Review, December 4th
I happened to be down in Mexico the other day in one of those “resort towns” you vaguely remember as a slightly developed fishing village only to return and find it’s a sprawling fume-choked metropolis of 800,000 people; and, wandering around, I couldn’t help thinking that if the jihad was looking for a smart investment it would dump a whole load of Saudi-Iranian walking-around money south of the Rio Grande and try to turn maybe 5 % of Mexico’s population Muslim, just to add another wrinkle to America’s southern immigration problem.
The Western Standard, December 18th
You gotta love these alternative theories for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the late “Russian dissident” (and there’s a phrase one hadn’t expected to make a comeback quite so soon). Relax, say the Kremlinologists (and there’s another), it wasn’t Putin who had the guy whacked. It was rogue elements within the state apparatus who gained access to supposedly secure facilities and then contaminated five international jets and dozens of joints all over London in order to pull off the world’s first radiological assassination.
Oh, well, that’s okay then. Nothing to worry about…
The Litvinenko murder is only the first of many stories in which Islam, nuclear materials and Russian decline will intersect in novel ways.
National Review, December 18th
There is a direct line between those French emissaries in Russia and Germany blaming Bolshevism and Nazism on “Talmudic atavism” and Daniel Bernard, M Chirac’s ambassador to the Court of St James’s, announcing airily at a London dinner party in 2001 that the problems of the world can be laid at the door of “that shitty little country” Israel. From “Talmudic atavism” to “shitty little country” may mark a deterioration in Gallic rhetorical élan but at least its prejudices remain inviolable.
If you had vaguely assumed that the now routine comparisons of Israelis to Nazis derived from an antipathy to Ariel Sharon or the post-1967 transformation of the Zionist Entity from plucky embattled underdog to all-conquering military behemoth, it’s sobering to be reminded that the French were doing the Israelis-are-the-new-Nazis shtick within ten minutes of the end of the Second World War. Jews, wrote the consul-general Rene Neuville, in a lengthy cable from Jerusalem in 1947, are “racist through and through… quite as much as their German persecutors”. The dispatches of Pierre Landy, French consul in Haifa, rely heavily on “the Israeli Gestapo” and similar formulations. In public the political class was usually more circumspect, though not always. President de Gaulle famously raged at a press conference that the Jews were “an elite people, self-assured and domineering” with “a burning ambition for conquest”. In the ensuing controversy, M le President assured the Chief Rabbi that he’d meant it as a compliment.
Maclean’s, December 18th
Everyone who knows Rabbi Bogomilsky says he’s an affable fellow, he doesn’t want to Scrooge up anybody’s Christmas, he’s an all-around swell guy. No doubt. But in the week when the President of Iran hosts an international (and well-attended) Holocaust Denial Convention (which simultaneously denies the last Holocaust while gleefully anticipating the next one), this rabbi thinks it’s in the interests of the Jewish people to take legal action against “holiday” decorations at Seattle Airport? Sorry, it’s not the airport but the plaintiff who’s out of his tree. An ability to prioritize is an indispensable quality of adulthood, and a sense of proportion is a crucial ingredient of a mature society.
The Chicago Sun-Times, December 17th
Consider this passage from the Inspector General’s official report on the Sandypants and his destruction of classified materials from the national archives:
Mr Berger exited the Archives on to Pennsylvania Avenue, the north entrance. It was dark. He did not want to run the risk of bringing the documents back in the building risking the possibility [redacted] might notice something unusual. He headed towards a construction area on Ninth Street. Mr Berger looked up and down the street, up into the windows of the Archives and the DOJ, and did not see anyone. He removed the documents from his pockets, folded the notes in a ‘V’ shape and inserted the documents in the center. He walked inside the construction fence and slid the documents under a trailer.
Why is this man getting his security clearance back in 2008?
The Chicago Sun-Times, December 31st
When I was in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, shortly after the war, a young boy showed me his schoolbook. It was like my textbooks at his age - full of doodles and squiggles and amusing additions to the illustrations. With one exception: the many pages bearing pictures of Saddam were in pristine condition. Even a bored schoolboy doesn't get so careless that he forgets where not to draw the line… When a dictator has exercised the total control over his subjects that Saddam did, his hold on them can only end with his death.
SteynOnline, December 29th
It has been strange to see my pals on the right approach Iraq as a matter of inventory and personnel. Many call for more troops to be sent to Baghdad, others say the US armed forces overall are too small and overstretched. Look, America is responsible for 40% of the planet’s military spending: it spends more money on its armed forces than the next 43 biggest militaries combined, from China, Britain and France all the way down the military-spending hit parade to Montenegro and Angola. Yet it’s not big enough to see off an insurgency confined to a 30-mile radius of a desert capital?
It’s not the planes, the tanks, the men, the body armor. It’s the political will. You can have the best car in town, but it won’t go anywhere if you don’t put your foot on the pedal.
The Chicago Sun-Times, December 3rd
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America Alone:
The End Of The World As We Know It
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