The Undocumented Mark Steyn Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by Mark Steyn

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Steyn, Mark.

  The undocumented Mark Steyn : don’t say you weren’t warned / Mark Steyn.

  pages cm

  Summary: “He’s brash, brilliant, and drawn to controversy like a moth to a flame. Mark Steyn is America’s most brutally honest columnist, ready to sound off on every hot issue in the news-and always ready to ruffle feathers. Prepare to be shocked and entertained by this curated compendium of Steyn’s most provocative, hilarious, and thought-provoking columns”-- Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-1-62157-319-7 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PN4913.S766A25 2014

  814’.54--dc23

  2014032955

  Published in the United States by

  Regnery Publishing

  A Salem Communications Company

  300 New Jersey Ave NW

  Washington, DC 20001

  www.Regnery.com

  Distributed to the trade by

  Perseus Distribution

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  New York, NY 10107

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  Books are available in quantity for promotional or premium use. For information on discounts and terms, please visit our website: www.Regnery.com.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Me and My Little Black Dress

  I: UP, DOWN, OVER AND OUT

  Viagra Nation

  Decaffeinated

  Unsung Songs

  Oh, Say, Can You See?

  II: SPIRITS OF THE AGE

  Life Class

  E Pluribus Composite

  Sheet Music

  Did the Earth Summit Move for You?

  The Media’s Maternal Instincts

  Living Large

  III: THE REPUBLIC OF MANNERS

  Potpourri Roasting on an Open Fire

  Last Dance

  We’ve Figured It Out

  The Audacity of Grope

  In the Absence of Guns

  Arms Are for Dining

  IV: THE BUREAU OF COMPLIANCE

  Signs of the Times

  Carried to Extremes

  Illegally Admiring the King’s Deer

  Ninjas vs. Turtles

  The Butt Stops Here

  V: HOMELAND SECURITY

  Priorities

  Choc and Awe

  The All-Seeing Nanny

  The Paramilitarized Bureaucracy

  VI: THE STORIES WE TELL

  Meeting Mr. Bond

  Boy, Meats, Girl

  Look Where Your Stories Have Landed You

  Cover Story

  When Harry Met Hillary

  VII: IMPERIAL ECHOES

  Keeping It

  Queer Theory

  Son of Empire

  The People’s Queen

  Celebrity Caesar

  The Footstools of Camelot

  VIII: SEPTEMBER 12

  History’s Calling Card

  The Brutal Afghan Winter

  The Brutal Cuban Winter

  The Limits

  Too Big to Win

  Drone Alone

  A National Disgrace

  The Man at the Border

  IX: THE WAR ON WOMEN

  My Sharia Amour

  Barbie in a Burqa

  How Unclean Was My Valley

  X: MYSTIC CHORDS

  Sounds of the Rude World

  Decoration Day

  Say, It Ain’t So Joe

  Happy Birthday, Mister Bob

  We Aren’t the World

  The Parliament of Euro-Man

  Changing His Tune

  Changing His Words

  Moon River and Me

  XI: AFTER WORK

  The Aristorockracy

  The Waste of People

  A Town with Pity

  The Post-Work Economy

  Tribal America

  XII: BIRTH OF TOMORROW

  Post-Modern Family

  Only the Clonely

  Stork Report

  The Right to Choose

  How Weird How Soon?

  XIII: CURTAINS

  Double Act

  Croc of Gold

  Every Dog Should Have His Day

  The Seventy-Year Itch

  XIV: LAST LAUGHS

  Joking Aside

  The Pinkshirts

  Little Stasi-on-Avon

  “There Is No More Molly”

  The Unsafe Space

  XV: LENGTHENED SHADOWS

  Footsteps in the Desert

  Sex at Sunset

  A Stroll at Twilight

  XVI: AGAINST THE GRAIN

  Dutch Courage

  The Uncowardly Lioness

  The Reformation of Manners

  POSTSCRIPT: EVERYONE’S A CRITIC

  Throwaway Line

  My Favorite Wahhabi

  Of All the Gin Joints in All the Towns in All the World

  Laying It on the Line

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  ME AND MY LITTLE BLACK DRESS

  A DECADE OR SO back, early in the 2004 presidential 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 replied, “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 Lewinsky’s dress was hilarious.” She motioned to the waiter. “Check, please!” And I got the distinct 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 appeared in Britain’s Daily Telegraph in 1998, although it was, in fact, datelined two decades later—August 22, 2018:

  She is older now, her once dazzling looks undeniably faded, her famous beauty worn and creased.

  “Sorry about that,” she says. “I was supposed to get ironed yesterday.”

  Yes, it’s “that dress”—the dress that, 20 years ago this month, held the fate of a presidency in her lap. It has been two decades since the day she gave her dramatic testimony to the grand jury and then promptly disappeared into the federal witness protection program. Even as she recalls her brief moment in the spotlight, she looks drawn. But that’s because, following extensive reconstructive surgery, she’s been living quietly as a pair of curtains in Idaho.

  “What do you think?” she says, saucily brushing her hem against the sill as her pleats ripple across the mullions. “It cost less than Paula Jones’ nose job.”

  To be honest, I was lucky to get the interview. The dress was supposed to be doing the BBC—the full sob-sister treatment, Martin Bashir, the works—but, to protect her identity, they wanted to do that undercover secret-location protect-your-identity trick with the camera t
hat makes part of the screen go all fuzzy and blurry.

  “Are you crazy?” she yelled at them. “It’ll look like I’ve still got the stain.”

  The Nineties were a lot of fun for a columnist. A third Clinton term and I could have retired to the Caribbean. But then came the new century and the new war, and I felt like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca when she tells Bogey, “I put that dress away. When the Germans march out, I’ll wear it again.” I put Monica’s dress away. When the jihadists march out, I’ll wear it again.

  My apocalyptic tome came out in 2006 (courtesy of the publisher of the book you’re holding right now) as America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It—jihad, demographic decline, the death of Europe, all the fun stuff. I followed it with After America: Get Ready for Armageddon—debt, doom, decadence, societal meltdown, total civilizational collapse, all the even more fun stuff. I don’t know whether the Monkees in their serious-artist phase ever felt it might be nice to sing “Daydream Believer” occasionally, but, after a decade of apocalyptic despair, I’ve found myself passing the closet and eyeing Monica’s dress wistfully. All jihad and no play can get to you after a while, so, in the interests of a balanced diet, what follows runs the gamut from Clinton’s boxer shorts to Barbie’s burqa.

  The old artistic trade-off—“Do you want it good or do you want it Friday?”—doesn’t really apply to jobbing columnists: Your editors want it Friday. Good is an extra. But if you’re lucky, a few of them hold up over the decades—not because you were aiming to say anything profound, but because in that snapshot of whatever was happening that particular Friday you alighted upon a small close-up that illuminates the big picture: The story of Deena Gilbey’s post-9/11 torments by the federal bureaucracy that facilitated the murder of her husband is still a perfect encapsulation of the near suicidal stupidity of America’s immigration regime. The coverage of the Million Mom March is a textbook case of the U.S. media’s willingness to serve as the court eunuchs of the Democratic Party. The new federally-mandated street signs in Barre, Vermont, explain why this country is the Brokest Nation in History. Over the years, I’ve written on a lot of different subjects: I was “Musical Theatre Correspondent” for The Independent in London, and obituarist for The Atlantic over here. And I’ve included a bit of movie criticism, literary disquisition, musical analysis, showbiz arcana, mostly, as above, for the larger truths they exemplify.

  There are politicians here, of course, although both Clinton, staggering pantless through American feminists’ defense of him, and Obama, running on biography but one full of entirely invented friends and family, seem more interesting to me as cultural phenomena. Sadly, there’s still no “John Kerry election diary,” although not because I didn’t enjoy valuable “face time” with the great man during his campaign for the White House. In 2003, I was at a campaign event in Haverhill, New Hampshire (for more on Haverhill, see this book’s postscript), chatting with two plaid-clad old-timers:

  The Senator approached and stopped in front of us. The etiquette in primary season is that the candidate defers to the cranky Granite Staters’ churlish indifference to status and initiates the conversation: “Hi, I’m John Kerry. Good to see ya. Cold enough for ya? How ’bout them Sox?” Etc. Instead, Senator Kerry just stood there nose to nose, staring at us with an inscrutable Botoxicated semi-glare on his face. After an eternity, an aide stepped out from behind him and said, “The Senator needs you to move.”

  “Well, why couldn’t he have said that?” muttered one of the old coots.

  Why indeed? But then again—from another campaign stop, a year later, at the popular burger emporium Wendy’s:

  Teresa Heinz Kerry pointed to the picture of the bowl of chili above the clerk’s head: “What’s that?” she asked. He explained that it was something called “chili,” and she said she’d like to try a bowl. The Senator also ordered a Frosty, a chocolate dessert. They toyed with them after a fashion and then got back on the bus. . . . He may not enjoy eating at Wendy’s, but his faux lunch order captures the essence of his crowd-working style: chili and Frosty. If I were the Wendy’s marketing director, I’d make it the John Kerry Special from now through Election Day.

  Nothing wrong with that. But I feel like Bob Hope must have felt flipping through his best Coolidge jokes during the Dukakis campaign. As I write, people keep asking me whom I favor for the nomination in 2016. Well, as a resident of a New Hampshire township with more than thirty-seven people, I don’t have to seek out presidential candidates; they’re there at the inn and the general store and the diner and the Grange. And, over the period covered by this book, I’ve seen enough next-presidents-of-the-United-States for several lifetimes: Phil Gramm, Pete Wilson, Bob Dornan, Bob Dole, Elizabeth Dole, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, Lamar Alexander, Tom Tancredo, Tommy Thompson, Alan Keyes. . . .

  Would it have made any difference to the country had any of these fine upstanding fellows prevailed? Or would we be pretty much where we are anyway? Aside from a trade agreement here, a federal regulation there, I’d plump for the latter. You can’t have conservative government in a liberal culture, and that’s the position the Republican Party is in. After the last election, I said that the billion dollars spent by the Romney campaign on robocalls and TV ads and all the rest had been entirely wasted, and the Electoral College breakdown would have been pretty much what it was if they’d just tossed the dough into the Potomac and let it float out to sea. But imagine the use all that money and time could have been put to out there in the wider world.

  Liberals expend tremendous effort changing the culture. Conservatives expend tremendous effort changing elected officials every other November—and then are surprised that it doesn’t make much difference. Culture trumps politics—which is why, once the question’s been settled culturally, conservatives are reduced to playing catch-up, twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why gay marriage is really conservative after all, or why thirty million unskilled immigrants with a majority of births out of wedlock are “natural allies” of the Republican Party.

  We’re told that the presidency is important because the head guy gets to appoint, if he’s lucky, a couple of Supreme Court judges. But they’re playing catch-up to the culture, too. In 1986, in a concurrence to a majority opinion, the Chief Justice of the United States declared that “there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy.” A blink of an eye, and his successors are discovering fundamental rights to commit homosexual marriage. What happened in between? Jurisprudentially, nothing: Everything Chief Justice Burger said back in the Eighties—about Common Law, Blackstone’s “crime against nature,” “the legislative authority of the State”—still applies. Except it doesn’t. Because the culture—from school guidance counselors to sitcom characters to Oscar hosts—moved on, and so even America’s Regency of Jurists was obliged to get with the beat. Because to say today what the Chief Justice of the United States said twenty-eight years ago would be to render oneself unfit for public office—not merely as Chief Justice but as CEO of a private company, or host of a cable home-remodeling show, or dog-catcher in Dead Moose Junction.

  What politician of left or right championed gay marriage? Bill Clinton? No, he signed the now notoriously “homophobic” Defense of Marriage Act. Barack Obama? Gay-wise, he took longer to come out than Ricky Martin. The only major politician to elbow his way to the front of the gay bandwagon was Britain’s David Cameron, who used same-sex marriage as a Sister-Souljah-on-steroids moment to signal to London’s chattering classes that, notwithstanding his membership of the unfortunately named “Conservative Party,” on everything that mattered he was one of them.

  But, in Britain as in America, the political class was simply playing catch-up to the culture. Even in the squishiest Continental “social democracy,” once every four or five years you can persuade the electorate to go out and vote for a conservative party. But if you want them to vote for conservative government you have to do the hard work of shifting the culture every day, s
even days a week, in the four-and-a-half years between elections. If the culture’s liberal, if the schools are liberal, if the churches are liberal, if the hip, groovy business elite is liberal, if the guys who make the movies and the pop songs are liberal, then electing a guy with an “R” after his name isn’t going to make a lot of difference. Nor should it. In free societies, politics is the art of the possible. In the 729 days between elections, the left is very good at making its causes so possible that in American politics almost anything of consequence is now impossible, from enforcing immigration law to controlling spending.

  What will we be playing catch-up to in another twenty-eight years? Not so long ago, I might have suggested transsexual rights. But, barely pausing to celebrate their victory on gay marriage, the identity-group enforcers have gone full steam ahead on transgender issues. Once upon a time there were but two sexes. Now Facebook offers its 1.2 billion patrons the opportunity to select their preference from dozens of “genders”: “male” and “female” are still on the drop-down menu, just about, but lost amid fifty shades of gay—“androgynous,” “bi-gender,” “intersex,” “cisfemale,” “trans*man,” “gender fluid”. . . .

  Oh, you can laugh. But none of the people who matter in American culture are laughing. They take it all perfectly seriously. Supreme Intergalactic Arbiter Anthony Kennedy wields more power over Americans than George III did, but in a year or three he’ll be playing catch-up and striking down laws because of their “improper animus” and wish to “demean” and “humiliate” persons of gender fluidity. Having done an impressive job of demolishing the basic societal building block of the family, the ambitious liberal is now moving on to demolishing the basic biological building block of the sexes. Indeed, taken in tandem with the ever greater dominance of women at America’s least worst colleges and, at the other end of the social scale, the bleak, dispiriting permanence of the “he-cession,” in twenty-eight years’ time we may be fairly well advanced toward the de facto abolition of man, at least in the manly sense. That seems to me at least as interesting a question as whether the Republicans can take the Senate with a pick-up in this or that swing state. Culture is the long view; politics is the here and now. Yet in America vast cultural changes occur in nothing flat, while, under our sclerotic political institutions, men elected to two-year terms of office announce ambitious plans to balance the budget a decade after their terms end. Here, again, liberals show a greater understanding of where the action is.