Mark Steyn's Blog, page 27

Brothers' Day

Last year at NRO I wrote: "The short 90-year history of independent Egypt is that it got worse" -- and was about to get "worse still." Eighty years ago, Egypt was ruled by a ramshackle, free-ish monarchy in mimicry of the Westminster system; forty years ago, it was under the control of authoritarian, secular pan-Arab nationalists; and now the Muslim Brotherhood guy has won the election.

But don't worry, on the day Mubarak stepped down, America's director of national intelligence, who presides over the most lavishly funded intelligence bureaucracy on the planet, was telling the world that the Muslim Brotherhood is "largely secular." So that's okay.

The linked clip of me and Megyn Kelly aired an hour or so after Mubarak's resignation, and is the same interview in which I said this was the dawn of the post-Western Middle East. "Experts" can get a lot of things wrong, but rarely on the scale of the Western media in February 2011, even as they were on the sharp end of the "Facebook Revolution":

Within minutes of Mubarak's resignation, the CBS reporter Lara Logan, covering events in Tahrir Square, was set upon by a 200-strong mob who stripped her, punched her, beat her with flagpoles, and subjected her to a half-hour sexual assault by multiple participants while shouting "Jew! Jew!..."

What's striking about this story is not so much that her own employer, CBS News, chose not to run it until over three days later - on the following Monday - but that in the intervening period they pumped out the same sappy drivel as everybody else -- "Egypt's New Age Revolution" (60 Minutes), "Egypt Proved Change Is Possible, Sexy And Cool!" (CBS Sunday Morning) - even as they knew there was another side to the story, and that their own correspondent was lying in the hospital traumatised because of it.

We can't do anything about the disposition of the Egyptian electorate, but we could at least stop deluding ourselves. Mubarak, according to various reports, is in a coma, or "clinically dead," or near death. Let's suppose the "Facebook Revolution" had never happened, and he'd continued ruling until stricken by ill health a year or so later. Does anyone suppose his successor would have been any worse than the Brotherhood/military carve-up Egypt's wound up with?

Or, as CBS would put it, any less "sexy and cool"?

Obama’s Great American Novel

Courtesy of David Maraniss’s new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”

David Maraniss is no right-winger, and can’t understand why boorish non-literary types have seized on his book as evidence that the president of the United States is a Grade A phony. “It is a legitimate question about where the line is in memoir,” he told Soledad O’Brien on CNN. My Oxford dictionary defines “memoir” as “an historical account or biography written from personal knowledge.” And if Obama doesn’t have “personal knowledge” of his tortured grandfather, war-hero step-grandfather, and racially obsessed theater-buff girlfriend, who does? But in recent years, the Left has turned the fake memoir into one of the most prestigious literary genres: Oprah’s Book Club recommended James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, hailed by Bret Easton Ellis as a “heartbreaking memoir” of “poetic honesty,” but subsequently revealed to be heavy on the “poetic” and rather light on the “honesty.” The “heartbreaking memoir” of a drug-addled street punk who got tossed in the slammer after brawling with cops while high on crack with his narco-hooker girlfriend proved to be the work of some suburban Pat Boone type with a couple of parking tickets. (I exaggerate, but not as much as he did.)

#ad#Oprah was also smitten by The Education of Little Tree, the heartwarmingly honest memoir of a Cherokee childhood which turned out to be concocted by a former Klansman whose only previous notable literary work was George Wallace’s “Segregation Forever” speech. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood is a heartbreakingly honest, poetically searing, searingly painful, painfully honest, etc. account of Binjamin Wilkomirski’s unimaginably horrific boyhood in the Jewish ghetto of Riga and the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. After his memoir won America’s respected National Jewish Book Award, Mr. Wilkomirski was inevitably discovered to have been born in Switzerland and spent the war in a prosperous neighborhood of Zurich being raised by a nice middle-class couple.  He certainly had a deprived childhood, at least from the point of view of a literary agent pitching a memoir to a major publisher. But the “unimaginable” horror of his book turned out to be all too easily imagined. Fake memoirs have won the Nobel Peace Prize and are taught at Ivy League schools to the scions of middle-class families who take on six figure debts for the privilege (I, Rigoberta Menchú). They’re handed out by the Pentagon to senior officers embarking on a tour of Afghanistan (Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea) on the entirely reasonable grounds that a complete fantasy could hardly be less credible than current NATO strategy.

In such a world, it was surely only a matter of time before a fake memoirist got elected as president of the United States. Indeed, the aforementioned Rigoberta Menchú ran as a candidate in the 2007 and 2011 presidential elections in Guatemala, although she got knocked out in the first round -- Guatemalans evidently being disinclined to elect someone to the highest office in the land with no accomplishment whatsoever apart from a lousy fake memoir. Which just goes to show what a bunch of unsophisticated rubes they are.

In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over Dreams from My Father is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.”  We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that actually happened rather than a literary jeu d’esprit playing with nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is moving beyond the old straightjackets of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, real and hallucinatory.

The question now is whether the United States itself is merely the latest chapter of Obama’s fake memoir. You’ll notice that, in the examples listed above, the invention only goes one way. No Cherokee orphan, Holocaust survivor, or recovering drug addict pretends to be George Wallace’s speechwriter. Instead, the beneficiaries of boring middle-class Western life seek to appropriate the narratives and thereby enjoy the electric frisson of fashionable victim groups. And so it goes with public policy in the West at twilight.

#page#Thus, Obama’s executive order on immigration exempting a million people from the laws of the United States is patently unconstitutional, but that’s not how an NPR listener looks at it: To him, Obama’s unilateral amnesty enriches stultifying white-bread America with a million plucky little Rigoberta Menchús and their heartbreaking stories. Eric Holder’s entire tenure as attorney general is a fake memoir all by itself, and his invocation of “executive privilege” in the Fast and Furious scandal is preposterous, but American liberals can’t hear: Insofar as they know anything about Fast and Furious, it’s something to do with the government tracking the guns of fellows like those Alabama “Segregation Forever” nuts, rather than a means by which hundreds of innocent Rigoberta Menchús south of the border were gunned down with weapons sold to their killers by liberal policymakers of the Obama administration.  If that’s the alternative narrative, they’ll take the fake memoir.

#ad#Similarly, Obamacare is apparently all about the repressed patriarchal white male waging his “war on women.” The women are struggling 30-year-old Georgetown Law coeds whose starting salary after graduation is 140 grand a year, but let’s not get hung up on details. Dodd-Frank financial reform, also awaiting Supreme Court judgment, is another unconstitutional power grab, but its designated villains are mustache-twirling top-hatted bankers, so likewise who cares?  

One can understand why the beneficiaries of the postwar West’s expansion of middle-class prosperity would rather pass themselves off as members of way cooler victim groups: It’s a great career move. It may even have potential beyond the page: See Sandra Fluke’s dazzling pre-Broadway tryout of Fake Memoir: The High School Musical, in which a 30-year-old Georgetown Law coed whose starting salary after graduation is 140 grand a year passes herself off as the Little Rigoberta Hussein Wilkomirski of the Rite-Aid pick-up line. But transforming an entire nation into a fake memoir is unlikely to prove half so lucrative. The heartwarming immigrants, the contraceptive-less coeds, the mustache-twirling bankers all provide cover for a far less appealing narrative: an expansion of centralized power hitherto unknown to this republic. In reality, Obama’s step-grandfather died falling off the chair while changing the drapes. In the fake-memoir version, Big Government’s on the chair, and it’s curtains for America.   

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

More Cake, Imam?

As a humble toiler in the opinion mines, cursed to work the same tapped out seams day in and day out, I confess to a certain admiration for those imams who never run out of new things to rail against. Moulana Abdul Hamid Ishaq, who spoke in Toronto on Sunday, is "one of the most active and learned scholars in South Africa", and he doesn't care for the "evils" of "Happy Birthday To You":

It is not necessary that everything the West does is according to logic. The biggest proof that it is the invention of the west are the song words without which this function is not complete viz. 'Happy birthday to you.' No one says, 'Happy birthday celebration' or 'Happy Blessed birthday' or any other words of this kind. This disease of celebrating birthdays was never prevalent among Muslims before, but since Muslims started living alongside the non-Muslims, they have been influenced by them.

Birthdays are celebrated usually at the end of a year and not at the beginning of the year. For example, if one's birth date is on the 1st of January, then the birthday will be celebrated on the 1st of January and not the 2nd of January. Now just ponder, what intelligence is there in celebrating and showing happiness when a year has decreased in one's life. During a birthday celebration, candles are lit on a cake, amounting to the years of the one's life... Here a person is extinguishing the rays of the years of his life by blowing them out himself.

I like to think the imam would find this cake especially objectionable.

'Reasonable Restrictions' on the Road to Tyranny

Re gun control and the Holocaust, I'd also add that the Weimar Republic had some of the Western world's first restrictions on "hate speech." Notwithstanding that curious fact, defenders of restrictions on freedom of speech (including the idiotic George Pataki) routinely advance the argument that if they'd been in place back in the Thirties the Holocaust might never have happened. As I wrote a couple of years back:

There's just one teensy-weensy problem with it: pre-Nazi Germany had such "reasonable limits." Indeed, the Weimar Republic was a veritable proto-Trudeaupia. As Alan Borovoy, Canada's leading civil libertarian, put it:

"Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech. And, in the opinion of the leading Jewish organization of that era, no more than 10 per cent of the cases were mishandled by the authorities. As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it."

Inevitably, the Nazi party exploited the restrictions on "free speech" in order to boost its appeal. In 1925, the state of Bavaria issued an order banning Adolf Hitler from making any public speeches. The Nazis responded by distributing a drawing of their leader with his mouth gagged and the caption, "Of 2,000 million people in the world, one alone is forbidden to speak in Germany."

So a fat lot of good those laws did against the Nazis -- but they proved immensely useful once the Nazis took power. Liberals always seem stunned when supposedly "liberal" laws are subsequently used for illiberal ends.

I mentioned a few days ago a small victory for freedom of speech up north: the thought-crime law used against me and Maclean's magazine has now been repealed by the Canadian House of Commons. I write about it, somewhat gloatingly, here:

Ian Fine, the senior counsel of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, declared that his organization was committed to the abolition of hatred—not “hate crimes,” not even “hate speech,” but hate—a human emotion; you know, like the human emotions the control-freak enforcers attempt to abolish in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives. Any society of free peoples will include its share of hate: it could not be human without it. And, as bad as racists and homophobes and Islamophobes and whateverphobes may be, empowering Mr. Fine’s ever more coercive enforcement regime to micro-regulate us into glassy-eyed compliance is a thousand times worse.

John J. Miller will be pleased to see that I begin with a Fahrenheit 451 quote, because the law in question effectively put the state in the book-burning business. I'm glad to know that, for the moment, Canada is out of it.

"Reasonable Restrictions" on the Road to Tyranny

Re gun control and the Holocaust, I'd also add that the Weimar Republic had some of the western world's first restrictions on "hate speech". Notwithstanding that curious fact, defenders of restrictions on freedom of speech (including the idiotic George Pataki) routinely advance the argument that if they'd been in place back in the Thirties the Holocaust might never have happened. As I wrote a couple of years back:

There's just one teensy-weensy problem with it: pre-Nazi Germany had such "reasonable limits." Indeed, the Weimar Republic was a veritable proto-Trudeaupia. As Alan Borovoy, Canada's leading civil libertarian, put it:

"Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech. And, in the opinion of the leading Jewish organization of that era, no more than 10 per cent of the cases were mishandled by the authorities. As subsequent history so painfully testifies, this type of legislation proved ineffectual on the one occasion when there was a real argument for it."

Inevitably, the Nazi party exploited the restrictions on "free speech" in order to boost its appeal. In 1925, the state of Bavaria issued an order banning Adolf Hitler from making any public speeches. The Nazis responded by distributing a drawing of their leader with his mouth gagged and the caption, "Of 2,000 million people in the world, one alone is forbidden to speak in Germany."

So a fat lot of good those laws did against the Nazis - but they proved immensely useful once the Nazis took power. Liberals always seem stunned when supposedly "liberal" laws are subsequently used for illiberal ends.

I mentioned a few days ago a small victory for freedom of speech up north: the thought-crime law used against me and Maclean's magazine has now been repealed by the Canadian House of Commons. I write about it, somewhat gloatingly, here:

Ian Fine, the senior counsel of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, declared that his organization was committed to the abolition of hatred—not “hate crimes,” not even “hate speech,” but hate—a human emotion; you know, like the human emotions the control-freak enforcers attempt to abolish in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Stepford Wives. Any society of free peoples will include its share of hate: it could not be human without it. And, as bad as racists and homophobes and Islamophobes and whateverphobes may be, empowering Mr. Fine’s ever more coercive enforcement regime to micro-regulate us into glassy-eyed compliance is a thousand times worse.

John J Miller will be pleased to see that I begin with a Fahrenheit 451 quote, because the law in question effectively put the state in the book-burning business. I'm glad to know that, for the moment, Canada is out of it.

Shovel-Ready Project in the Basement

It's a broiling 97-degree day in New York today, and 36 per cent of city schools have no air conditioning. Among them is this Brooklyn middle school, which has plenty of air conditioners - in the basement:

Earlier this school year, workers discovered 10 unopened boxes of air-conditioner units in the basement, said Deanna Sinito, the principal of New Horizons, in Carroll Gardens. School officials and the Education Department could not say how long the air-conditioners had been there and do not agree on how they got there. (The company that makes the air-conditioners said they were manufactured in 2009...)

Around the time Ms. Sinito started at New Horizons as an assistant principal in 2007, the elementary school had been rewired and air-conditioning was installed in its classrooms. According to her recollection, the middle school was rewired later, but air-conditioning was not installed... According to Marge Feinberg, a spokeswoman for the department, the units were bought by New Horizon, but its wiring is not capable of running them.

“At this school, the air-conditioning units purchased by the school require more power than the building can hold,’’ she said.

Oh. Is there perhaps a non-air-conditioned middle school in Queens whose rewiring is compatible with the Brooklyn air conditioners and accidentally ordered a basement full of Brooklyn-compatible air conditioners? Aw, it's a hot day. Who wants to be moving stuff up from the basement?

I like the Education Department's rationale:

The school has 18 classrooms. If the 10 units in storage are used, that would leave the children and teachers in the other 8 rooms uncomfortable on hot days.

Better a thousand kids fry than that a privileged few chill. As Alfred the Butler observed to Batman a movie or two back, "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

Mau-Mauing the Barack-hatchers

It seems President Obama may have a composite gram'pa, too. Toby Harnden writes:

One of the enduring myths of Obama’s ancestry is that his paternal grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama, who served as a cook in the British Army, was imprisoned in 1949 by the British for helping the anti-colonial Mau Mau rebels and held for several months.

Obama’s step-grandmother Sarah, Onyango wife, who is still living, is quoted in the future President’s memoir, as saying: ‘One day, the white man’s askaris came to take Onyango away, and he was placed in a detention camp. 'But he had been in the camp for over six months, and when he returned to Alego he was very thin and dirty. He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of lice. He was so ashamed, he refused to enter his house or tell us what happened...’

But Maraniss, who researched Obama’s life in Kenya, Indonesia, Hawaii and the mainland United States, found that there were ‘no remaining records of any detention, imprisonment, or trial of Hussein Onyango Obama’. He interviewed five people who knew Obama’s grandfather, who died in 1979, who ‘doubted the story or were certain it did not happen’.

This undermines the received wisdom that Obama’s grandfather was a victim of oppression, an assumption that has in turn fuelled theories that Obama harbours an animus towards Britain based on a deeply-rooted rage about the way Onyango was treated.

John Ndalo Aguk, who worked with Onyango before the alleged imprisonment and was in touch with him weekly afterwards said he 'knew nothing' about any detention and would have noticed if he had gone missing for several months...

Dick Opar, a relative by marriage to Onyango and a senior Kenyan police official, gave what Maraniss judged to be the most authoritative word. ‘People make up stories,’ he said. ‘If you get arrested, you say it was the fight for independence, but they are arrested for another thing.

‘I would have known. I would have known. If he was in Kamiti Prison for only a day, even if for a day, I would have known.’

So it looks as if the explanation that Obama sent back the Churchill bust because the Brits tortured his grandfather doesn't quite hold up. Maybe he sent it back because the bust kept hitting on his composite girlfriend.

Ground Control to President Obama

Round about this time in the election cycle, a presidential challenger finds himself on the stump and posing a simple test to voters: “Ask yourself -- are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

But, in fact, you don’t need to ask yourself, because the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances has done it for you. Between 2007 and 2010, Americans’ median net worth fell 38.8 percent -- or from $126,400 per family to $77,300 per family. Oh, dear. As I mentioned a few months ago, when readers asked me to recommend countries they could flee to, most of the countries worth fleeing to Americans can no longer afford to live in.

Which means we’ll just have to fix things here. How likely is Barack Obama to do this? A few days ago he came to Cleveland, a city that is a byword for economic dynamism, fiscal prudence, and sound government. He gave a 54-minute address that tried the patience even of the most doting court eunuchs. “One of the worst speeches I’ve ever heard Barack Obama make,” pronounced MSNBC’s Jonathan Alter, as loyal Democrat attendees fled the arena to volunteer for the Obamacare death-panel pilot program. In fairness to the president, I wouldn’t say it was that much worse, or duller, or more listless and inert than previous Obama speeches. In fact, much of it was exactly the same guff he was peddling when Jonathan Alter’s pals were still hailing him as the world’s greatest orator. The problem is the ever widening gulf between the speech and the slough of despond all about.

#ad#Take, for example, the attempt at soaring rhetoric: “That’s how we built this country -- together. We constructed railroads and highways, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. We did those things together,” he said, in a passage that was presumably meant to be inspirational but was delivered with the faintly petulant air of a great man resentful at having to point out the obvious, yet again. “Together, we touched the surface of the moon, unlocked the mystery of the atom, connected the world through our own science and imagination. We haven’t done these things as Democrats or Republicans. We’ve done them as Americans.”

Beyond the cheap dissembling, there was a bleak, tragic quality to this paragraph. Does anyone really believe a second-term Obama administration is going to build anything? Yes, you, madam, the gullible sap at the back in the faded hope’n’change T-shirt. You seriously think your guy is going to put up another Hoover Dam? Let me quote one Deanna Archuleta, Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of the interior, in a speech to Democrat environmentalists in Nevada:

“You will never see another federal dam.”

Ever.

That seems pretty straightforward. America is out of the dam business. Just as the late Roman Empire no longer built aqueducts, so we no longer build dams. In fairness to the Romans, they left it to the barbarians to sweep in and destroy the existing aqueducts, whereas in America the government destroys the dams (some 200 this century) as an act of environmental virtue hailed by the deputy assistant secretary of the interior.

Obama can urge us all he wants to band together because when we dream big dreams there’s no limit to what Big Government can accomplish. But these days we can’t build a new Hoover Dam, only an attractive new corner office for the assistant deputy assistant deputy assistant secretary to the secretary of deputy assistants at the Department of Bureaucratic Sclerosis, and she’ll be happy to issue a compliance order that the Hoover Dam’s mandatory fish ladders are non-wheelchair-accessible, and so the whole joint needs to close. That we can do! If only we dare to dream Big Dreams!! Together!!!

#page#As to “touching the surface of the moon,” I touch on this in my most recent book, whose title I will forbear to plug. Imagine if we hadn’t gone to the moon in the 1960s. Can you seriously picture Obama presiding over such an event today? Instead of the Apollo 11 guys taking up a portable cassette machine to play Sinatra and the Count Basie band’s recording of “Fly Me to the Moon,” the lads of Obamo 11 would take an iPod with Lady Gaga or Ke$ha or whatever.#...#Yet, even as you try to fill in the details, doesn’t the whole thing start to swim out of focus as something that increasingly belongs not only to another time but another place? In the Sixties, American ingenuity burst the bounds of the planet. Now our debt does, and “touching the surface of the moon” half-lingers in collective consciousness as a dimming memory of lost grandeur, in the way a date farmer in 19th-century Nasiriyah might be vaguely aware that the Great Ziggurat of Ur used to be around here.

But all he can see stretching to the horizon is sand.

So today our money-no-object government spends lots of money but to no great object. What are Big Government’s priorities now? Carpeting Catholic universities with IUDs. Regulating the maximum size of milk-coffee beverages. As Obama told us: “That’s how we built this country -- together. We constructed railroads and highways.#...#Together, we touched the surface of the moon, unlocked the mystery of the atom.” And as we will one day tell our grandchildren: “Together, we touched the surface of the decaf caramel macchiato and deemed it to be more than 16 ounces. Together, we unlocked the mystery of 30-year-old college students’ womanhood. One small step to the Ikea futon for a lucky Georgetown Law freshwoman, one giant leap for womankind. Who will ever forget the day when the Union Pacific Board of Health Compliance and the Central Pacific Agency of Sustainable Growth Enhancement met at Promontory Community College, Utah, to hammer in the Golden Spike condom dispenser?”

#ad#Most of us don’t want a new Hoover Dam. We would like our homes to be less underwater, but there’s no danger of that anytime soon. Most of us don’t want America to go to the moon. We would like a few less craters on the economic wasteland down here. Soaring rhetoric at a time of earthbound problems -- jobs, debt -- risks making the president sound ridiculous. Granted, there’s a lot of it about this time of year -- commencement speakers assuring kids who can’t manage middle-school math that you can be anything you want to be as long as you dream your dreams. But Obama offers an even more absurd evolution of this grim trope: “I can be anything I want to be as long as you chumps dream your dreams.”

Self-pity is never an attractive quality, and in an elected head of state even less so. Obama whines that his opponents say it’s all his fault. One can argue about whose fault it is, but not, as my colleagues at National Review pointed out, whose responsibility it is: It’s his. He’s the only president we have. And he made things worse. He increased the national debt by some 70 percent, and what do we have to show for it? No dams, no railroads, no moon shots. Just government, and bureaucracy, and regulation, unto national bankruptcy.

“Fly me to the moon / Let me play among the stars#...#” Who needs another moon shot? Obama’s already up there, soaring ever more unmoored from reality. Pity us mere mortals back on Planet Earth, living in the land he made.

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn

Re: Mr. Romney

Katrina, I'm with Kevin and the president in preferring "Mr. Romney" over "Governor Romney." The primary debates were all "Governor", "Senator" and "Mr. Speaker", even though there wasn't a single governor, senator, or speaker on the stage. What's the point of a republic if a guy can serve one term in the House of Representatives in the early Seventies and be addressed as "Congressman" until he keels over half-a-century later? Turning offices into titles of nobility is, to my mind, even more unrepublican than having a bunch of marquesses and viscounts queening it up because "Senator", "Governor" et al. are titles that by definition are in the gift of the people and, when the people are no longer willing to bestow said title or the office-holder declines to submit himself to their adjudication, the use thereof should cease.

Lest I be accused of being anti-American in respect of the above, I may add that, as a subject of Her Canadian Majesty, I think "Mr." and "Mrs." can be pretty cool in monarchies, too. Just about the only advice I ever had the temerity to offer Mrs. Thatcher was not to accept a peerage, because to my mind "Mrs. Thatcher" was a far greater title than anything the Sovereign could bestow. I still think I was right on that, and can never quite bring myself to say "Lady Thatcher." In fact, the only guy who makes it work is Larry King, who liked to introduce her on CNN as "Margaret the Lady Thatcher", which makes her sound like she's running the south side numbers racket with Sammy "The Bull" Gravano.

Young, Gifted, and Cool

The point to remember, Jonah, is that anything you say about the president, his policies, or anybody standing in the general vicinity is a racist codeword. For example, I was shocked during the Obamacare debate to hear you express concern about wait-times for hip replacements in Scotland when everyone knows "hip" is a synonym for "cool" and that "cool" is a synonym for "Barack."

And only last week you wondered why Obama was co-hosting a fundraiser with Sarah Jessica Parker and Anna Wintour, "that ridiculous Vogue editor a good two decades too old to go around with her hair in a pageboy," and when I said, "'Boy?' What Bull Connor biopic have you just stepped out of?", you said, "Okay, her hair's in a bob," and I had to remind you that "Bob" is a common monosyllabic male name much like "George," which you probably still bark at your Pullman Porters when they're lugging your steamer trunks off the caboose. And you replied, "I am not speaking in racist codewords!", which everyone knows is code for "I am incapable of speaking in anything but racist codewords."

In my most recent book, I write en passant:

Invited by National Public Radio to expound on the use of “racial code words” in “the current opposition to health care reform”, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton, informed her listeners that “language of personal responsibility is often a code language used against poor and minority communities.”

“Personal responsibility” is racial code language? Phew, thank goodness America is belatedly joining Europe in all but abolishing the concept.

“Code language” is code language for “total bollocks”. “Code word” is a code word for “I’m inventing what you really meant to say because the actual quote doesn’t quite do the job for me”. “Small government”? Racist code words! “Non-confiscatory taxes”? Likewise. “Individual liberty”? Don’t even go there! With interpreters like Professor Harris-Lacewell on the prowl, I’m confident 95 per cent of Webster’s will eventually be ruled “code language.”

Cool!