Mark Steyn's Blog, page 29

Twilight of the West

The Eurovision Song Contest doesn’t get a lot of attention in the United States, but on the Continent it’s long been seen as the perfect Euro-metaphor. Years before the euro came along, it was the prototype pan-European institution, and predicated on the same assumptions. Eurovision took the national cultures that produced Mozart, Vivaldi, and Debussy, and in return gave us “Boom-Bang-a-Bang” (winner, 1969), “Ding-Ding-a-Dong” (winner, 1975), and “Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley” (winner, 1984). The euro took the mark, the lira, and the franc, and merged them to create the “Boom-Bang-a-Bang” of currencies.

How will it all end? One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” cooed the hostess, Helga Vlahović. “The string section and the wood section all sit together.” Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahović herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV’s head of “war information” programming.

Fortunately, no one remembers Yugoslavia. So today Europe itself is very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting for the German guy to show up with their checks. Just before last week’s Eurovision finale in Azerbaijan, the Daily Mail in London reported that the Spanish entrant, Pastora Soler, had been told to throw the competition “because the cash-strapped country can’t afford to host the lavish event next year,” as the winning nation is obliged to do. In a land where the youth unemployment rate is over 50 percent, and two-thirds of the country’s airports are under threat of closure, and whose neighbors (Britain) are drawing up plans for military intervention to evacuate their nationals in the event of total civic collapse, the pressing need to avoid winning the Eurovision Song Contest is still a poignant symbol of how total is Spain’s implosion. Ask not for whom “Ding-Ding-a-Dong” dings, it dings for thee.

#ad#One of the bizarre aspects of media coverage since 2008 is the complacent assumption that what’s happening is “cyclical” -- a downturn that will eventually correct itself -- rather than profoundly structural. Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, found herself skewered like souvlaki on a Thessaloniki grill for suggesting the other day that the Greeks are a race of tax evaders. She’s right. Compared to Germans, your average Athenian has a noticeable aversion to declaring income. But that’s easy for her to say: Mme. Lagarde’s half-million-dollar remuneration from the IMF is tax-free, just a routine perk of the new transnational governing class. And, in the end, whether your broke European state has reasonably efficient tax collectors like the French or incompetent ones like the Greeks is relatively peripheral.

Likewise, on this side of the Atlantic: Quebec university students, who pay the lowest tuition rates in North America, are currently striking over a proposed increase of $1,625. Spread out over seven years. Or about 232 bucks per annum. Or about the cost of one fair-trade macchiato a week. Which has, since the strike, been reduced further, to a couple of sips: If you’re wondering how guys who don’t do any work can withdraw their labor, well, “strike” is a euphemism for riot. The other week, Vanessa L’Écuyer, a sexology student at the Université du Québec à Montréal, was among those arrested for smoke-bombing the subway system and bringing the city’s morning commute to a halt. But, as in Europe, in the end, whether you fund your half-decade bachelor’s in sexology through a six-figure personal debt or whether you do it through the largesse of the state is relatively peripheral.

#page#In the twilight of the West, America and Europe are still different but only to this extent: They’ve wound up taking separate paths to the same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common currency for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative easing and the global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your final years in the care of Medicare or the National Health Service death panels, whether higher education is just another stage of cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion dollars’ worth of personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec.

That’s to say, the unsustainable “bubble” is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world. Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been chewed away at both ends. We invented something called “adolescence” that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a desultory half decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till you’re 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents’ health-insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced something called “retirement” that, in the space of two generations, has led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend the last couple of decades, or one-third of their adult lives, as a long holiday weekend.

#ad#The bit in between adolescence and retirement is your working life, and it’s been getting shorter and shorter. Which is unfortunate, as it has to pay for everything else. This structural deformity in the life cycle of Western man is at the root of most of our problems. Staying ever longer in “school” (I use the term loosely) leads to ever later workplace entry, and ever later (if at all) family formation. Which means that our generation is running up debt that will have to be repaid by our shrunken progeny. One hundred Greek grandparents have 42 Greek grandchildren. Is it likely that 42 Greeks can repay the debts run up by 100 Greeks? No wonder they’d rather stick it to the Germans. But the thriftier Germans have the same deathbed demographics. If 100 Germans resent having to pick up the check for an entire continent, is it likely 42 Germans will be able to do it?

Look around you. The late-20th-century Western lifestyle isn’t going to be around much longer. In a few years’ time, our children will look at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that came from. In turn, their children will be amazed to discover that in the early 21st century the Western world thought it entirely normal that vast swathes of the citizenry should while away their youth enjoying what, a mere hundred years earlier, would have been the leisurely varsity of the younger son of a Mitteleuropean Grand Duke.

I was sad to learn that Helga Vlahović died a few weeks ago, but her central metaphor all those years ago wasn’t wrong. Any functioning society is like an orchestra. When the parts don’t fit together, it’s always the other fellow who’s out of tune. So the Greeks will blame the Germans, and vice versa. But the developed world is all playing the same recessional. In the world after Western prosperity, we will work till we’re older and we will start younger -- and we will despise those who thought they could defy not just the rules of economic gravity but the basic human life cycle.

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

She Was Asking for It

Over in London, the Daily Telegraph has a piece on how George W. Bush became "the quiet man of US politics." Naturally, it's provoked a mass Tourette's explosion of what-a-moron sneers from sophisticated commenters apparently starved these last four years of the contrarian, iconoclastic thrill of making the same cracks everybody else makes. Nevertheless, some readers manage to take it to a whole new level:

I can't help how different the world would be if Bush had said, when those men killed thousands by destroying the twin towers; "Sorry."

It would have uutterly demolished the murderer's cause. The world would been forced to look at the great things the US has done and seen a nation that is greiving and brought the rest of the world instantly to their side. Nothing creates solidarity than humility.

I wonder how many people in the Western world think like this. President Bush once told me he figured it at 25 percent, but that may be, as they say, a misunderestimate.

In related news on the strategic value of "humility": "Honour Violence Called Prevalent In Calgary."

Playing the Trump Card

My former governor John Sununu makes a great attack dog, and he's not riding on the roof of the car but on the hood. I like the way he pushes back here against the ridiculous Soledad O'Brien when asked about the burning issue of this election, which is apparently Donald Trump's views on President Obama's birth certificate. One of the things that even non-Newt supporters appreciated about Gingrich in the debates was his disinclination to accept the premise of the questions. That's what Sununu does, hanging million-dollar misogynist Bill Maher round the President's neck. (He could have gone with Pole-hating Koreaphobe Al Sharpton, or any number of others.)

Given CNN's ratings, playing court eunuch isn't doing anything for their business. So they should be grateful to the Romney campaign for providing them with five minutes' relief from their usual gate-delay background-hum.

This year the GOP seems to have figured out a lesson it should have learned a long time ago: Only saps let the palace media frame the parameters of debate. Speaking of which, my favorite moment is when Miss O'Brien demands to know why can't Mitt be more like John McCain. You mean, lose gracefully and get great reviews for doing so? Not this time.

Forever Blowing Bubbles

Glenn Reynolds writes today about the higher education bubble:

Pretty much everyone agrees that the increases in tuition (which have vastly outpaced consumer prices and family incomes) and the growth in student-loan debt (which now exceeds credit-card or auto-loan debt) are unsustainable. As economist Herb Stein famously said, something that can’t go on forever, won’t. So, how should we respond?

For students, piece of advice No. 1 is: Don’t go into debt...

Debt is what gets people into trouble in bubbles: They borrow heavily because they think the value of what they’re buying, whether it’s a house or a tulip, will go up. When it stops going up, they’re sunk.

Today, the value of an education isn’t going up, but the price is. That’s a bad combination. So don’t borrow heavily.

Aside from the fact that most "higher education" is not really "higher" and much of it isn't "education" in any sense, there is a tragic element to America's structural defects. For most people seeking to avoid being upended by the vicissitudes of life, it used to be fairly straightforward: 1) get an education - you'll always have "something to fall back on"; 2) buy property - your investment will be "safe as houses"; 3) take care of your health. Government distortion of the market has ruined three key pillars of stability. There isn't a lot left to wreck, but I'm sure they'll come up with something.

Big Mac Meets Big Mo*

A few years ago, Burger King's chocolate frosty swirl dessert made the mistake of disrespecting Allah. Now McDonald's has committed the sin of putting Mohammed's name in a Happy Meal toy and getting a Power Ranger to stamp on it:

According to a report appearing today (5/27/12) on the Arabic news website, Kermalkom.com, the McDonald's fast food restaurant "abused the Prophet Muhammad by placing his name at the base of a toy that is being distributed as part of the Happy Meal, a toy which steps on the name 'Muhammad.'"

The toy consists of a blue superhero figurine... It stands on one leg, and, when the lever is pressed, it pounds on the base with the other leg. According to the Saudis, the designs that appear all around the base, where the figurine stomps its foot, is really the name "Muhammad" written several times in circles...

Saudis, "demanding the strongest possible punishment for the restaurant" and insisting that "they will not be silent until this is realized," further complained how such an obvious insult could pass the supervision of the management at McDonalds.

You can see for yourself the Power Ranger obviously insulting the Prophet here.

In response, McDonald's issued a statement saying, "Get a life, you losers." Whoops, I mean, of course, McDonald's has immediately withdrawn the Islamophobic toy from all its restaurants.

Because in a multicultural world we should all be sensitive to the other fellow's religion...

(Headline courtesy of my book America Alone, which has a chapter presciently called "Big Mo vs Big Mac".)

The Facebook Caliphate

So how’s that old Arab Spring going? You remember -- the “Facebook Revolution.” As I write, they’re counting the votes in Egypt’s presidential election, so by the time you read this the pecking order may have changed somewhat. But currently in first place is the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi, who in an inspiring stump speech before the students of Cairo University the other night told them, “Death in the name of Allah is our goal.”

Like!

In second place is the military’s man Ahmed Shafiq, Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister and a man who in a recent television interview said that “unfortunately the revolution succeeded.”

Like!

In third place is moderate Islamist Abdel-Moneim Abolfotoh, a 9/11 Truther endorsed by the terrorist organization al-Gama’a al-Islamiya. He’s a “moderate” because he thinks Egyptian Christians should be allowed to run for the presidency, although they shouldn’t be allowed to win.

#ad#Like!

As I said, this thrilling race is by no means over, and one would not rule out an eventual third-place finish by a rival beacon of progress such as Amr Moussa, the longtime Arab League flack and former Mubarak foreign minister. So what happened to all those candidates embodying the spirit of Egypt’s modern progressive democratic youth movement that all those Western media rubes were cooing over in Tahrir Square a year ago? How are they doing in Egypt’s first free presidential election?

You have 0 friends!

I don’t know about you, but I have the feeling that Messrs. Morsi, Shafiq, and Abolfotoh are not spending much time on Facebook, or even on Twitter. Indeed, for a “social-media revolution,” the principal beneficiaries seem to be remarkably antisocial: Liberated from the grip of Mubarak the new Egypt is a land where the Israeli embassy gets attacked and ransacked, Christians get killed and their churches burned to the ground, female reporters for the Western media are sexually assaulted in broad daylight, and for the rest of the gals a woman’s place is in the clitoridectomy clinic. In the course of the election campaign, the Muslim Brotherhood has cast off the veil of modernity and moderation that so beguiled the U.S. State Department and the New York Times: Khairat el-Shater, the deputy leader, now says that “the Koran is our Constitution” and that Mubarak-era laws permitting, for example, women to seek divorce should be revised. As the TV cleric Safwat Hegazy told thousands of supporters at a Brotherhood rally in the Nile Delta, “We are seeing the dream of the Islamic Caliphate coming true.”

Thus, the Facebook Revolution one year on. Status: It’s not that complicated. Since the founding of the Kingdom of Egypt in 1922, the country has spent the last nine decades getting worse. Mubarak’s kleptocracy was worse than Farouk’s ramshackle kingdom, and the new Egypt will be worse still.

At a certain level, there’s nothing very new about this. In the early stages of revolution, students are often on the front line, mainly because they’ve got nothing else to do all day. But by the time the strongman is being sworn in at the presidential palace they’re usually long gone from the scene, supplanted by harder and better-organized forces. Was it ever likely that Western “social media” would change this familiar trajectory? National Review’s editor Rich Lowry, from whose byline picture the pixie twinkle of boyish charm has yet to fade, was nevertheless sounding as cranky an old coot as I usually do when he declared that “Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is to uselessness what Henry Ford was to the automobile” and deplored a world in which millions of people spend their time “passing around photos of pets in party costumes, telling us whether they are having a good or bad hair day, and playing the farming-simulation game FarmVille.” It is not necessary to agree with the full majestic sweep of Lowry’s dismissal to note that neither Lenin nor Mao is known to have taken a photograph of his pet in a party costume, or even a Party costume, and that both men played their farming-simulation games for real, and on an industrial scale. Putting aside its deficiencies in revolution-mobilizing, Facebook, until its shares headed south this week, had a valuation of over $100 billion -- or about two-thirds of the GDP of New Zealand. Which seems a little high to me.

#page#Whatever one feels about the sharia-enforcing, Jew-hating, genital-mutilating enthusiasts of the Muslim Brotherhood, they do accurately reflect a significant slice -- and perhaps a majority -- of the Egyptian people. The problem with the old-school dictators was that in the end Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Qaddafi didn’t represent anything other than their Swiss bank accounts. The question for the wider world is what do “social media” represent? If they supposedly embody the forces of progress and modernity, then they’ve just taken an electoral pounding from guys who haven’t had a new idea since the seventh century.

No one should begrudge Mark Zuckerberg his billions, and decent people should revile in the strongest terms thug-senator Chuck Schumer’s attempts to punish Zuckerberg’s partner Eduardo Saverin for wishing to enjoy his profits under the less confiscatory tax arrangements of Singapore: It is a sign of terminal desperation when regimes that can’t compete for talent focus their energies on ever more elaborate procedures to prevent freeborn individuals voting with their feet.

#ad#But it is also a sign of desperation to talk up amiable diversions for pampered solipsistic Westerners as an irresistible force of modernity. One of the basic defects of the Bush administration’s designation of a “war on terror” was that it emphasized symptoms (bombs and bombers) over causes (the underlying ideology). In the war of ideas, the West has chosen not to compete, under the erroneous assumption that the ever more refined delivery systems for its sensual distractions are a Big Idea in and of themselves. They’re not. If you know your Tocqueville, they sound awfully like his prediction of a world in which “an innumerable crowd of like and equal men#...#revolve on themselves without repose,” a phrase which nicely distills the unending busy-ness of our gaudy novelties.

Don’t get me wrong; I like goofy pet photos. But can these gizmos do anything else? Yes, in theory. But in practice is a culture that “revolves on itself without repose” likely to be that effective at communicating real ideas to the wider world? Ideas on liberty, free speech, property rights, women’s rights, and all the other things conspicuous by their absence in the philosophies of Egypt’s new political class. In the end, a revolution cannot be tweeted. Whatever their defects, the unlovely forces running the new Egypt understand the difference between actually mutilating a young girl’s genitals to deny her the possibility of sexual pleasure, and merely “following” your local clitoridectomist on his Twitter feed.

A century ago, the West exported its values. So, in Farouk’s Egypt, at the start of a new legislative session, the King was driven to his toytown parliament to deliver the speech from the throne in an explicit if ramshackle simulacrum of Westminster’s rituals of constitutional monarchy. Today, we decline to export values, and complacently assume, as the very term “Facebook Revolution” suggests, that technology marches in support of modernity. It doesn’t. Facebook’s flat IPO and Egypt’s presidential election are in that sense part of the same story, of a developed world whose definitions of innovation and achievement have become too shrunken and undernourished. The vote in Egypt tells us a lot about them, but it also tells us something about us.

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

Celeb Prez Gone Bad

While the star of Farm Girls Gone Bad has no difficulty getting her photograph taken with Bill Clinton, for less illustrious party guests it's all a bit more complicated:

Angry guests who paid up to £1,000 to attend an exclusive event hosted by Bill Clinton dubbed the “worst party ever”, should receive refunds, one of the co-hosts has said...

The fund-raiser has been described as the “worst party ever” by angry guests, some of whom were forced to wait outside for up to 90 minutes while high profile attendees were admitted inside.

When they were eventually admitted, guests complained that the underground venue “stank”, perspiration was “dripping off the walls” while the rooms were “chaotic” and too overcrowded to even see the former president.

Maybe he was filming Farm Girls Gone Bad 2 in there.

Myth Congeniality

Jonah, Kevin, re Bernie Quigley's ingenious "Fake but mythic" defense of Elizabeth Warren, does that mean that when she checked the "Native American" and Harvard Law "woman of color" boxes, she merely displaced another mythic Injun or woman of mythic color? Or did she displace an actual non-mythic minority?

For my part, the next time I'm confronted by the neo-apartheid ethnic-categorization boxes of official paperwork, I intend to write in "Mythic". There's bound to be a grant or at least a tribal cookbook in it.

Breaking! The House of Windsor is One of the Five Tribes

My weekend column mentions en passant Teepee Party candidate Elizabeth Warren's contributions to the cookbook Pow Wow Chow, a “compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families”:

The recipes from “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee” include a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren’s fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It’s in the state song: “Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin’ down the plain . . . ” But then the white man came and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren’s traditional Five Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie.

Shortly after my column was filed yesterday afternoon, our Noah Glyn reported that Mrs Warren's crab dish passed down from her Cherokee ancestors actually came from an upscale Manhattan eatery on 55th Street across from the St Regis:

Two of the possibly plagiarized recipes, said in the Pow Wow Chow cookbook to have been passed down through generations of Oklahoma Native American members of the Cherokee tribe, are described in a New York Times News Service story as originating at Le Pavilion, a fabulously expensive French restaurant in Manhattan. The dishes were said to be particular favorites of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Cole Porter.

The Pundette wonders: "Were they Cherokee, too?"

No. But, as Broadway's first Native American composer, Cole Porter wrote about his Indian blood in his famous song, "I've Got Sioux Under My Skin".

Actually, that last line quoted above briefly made me wonder if writing about American liberalism isn't a threat to one's sanity. Some societies are racist, some societies work hard to be anti-racist, but only in America does the nation's most prestigious law school hire a 100 per cent white female as its first "woman of color" on the basis that she once mailed in the Duke of Windsor's favorite crab recipe to a tribal cookbook.

Before he ascended to the throne, the Duke inspired a hit song of reflected celebrity: "I Danced With A Man Who Danced With A Girl Who Danced With The Prince Of Wales". That seems to be how Harvard Law's identity-group quota-filling works. I'm confident Elizabeth Warren will eventually be able to prove she danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with someone who once changed planes at a municipal airport accidentally built on a Cherokee burial ground.

The Great Barry

It used to be a lot simpler. As E. C. Bentley deftly summarized it in 1905:

Geography is about maps

But Biography is about chaps.

But that was then, and now Biography is also about maps. For example, have you ever thought it would be way cooler to have been born in colonial Kenya?

Whoa, that sounds like crazy Birther talk; don’t go there! But Breitbart News did, and it turns out that the earliest recorded example of Birtherism is from the president’s own literary agent, way back in 1991, in the official bio of her exciting new author: “Barack Obama, the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

So the lunatic theory that Barack Obama doesn’t meet the minimum eligibility requirements to be president of the United States was first advanced by Barack Obama’s official representative. Where did she get that wacky idea from? “This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me,” says Obama’s literary agent Miriam Goderich, a “fact” that went so un-“checked” that it stayed up on her agency’s website in the official biography of her by-then-famous client up until 2007: “He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister.”

#ad#And then in April 2007, someone belatedly decided to “check” the 16-year-old “fact” and revised the biography, a few weeks into the now non-Kenyan’s campaign for the presidency. Fancy that!

When it comes to conspiracies, I’m an Occam’s Razor man. The more obvious explanation of the variable first line in the eternally shifting sands of Obama’s biography is that, rather than pretending to have been born in Hawaii, he’s spent much of his life pretending to have been born in Kenya. After all, if your first book is an exploration of racial identity and has the working title “Journeys in Black and White,” being born in Hawaii doesn’t really help. It’s entirely irrelevant to the twin pillars of contemporary black grievance -- American slavery and European imperialism. To 99.99 percent of people, Hawaii is a luxury-vacation destination and nothing else. Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against the white man’s rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary agents.

And where’s the harm in it? Everybody does it -- at least in the circles in which Obama hangs. At Harvard Law School, where young Barack was “the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review,” there’s no end of famous firsts: As The Fordham Law Review reported, “Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.” There is no evidence that Mrs. Warren, now the Democrats’ Senate candidate, is anything other than 100 percent white. She walks like a white, quacks like a white, looks whiter than white. She’s the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out. But she “self-identified” as Cherokee, so that makes her a “woman of color.” Why, back in 1984 she submitted some of her favorite dishes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook, a “compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families.”

The recipes from “Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee” include a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren’s fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It’s in the state song: “Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin’ down the plain#...#” But then the white man came and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren’s traditional Five Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie.

#page#A delegation of college students visited the White House last week, and Vice President Biden told them: “You’re an incredible generation. And that’s not hyperbole either. Your generation and the 9/11 generation before you are the most incredible group of Americans we have ever, ever, ever produced.” Ever ever ever ever! Even in a world where everyone’s incredible, some things ought to be truly incredible. Yet Harvard Law School touted Elizabeth “Dances with Crabs” Warren as their “first woman of color” -- and nobody laughed. Because, if you laugh, chances are you’ll be tied up in sensitivity-training hell for the next six weeks. Because in an ever more incredible America being an all-white “woman of color” is entirely credible.

Entering these murky waters, swimming through it like a crab in Mrs. Warren’s tomato mayo, Barack Obama refined his own identity with a finesse Harvard Law’s first cigar-store Indian lacked. In 1984, when “Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee” was cooking up a storm, the young Obama was still trying to figure out his name: He’d been “Barry” up till then. According to his recently discovered New York girlfriend, back when she dated him he was “BAR-ack,” emphasis on the first syllable, as in barracks, which is how his dad was known back in Kenya. Later in the Eighties, he decided “BAR-ack” was too British, and modified it to “Ba-RACK.” Some years ago, on Fox News, Bob Beckel criticized me for mispronouncing Barack Obama’s name. My mistake. All I did was say it the way they’ve always said it back in Kenya. But Obama himself didn’t finally decide what his name was or how to say it until he was pushing 30. In the shifting sands of identity, he picked his crabs carefully.

#ad#“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then,” says Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people -- his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.#...# So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

In a postmodern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake -- an elite schooling -- Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure -- the impoverished roots -- merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His “shiftless and unsuccessful” relatives -- the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi -- are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don’t seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows. Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: Let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is in his way the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life.  But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about “the unreality of reality.”

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