Mark Steyn's Blog, page 31

Going Native

In my weekend column, I write about Harvard Law prof and Democrat Teepee Party candidate Elizabeth Warren, who can't understand why anyone could possibly get the idea she's been passing herself off as a Cherokee for most of her adult life. Well, maybe they got if from Harvard's daily newspaper. From 1998:

Harvard Law School currently has only one tenured minority woman, Gottlieb Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren, who is Native American.

This may be the drollest diversity scam since an Englishman called Archibald parlayed himself into global celebrity as the Ojibwe Indian "Grey Owl". Unlike "self-identifying" as Hispanic, "Native American" identity requires a formal namecheck on tribal rolls. Yet, on the basis of a (possible) great-great-great-gran'ma, Elizabeth Warren presented herself as Harvard's token redskin with nary a blush - and nobody called her on it.

Andy Warhol got it wrong: In the future everyone will be a disadvantaged minority for one thirty-second.

For the record, I am the only Fijian tribal elder at National Review.

Composite Americans

Have you dated a composite woman? They’re America’s hottest new demographic. As with all the really cool stuff, Barack Obama was doing it years before the rest of us. In Dreams from My Father, the world’s all-time most unread bestseller, he spills the inside dope on his composite white girlfriend: “When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough#...#”

But being yourself is never going to be enough in the new composite America. Last week, in an election campaign ad, Barack revealed his latest composite girlfriend -- “Julia.” She’s worse than the old New York girlfriend. She can’t even be herself. In fact, she can’t be anything without massive assistance from Barack every step of the way, from his “Head Start” program at the age of three through to his Social Security benefits at the age of 67. Everything good in her life she owes to him. When she writes her memoir, it will be thanks to a subvention from the Federal Publishing Assistance Program for Chronically Dependent Women but you’ll love it: Sweet Dreams from My Sugar Daddy. She’s what the lawyers would call “non composite mentis.” She’s not competent to do a single thing for herself -- and, from Barack’s point of view, that’s exactly what he’s looking for in a woman, if only for a one-night stand on a Tuesday in early November.

#ad#Then there’s “Elizabeth,” a 62-year-old Democratic Senate candidate from Massachusetts. Like Barack’s white girlfriend, she couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be a composite -- a white woman and an Indian woman, all mixed up in one! Not Indian in the sense of Ashton Kutcher putting on brownface make-up and a fake-Indian accent in his amusing new commercial for the hip lo-fat snack Popchips. But Indian in the sense of checking the “Are you Native American?” box on the Association of American Law Schools form, which Elizabeth Warren did for much of her adult life. According to her, she’s part Cherokee and part Delaware. Not in the Joe Biden sense, I hasten to add, but Delaware in the sense of the Indian tribe named in honor of the home state of Big F***kin’ Chief Dances with Plugs.

How does she know she’s a Cherokee maiden? Well, she cites her grandfather’s “high cheekbones,” and says the Indian stuff is part of her family “lore.” Which was evidently good enough for Harvard Lore School when they were looking to rack up a few affirmative-action credits. The former Obama special adviser to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel now says that “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group, something that might happen with people who are like I am,” and certainly not for personal career advancement or anything like that. Like everyone else, she was shocked, shocked to discover that, as the Boston Herald reported, “Harvard Law School officials listed Warren as Native American in the ’90s, when the school was under fierce fire for their faculty’s lack of diversity.”

So did the University of Texas, and the University of Pennsylvania. With the impertinent jackanapes of the press querying the bona fides of Harvard Lore School’s first Native American female professor, the Warren campaign got to work and eventually turned up a great-great-great-grandmother designated as Cherokee in the online transcription of a marriage application of 1894.

#page#Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have -- hang on, let me get out my calculator -- duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding-license application. And now it’s here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren’s memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, Dreams from My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother.

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran’ma as Cherokee, but let’s cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind -- “people who are like I am,” 31/32nds white, and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America’s melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

#ad#Just in case you’re having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it’s the other way round. Progress!

Coincidentally, the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission last week issued an “Enforcement Guidance” limiting the rights of employers to take into account the criminal convictions and arrest records of job applicants because of the “disparate impact” the consideration of such matters might have on minorities. That’s great news, isn’t it? So Harvard Law School can’t ask Elizabeth Warren if she’s ever held up a liquor store because, if they did, the faculty might be even less Cherokee than it is.

My colleague Jonah Goldberg wrote the other day about Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain, and other scientific chaps who argue that conservatives suffer from a genetic cognitive impairment that causes us to favor small government. In other words, we’re born stupid. So, thanks to gene sequencing, we now know why conservatives aren’t as smart as, say, Pete Stark, the nigh-on-half-a-century Democratic congressman who believes that Solyndra, which is based in his district, is an automobile manufacturer: “I wish I had a big enough expense allowance to get one of those new ‘S’s’ that Solyndra’s going to make down there, the electric car,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle this week. “My 10 year old is after me. He no longer wants a Porsche. He wants dad to have an ‘S’ sedan.” Pete sounds so out of it, you have to wonder if maybe he’s 1/32nd Republican on his great-great-great-grandmother’s side.

But, if conservatives are simply born that way, shouldn’t they be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission?

Aw, don’t waste your time. Elizabeth Warren will be ahead of you checking the “right-wing madman” box on the grounds that she gets her high cheekbones and minimal facial hair from Genghis Khan. And “Julia” will be saying she was born conservative but thanks to Obama’s new Headcase Start program was able to get ideological reassignment surgery. And Barack’s imaginary girlfriend will be telling him that she’d be left if she could, but she’s right so she can’t, but she’d love to be left. So he left her.

Good thing the smart guys are running the joint.

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

Re: The Soft Bigotry of Multiculturalism

Heather, re the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition, your average post-colonial studies graduate can take this one in his stride. As I wrote in Britain seven years ago:

Last week the Guardian forced itself to consider the awkward fact that many young black males are "homophobic"... The "vilification of Jamaican homophobia", says Decca Aitkenhead, is just an attempt to distract from the real culprit: "It's a failure to recognise 400 years of Jamaican history, starting with the sodomy of male slaves by their white owners as a means of humiliation.

"Slavery laid the foundations of homophobia," writes Miss Aitkenhead. "For us to vilify Jamaicans for an attitude of which we were the architects is shameful. Jamaicans weren't the architects of their ideas about homosexuality; we were..."

If we hadn't enslaved these fellows and taken them to the West Indies to be our playthings under the Caribbean moon, they'd have stayed in Africa and grown up as relaxed live-and-let-live types like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, who's accused Tony Blair of a plan to impose homosexuality throughout the Commonwealth; or Kenya's Daniel arap Moi, who attacked the "gay scourge" sweeping Africa; or Zambia's Frederick Chiluba, who has said gays do not have "a right to be abnormal"; or Namibia's Sam Nujoma, who accused African homosexuals of being closet "Europeans" trying to destroy his country through the spread of "gayism"; or Uganda's Yoweri Museveni, who proposed the arrest of all homosexuals, though he subsequently moderated his position and called for a return to the good old days when "these few individuals were either ignored or speared and killed by their parents".

But no doubt Decca Aitkenhead would respond that African homophobia is also the malign legacy of British colonialism. Who taught them to spear gays, eh?

By refusing to enslave them and take them to our Caribbean plantations and sodomise them every night, we left them with feelings of rejection and humiliation that laid the foundations of their homophobic architecture.

It's all our fault, and it always will be.

Incidentally, I've no use for Robert Mugabe but I did rather enjoy it when he called Tony Blair a "gay gangster" leading "the gay government of the gay United gay Kingdom". A Downing Street spokesgay denied the charge:

The Prime Minister is not a gay gangster.

They're Playing His Sarong

Fans of the Starr Report will recall that Bill Clinton was famously disinclined to reciprocate. But he had nothing on his successor:

She talked about how Obama walked around his bedroom bare-chested, dressed in a blue and white sarong while working on a New York Times crossword puzzle...

Obama and Cook would date for a year. He was 22 and she was 25 when they met.

Cook said when she told Obama she loved him, he responded: “Thank you.”

Miss Cook eventually figured out that two sarongs don't make Mr Right.

The Descent of Man

While Americans have over a trillion dollars in college debt and 50 per cent of recent graduates can't get jobs, Quebec students are demanding the right to get to the dole office a lot cheaper. They're currently striking, and rioting, violently, to protest a proposed tuition 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. Nevertheless, they're not gonna swallow it:

Students in Quebec are like no others, we’re told. We need to understand that tuition fees are not the real issue. The real issue is social justice. The real issue is the promise made during the Quiet Revolution that universities would eventually be free. The real issue is the fight against the ruling class, the greedy corporations, the tar sands, and the entire capitalist, neo-liberal elite. Of course, since universities actually do cost money, somebody will have to pay. Who? The greedy corporations!

The most militant protest group, the CLASSE (whose handsome spokesperson, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, has become a celebrity on French TV), has lots of other ideas about social justice. It wants a boycott of Israel’s “apartheid regime.” It wants courses, lesson plans and reading lists to be “feminized.” It wants an end to free trade. You get the idea.

According to Pierre Martin, a political science professor at the University of Montreal, Quebec’s students dwell in a world of their own. They neither know nor care what’s happening in the rest of Canada. “The Quebec education system is a distinct system in the sense that very few students would contemplate the option of going elsewhere,” he said on As It Happens. “The system is very self-contained.” Now I get it: The kids are on another planet.

Whoever writes the epitaph of western civilization will marvel at the thoroughness with which higher education led to mass delusion - indeed, mass moronization.

Dances with Hogwash

The Democrats' Senate candidate in Massachusetts turns out to be Harvard's cigar-store Indian:

Elizabeth Warren said yesterday she is “proud” of her Native American heritage and indicated she had no problem with Harvard Law School using her roots to claim her as a diversity hire, but her campaign still could not produce documents proving her lineage.

“I am very proud of my Native American heritage, thank you,” said Warren when asked if she disapproved of the school counting her as a minority woman on the faculty. “These are my family stories ... This is our lives and I am very proud of that.”

The Herald reported yesterday that Harvard Law School officials listed Warren as Native American in the ’90s, when the school was under fierce fire for their faculty’s lack of diversity.

But don't worry, Harvard Law School racked up their identity-group bonus points on the basis of the authoritative evidence of Ms Warren's family "lore":

Aides said the tales of Warren’s Cherokee and Delaware tribe ancestors have been passed down through family lore.

...which surely ought to be good enough for faculty-lounge affirmative-action credits. Susan Vass asks:

Could Ward Churchill and Elizabeth Warren marry and franchise a chain of Forked Tongue Casinos for other fake Indians?

I've been wondering what will happen to American academia's vast sprawling campuses after the college "education" bubble bursts. But turning them all into casinos run by pretend Indian professors is a win-win solution. Fakewoods! Let's live for the wonder of it all...

From Iron Lady to Granite Ladies

John O'Sullivan was too busy plugging Gilbert & Sullivan this weekend to plug his own appearance in Manchester, New Hampshire this Tuesday evening. He'll be talking about Mrs Thatcher and women in politics at the big Vesta Roy event, named for one of the great ladies of Granite State politics. (I played the Vesta Roy two years ago, and had a grand time.) John is a familiar sight on the public speaking circuit around the world, as NR readers from Waziristan to the South Sandwich Islands well know. But I believe this is his debut appearance in New Hampshire, and I'm delighted to have the honor of introducing him and providing simultaneous translation if necessary.

It kicks off at 6pm at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St Anselm College. Admission is free, and Manchester is a convenient 20-minute drive from Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont and far northern Quebec. More details here and here.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Entertainment

I share John Hinderaker's general line on the general loathsomeness of the White House Correspondents' Dinner - I dislike both the self-flattering fake self-deprecation of the pols and the fawning defanged jabs of the comics. A ghastly business. But I also share his appreciation for the only novel aspect of last night's affair. My weekend column addressed Romney's dog-transporting and Obama's dog-eating - the former referenced by New York Times columnist Gail Collins some four dozen or so times, the latter not at all by her or any other Times bigshot. And yet there was the President of the United States up on stage doing dog-eating shtick in front of the nation. That represents an amazingly swift victory for the man who, all but entirely via Twitter, injected the topic into the public discourse - Jim Treacher.

Indeed,  as The Atlantic's Garance Franke-Ruta wrote:

My favorite DC/world disconnect at #WHCD dinner lst nite was when frmr politico now in NY asked why Obama kept talking about eating dogs.

It's not really a "DC/world" disconnect so much as a housetrained media/freelance bloodhound disconnect. If you rely for your news on the poodles of the Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, etc, or the self-neutered attack-dogs of the late-night comedy shows, you would, like Ms Franke-Ruta's friend, have been utterly in the dark. Jim Treacher forced the President and his palace guard to break their own embargo. Or as he put it:

I win.

Good for him.

Cuisines from My Stepfather

A couple of days ago, Obama-campaign top dog David Axelrod threw in the towel on the dog war. “I thought it was a little absurd to talk about what the president had done as a ten-year-old boy,” he sniffed to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, which is as near as the suddenly sheepish attack dog will ever get to conceding that Barack Obama is the first dog-eating president in the history of the republic. For those coming late to the feud, the Democrats started it, assiduously promoting accounts of a 1983 Romney vacation to Canada in which the family pooch Seamus rode on the roof of the car. Axelrod and the boys thought they could have some sport with this, and their poodles in the media eagerly played along. The New York Times columnist Gail Collins alone has referred to it dozens of times.

And then Jim Treacher, the sharp-eyed wag of the Daily Caller, uncovered this passage from Chapter Two of Obama’s bestselling but apparently largely unread memoir Dreams from My Father, in which the author recalls childhood meals with his stepfather Lolo Soetoro:

I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.

#ad#There followed an Internet storm of “I Ate a Dog (and I Liked It)” gags. Axelrod, an early tweeter of Romney doggie digs, has now figured out that the subject is no longer profitable for his boss. The dogs he let slip aren’t quite that savvy. Jeremy Funk, communications director of “Americans United for Change,” is still bulk-e-mailing links to the dogsagainstromney.com video “Should We Have a President Who Isn’t Even Qualified to Adopt a Pet?” Confronted by the revelation that his preferred candidate only swings by the Humane Society for the all-you-can-eat buffet, he huffs that this is “false equivalence.” “A six-year-old with no choice in the matter” is not the same as a grown man choosing to place his dog on the roof of his vehicle. My Canadian compatriot Kate McMillan, a dog breeder, advised Mr. Funk to “try this experiment--sit a normal, American 6 year old down at a plate and tell him it’s dog meat. Watch what happens.”

For their next exploding cigar, the Democrats chose polygamy. Brian Schweitzer, the Democratic governor of Montana, remarked that Romney was unlikely to appeal to women because his father was “born on a polygamy commune.” Eighty-six percent of women, noted Governor Schweitzer with a keenly forensic demographic eye, are “not great fans of polygamy.” You can understand the 86 percent’s ickiness at the whole freaky-weirdy idea of a president descended from someone who had multiple wives. Eww.

Just for the record, Romney’s father was not a polygamist; Romney’s grandfather was not a polygamist; his great-grandfather was a polygamist. Miles Park Romney died in 1904, so one can see why this would weigh heavy on 86 percent of female voters 108 years later.

Meanwhile, back in the female-friendly party, Obama’s father was a polygamist; his grandfather was a polygamist; and his great-grandfather was a polygamist who had one more wife (five in total) than Romney’s great-grandfather. It seems President Obama is the first male in his line not to be a polygamist. So, given the “gender gap,” maybe those 86 percent of American women are way cooler with polygamy than Governor Schweitzer thinks. Maybe these liberal chicks really dig it.

#page#The exploding cigars are revealing not merely of Democratic hypocrisy but of a key difference in worldview between liberals and conservatives. Jeremy Funk and Governor Schweitzer reflexively believe that their dog-eating polygamy-scion is different from the other guy’s dog-transporting polygamy-scion. This is nothing to do with young Barack being six or ten years old and meekly eating whatever was put in front of him. He was 34 years old when he wrote the passage quoted above and ten years older when he recorded the audio edition. And, as both versions make plain, he thinks it’s kinda cool, and he knows that to the average upscale white liberal it has the electric frisson of the exotic other.

Obama is correct that certain cultures believe a man takes on the powers of whatever he eats. In Liberia, where presidential contests are somewhat more primal than in this effete republic, Samuel Doe was captured by some of his eventual successor’s, ah, campaign staff, who cut off President Doe’s ears and then fed them to him. They then removed His Excellency’s genitals and wound up in a fight over who should get them, believing that the still not quite yet late president’s powers would be transferred to whoever got to chow down on the crown jewels. I’m not suggesting that President Obama has eaten a human penis, because, if he had, he’d almost certainly have boasted about it to the impressionable NPR ninnies who gobbled up his memoirs. But I am suggesting that Mitt Romney might like to consider it for next year’s Inauguration Day.

#ad#I jest -- just in case the Secret Service are taking a break from their Colombian hookers and are minded to investigate me for a threat against what Joe Biden would call the “big stick.” My point is that self-loathing cultural relativism is so deeply ingrained on the left that any revulsion to dog-eating is trumped by revulsion to criticizing any of the rich, vibrant cultural diversity out there in Indonesia or anywhere else. Most polygamy in the developed world is nothing to do with Mormons: It’s widely practiced by Western Muslims, whose plural marriages are recognized de facto by French and Ontario welfare departments and de jure by Britain’s pensions department. But “edgy” “transgressive” leftie comics on sad, pandering standup shows will reserve their polygamy jokes for Mormons until the last stern-faced elder in Utah keels over at the age of 112. In the United Kingdom, 57 percent of Pakistani Britons are married to their first cousins, with attendant increases in their children’s congenital birth defects. Bur the comics save their inbreeding jokes for stump-toothed West Virginians enjoying a jigger of moonshine and a bunk-up with their sisters. The editor of Washington’s leading gay newspaper was gay-bashed in Amsterdam, “the most tolerant city in Europe,” but by Muslims rather than the pasty rednecks who killed Matthew Shepard, so liberals don’t have a dog in this fight. Likewise, the epidemic of black-on-black murder vs. the once-in-a-blue-moon Trayvon Martin: To the liberal mindset, certain dogs won’t hunt. In one of his many bestsellers, Ayatollah Khomeini produced a hierarchy of “the uncleans”: Dogs are at Number Six, Infidels are at Number Eight, and Number Eleven is “the sweat of an unlawful ejaculation.” In the liberal hierarchy, conservative infidels are at Number One, dogs are somewhere between Eight and Eleven, and the sweat of an unlawful ejaculation isn’t on the list at all.

Axelrod is right. Obama’s appetite for dogs isn’t as critical as his appetite for spending and statism. But it was part of his cool. “Mitt Romney isn’t cool,” declared Brian Montopoli of CBS News this week in a story headlined “Can Mitt Romney Make Boring Sexy”? For economically beleaguered Americans, the more pertinent question is: “Can Barack Obama Make Cool Affordable”? It’s not just that Obama ate the dog, but that he’s screwing the pooch.



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

Don't See Red Over Green-on-Blue

Hitherto, "green-on-blue" violence - in which western troops are killed by their Aghan "allies - has been confined to regular soldiers and policemen. But today saw :

An elite Afghan soldier shot dead an American mentor and his translator at a U.S. base, Afghan officials said on Friday, in the first rogue shooting blamed on the country's new and closely vetted special forces.

But not to worry, the brass are fairly relaxed about it:

NATO commanders argue the growing number of shootings is in proportion to the growing size of Afghan security forces towards an eventual 352,000 target.

So the more Afghan soldiers Nato soldiers train, the more Nato soldiers Afghan soldiers kill. But as long as it's proportional it's no big deal:

"Quite often people resolve their personal problems by resorting to the use of a weapon. It's more of a cultural thing here."

So that's okay then.

This seems as good a time as any to dust off Burke's line that "men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters." Which is not un-germane to Andy, Mario and Mark K's back-and-forth on whether, in the Arab world, the Muslim Brotherhood is the path to democracy. "Democracy" - as in a polling station and ballot box - is the last piece of liberty's puzzle. What comes first are property rights, legal systems, freedom of speech and of conscience, a civil society rather than a tribal one. Absent those, the "cultural thing" will out.