Mark Steyn's Blog, page 40

The Man Who Gave Us Newt

The nature of this peculiar primary season - the reason it seems at odds with both the 2009-2010 political narrative and the seriousness of the times - was determined by Mitt Romney. Even if you don't mind RomneyCare, or the abortion flip-flop, or any of the rest, there's a more basic problem: He's not a natural campaigner, and on the stump he instinctively recoils from any personal connection with the voters. So, in compensation, he's bought himself a bunch of A-list advisors and a lavish campaign. He is, as he likes to say, the only candidate with experience in the private sector. So he knows better than to throw his money away, right? But that's just what he's doing, in big ways and small.

Small: It's a good idea to get that telegenic gal (daughter-in-law?) to stand behind him during the concession speech, but one of those expensive consultants ought to tell her not to look so bored and glassy-eyed as the stiff guy grinds through the same-old-same-old for the umpteenth time. To those watching on TV last night, she looked like we felt.

Big: Why is the stump speech so awful? "I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that's the America millions of Americans believe in. That's the America I love." Mitt paid some guy to write this insipid pap. And he paid others to approve it. Not only is it bland and generic, it's lethal to him in a way that it wouldn't be to Gingrich or Perry or Bachmann or Paul because it plays to his caricature - as a synthetic, stage-managed hollow man of no fixed beliefs. And, when Ron Paul's going on about "fiat money" and Newt's brimming with specifics on everything (he was great on the pipeline last night), Mitt's generalities are awfully condescending: The finely calibrated inoffensiveness is kind of offensive.

And what's with the wind up? The "shining city on the hill"? That's another guy's line - a guy with whom you have had hitherto little connection other than your public repudiation of him back in the Nineties. Can't any of his highly paid honchos write him a campaign slogan that's his own and doesn't sound in his mouth so cheesily anodyne, as if some guy ran a focus-group and this phrase came up with the lowest negatives?

And where, among all the dough he's handing out, is the rapid-response team? Newt's "spontaneous" indignation at John King was carefully crafted by Gingrich himself. By contrast, Mitt has a ton of consultants, and not one of them thought he needed a credible answer on Bain or taxes? For a guy running as a chief exec applying proven private-sector solutions, his campaign looks awfully like an unreformable government bureaucracy: big, bloated, overstaffed, burning money, slow to react, and all but impossible to change.

Mitt's strategy for 2012 as for 2008 was to sit on his lead and run out the clock: Four years ago, that strategy died in New Hampshire; this time round it died one state later. Congratulations! Years ago, I was chit-chatting with Arthur Laurents, the writer of West Side Story and The Way We Were and much else, about some show that was in trouble on the road that he'd been called in to "fix". "The trouble with a bad show," he sighed, "is that you can make it better but you can never make it good." The Romney candidacy is better than it was four years ago, but it's not clear that it's good. Mitt needs to get good real fast: A real speech, real plan, real responses, and real fire in the belly. Does he have it in him?  

The Sinking of the West

Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine tweets:

Is there any chance that Mark Steyn won’t use the Italian captain fleeing the sinking ship as the lead metaphor in a column on EU collapse?

Oh, dear. You’ve got to get up early in the morning to beat me to civilizational-collapse metaphors. Been there, done that. See page 185 of my most recent book, where I contrast the orderly, dignified, and moving behavior of those on the Titanic (the ship, not the mendacious Hollywood blockbuster) with that manifested in more recent disasters. There was no orderly evacuation from the Costa Concordia, just chaos punctuated by individual acts of courage from, for example, an Hungarian violinist in the orchestra and a ship’s entertainer in a Spiderman costume, both of whom helped children to safety, the former paying with his life.

#ad#The miserable Captain Schettino, by contrast, is presently under house arrest, charged with manslaughter and abandoning ship. His explanation is that, when the vessel listed suddenly, he fell into a lifeboat and was unable to climb out. Seriously. Could happen to anyone, slippery decks and all that. Next thing you know, he was safe on shore, leaving his passengers all at sea. On the other hand, the audio of him being ordered by Coast Guard officers to return to his ship and refusing to do so is not helpful to this version of events.

In the centenary year of the most famous of all maritime disasters, we would do well to consider honestly the tale of the Titanic. When James Cameron made his movie, he was interested in everything except what the story was actually about. I confess I have very little memory of the film except for Kate Winslet’s lush full breasts and some tedious sub-Riverdance prancing in the hold, but what I do recall traduced the memory of honorable men: In my book, I cite First Officer William Murdoch. In real life, he threw deckchairs to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship -- the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron’s movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. The director subsequently apologized to the First Officer’s hometown in Scotland and offered £5,000 toward a memorial, which converted into Hollywood dollars equals rather less than what Cameron and his family paid for dinner after the Oscars.

On the Titanic, the male passengers gave their lives for the women and would never have considered doing otherwise. On the Costa Concordia, in the words of a female passenger, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboat.” After similar scenes on the MV Estonia a few years ago, Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine: “There is no law that says women and children first. That is something from the age of chivalry.”

If, by “the age of chivalry,” you mean our great-grandparents’ time.

In fact, “women and children first” can be dated very precisely. On Feb. 26, 1852, HMS Birkenhead was wrecked off the coast of Cape Town while transporting British troops to South Africa. There were, as on the Titanic, insufficient lifeboats. The women and children were escorted to the ship’s cutter. The men mustered on deck. They were ordered not to dive in the water lest they risk endangering the ladies and their young charges by swamping the boats. So they stood stiffly at their posts as the ship disappeared beneath the waves. As Kipling wrote:

We’re most of us liars, we’re ’arf of us thieves, an’ the rest of us rank as can be, But once in a while we can finish in style (which I ’ope it won’t ’appen to me).

Sixty years later, the men on the Titanic -- liars and thieves, wealthy and powerful, poor and obscure -- found themselves called upon to “finish in style,” and did so. They had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. They, too, ’oped it wouldn’t ’appen to them, but, when it did, the social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure and across all classes.

Today there is no social norm, so it’s every man for himself -- operative word “man,” although not many of the chaps on the Titanic would recognize those on the Costa Concordia as “men.” From a grandmother on the latter: “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.”

Whenever I write about these subjects, I receive a lot of mail from men along the lines of this correspondent: “The feminists wanted a gender-neutral society. Now they’ve got it. So what are you complaining about?”

#page#And so the manly virtues (if you’ll forgive a quaint phrase) shrivel away to the so-called “man caves,” those sad little redoubts of beer and premium cable sports networks.

We are beyond social norms these days. A woman can be a soldier. A man can be a woman. A seven-year-old cross-dressing boy can join the Girl Scouts in Colorado because he “identifies” as a girl. It all adds to life’s rich tapestry, no doubt. But I can’t help wondering, when the ship hits the fan, how many of us will still be willing to identify as a man.

#ad#A day or two after the cruise wreck, I read the obituary of a man called Ian Bryce, who found himself at Dunkirk in 1940, when an ad hoc flotilla of English fishing boats, pleasure cruisers, and other “little ships” evacuated Allied troops cut off by the advancing Germans. Young Bryce, a 17-year-old midshipman, singlehandedly rescued 109 British soldiers, eight Belgian officers, two Frenchmen, and two Jewish refugees in multiple trips in a motorboat under Luftwaffe fire. Nobody asked Captain Schettino to do anything extraordinary, only his duty.

Abe Greenwald isn’t thinking big enough. The Costa Concordia isn’t merely a metaphor for EU collapse but -- here it comes down the slipway -- the fragility of civilization. Like every ship, the Concordia had its emergency procedures -- the lifeboat drills that all crew and passengers are obliged to go through before sailing. As with the security theater at airports, the rituals give the illusion of security -- and then, as the ship tips and the lights fail and the icy black water rushes in, we discover we’re on our own: from dancing and dining, showgirls and saunas, to the inky depths in a matter of moments.

Today the wealthiest nations in human history build cruise ships rather than battleships, vast floating palaces dedicated to the good life -- to the proposition that, in the plump and complacent West, life itself is a cruise, sailing (as the Concordia’s name suggests) on a placid lake of peace and harmony. Since the economic downturn of 2008, the Titanic metaphor -- of a Western world steaming for the iceberg but unable to correct course -- has become a little overworked, the easiest cliché for any politician attempting to project urgency. But let’s assume they’re correct, and we’re heading full steam for the big ’berg. When we hit, what’s the likelihood? That our response will be as ordered and civilized as those on the Titanic? Or that we will descend into the hell of the Concordia?

The contempt for “women and children first” is not a small loss. For soft cultures in good times, dispensing with social norms is easy. In hard times, you may have need of them.

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

Re: re: Make Up Your Mind, Newt

Jonah, Andy, I'm with you guys. Does Newt have an "open marriage" with John King? He gets to slap him around on TV, but after the show he's all kissy-kissy with him? I've sat through too many third-rate nights on Broadway not to recognize the difference between cheap manipulative ersatz indignation and the real thing.

More fool the crowd for rewarding him for it. The Pundette thinks Newt-vs-the-media is one of those Iraq-Iran war neither-of-the-above deals:

Here's a heads-up for Newt: We don't have to choose between you and them; we can dislike you both.

While we're at it, a lot of readers think this post was some sort of pro-Santorum pitch. Not at all. I'm merely pointing out that he was damaged by the inability of the fools running the Iowa caucus to conduct the first meaningful vote in the presidential process in a timely and efficient way. Please note my final point: Nowhere else in the civilized world does it take so long to count so few votes, while losing so many along the way. Iowans should be cringing with embarrassment.

In a broader sense, the primary season seems oddly out of sync with the times. Chastised by Laura Ingraham for his characteristically tepid message on the economy, Mitt responded: "Do you have a better one, Laura?" There's a campaign slogan if ever I heard one: "Romney 2012. Do You Have A Better One?"

If in November the incumbent manages to see off his challenger, I would imagine an Obama second term would start where the non-recess recess appointments left off - with an ever more brazen contempt for the legal niceties that will drive a coach and horses through the Constitution. Historians will look back mystified at a contest between Mitt's soporific trimming and Newt's histrionic showboating. Obama means it. Do they?

Rick Wronged

As I think about it, the inability of the boobs who run the Iowa caucuses to declare reliably a winner until over two weeks after voting is not a small thing. Obviously, a couple of dozen votes one way or another is statistically insignificant, but then so, in Iowa, are the total votes: 121,000-and-something Iowans participated in the Republican caucuses and they have more say over the presidential nominating process than all 37 million Californians. So they could at least get it right, and in a timely manner.

The horse-race headlines matter. Just nine days ago, the bigfoot media line on primary night in the Granite State was that Mitt Romney was the first non-incumbent in the history of the planet to win both Iowa and New Hampshire. Wow! Unprecedented! One for the record books! Next question: Will the history-making and increasingly inevitable "Big Mo" Mitt make it three-in-a-row in the Palmetto State?

But this entire narrative rested on nothing more substantial than an incompetent count in a state where votes in eight precincts had gone missing. On the eve of South Carolina, it turns out that Mister Inevitable, Mister Run-The-Board, Mister Sweep-The-Nation has done no more than win one state in which he keeps a vacation home.

If I were Rick Santorum, I'd be feeling mighty irked by the two-week switcheroo. Had he been pronounced the winner of Iowa back when it mattered, who knows the difference it might have made to his fundraising, or to a meaningful surge in New Hampshire, or to the ability to buy airtime in Florida. What First World jurisdiction needs over a fortnight to count a hundred thousand votes? 

The Last Laugh

John J Miller started the day here in The Corner with the story of Professor Robert Klein Engler, who was fired from Roosevelt University and only discovered why two months later. It was for telling a joke:

A group of sociologists did a poll in Arizona regarding the state’s new immigration law. Sixty percent said they were in favor, and 40 percent said, ‘No hablo Ingles.’

For NR last year I wrote a "Happy Warrior" column about Milan Kundera's first novel, about a loyal Party member in newly Communist Czechoslovakia with a great future ahead of him who makes one mistake: He makes a joke, and his life is ruined. He's expelled from the Party and his university, and sent to work in the mines.

I first read The Joke as a schoolboy, when we thought such deranged scenarios were confined to the Warsaw Pact. I re-read it on the flight to Vancouver, the day before the British Columbia "Human Rights" Tribunal devoted the best part of a day's court proceedings to hearing testimony from "expert witnesses" on the "tone" of my jokes. Fresh from that triumph, the BC HRT then convicted and fined Guy Earle, a stand-up comedian who committed the hitherto unknown crime of putting down a lesbian heckler homophobically. At the time of my NR column, I was writing about Dr Lazar Greenfield, president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, whose career came to a sudden end after he wrote a light-hearted Valentine's Day piece for Surgery News on the health benefits for women of semen. Although right on the facts, he offended the tender sensitivities of his feminist colleagues, and his decades of illustrious service availed him naught. Like Kundera's protagonist, Dr Greenfield had made an ideologically unsound joke, and was disappeared: Surgery News wound up pulping the entire issue.

And now we have Professor Engler. As I wrote in NR:

As a waggish adolescent, I liked the absurdity of the situation in which Ludvik finds himself. Later, I came to appreciate Kundera had skewered the touchiness of totalitarianism, and the consequential loss of any sense of proportion.

We are not yet a totalitarian society, but the touchiness of America's wretched academy is certainly providing a fine pilot program.

Old Jack Swing

Yes, Newt was on grand form last night. He was devastating in his rebuke to Ron Paul. If he hadn't trumped himself with his comeback to Juan Williams, Gingrich's contempt for Paul's equivalence between Osama bin Laden and a Chinese dissident would have been the line of the night. He then capped it with this:

South Carolina in the Revolutionary War had a young 13-year-old named Andrew Jackson. He was sabred by a British officer and wore a scar his whole life. Andrew Jackson had a pretty clear-cut idea about America’s enemies: Kill them.

By the dismal standards of campaign debates, that's a thing of beauty: lightly-worn knowledge, big-picture perspective, locally targeted, vivid and specific, crisply delivered. You can't be "prepped" for lines like that - or for the "99 weeks* is an associate degree" one. You have to know a lot of stuff, be able to fish the right card out of the mental Rolodex, and then swat it down the other guy's gullet with a bit of brio. Good for Newt. But how sad there's only one fellow on stage capable of that.

[*corrected from "months"]

A Good Blog Discovery

I just discovered that Liberty Fund has recently begun a blog entitled Library of Law and Liberty. It features libertarian and originalist views on hot legal questions such as the case against Obamacare.

A Question about the Corner

On debate and primary nights, we post a tweet tracker at the top of this page. Do you find it helpful? Should we consider making it a permanent feature?

From 25% ceiling to 25-Point Lead

I was never a big believer in the theory that Romney was capped forever at 25%. He is now comfortably above it in national polls. 

Teamwork and Solitude: A Delicate Balance

Those who follow the prevailing pedagogical trends have for some time observed that, as Susan Cain writes, "solitude is out" and "collaboration is in." Cain, the author of the forthcoming book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, cites research indicating that solitude is in fact an indispensable impetus to creativity and learning and that people are more innovative when they work privately and autonomously.

The mindless, detrimental extremes to which a dogmatic acceptance of teamwork can lead is illustrated by what Cain witnessed in one classroom -- a group-work project in which students were not permitted to ask a question unless every member of the group posed the exact same question.

The thrust here, however, is by no means to eliminate collaboration but rather to restore a more balanced approach to creativity, one that incorporates the altogether natural and invaluable habit of learning to work on one's own for uninterrupted periods. Within this context, Cain points to studies suggesting that important academic work is more and more carried on by teams but that, interestingly, the most influential of these achievements involve members consulting remotely, from separate universities.