Mark Steyn's Blog, page 43

Vee Vozz Only Obeying Orders

Courtesy of my state newspaper, The Union Leader, here's another heartwarming tale from America's friendly skies. This time SouthWest Airlines bravely attempted to prevent a dying eight-year old boy from spending his last Christmas at home.

The story has all the usual elements - the utter capriciousness of airline "safety":

The Dainiak family was told by Southwest staff that the boy would either have to forgo the protective seat or get off the plane because the chair was not compliant with Federal Aviation Administration rules.

“It was a little shocking,” said the boy's father, Chris. “We flew down with this exact chair six days before.”

And, of course, the desiccated response of the spokeseunuch:

“We are working directly with the family after sincerely apologizing and issuing a full refund for their less-than-positive travel experience,” Southwest spokesman Brad Hawkins said Sunday night. “We certainly will take away any potential learnings from this experience in our constant evaluation of how to provide the best possible customer service."

Potential learnings from their less-than-positive travel experience? How many "man"-hours of training do you have to have to talk like that?

If this were a TV movie on Lifestyle or some such, the traveling salesman behind them would say, "Hell, no. If you're kicking the dying kid off the plane, you'll have to kick us all off." And the stewardess would go, "Goshdarn it, this flight's not taking off without little Jimmy!" As one of the commenters roars:

My fellow Americans you are sheep if you don't speak out and stand up to these morons!!

But, as I wrote here earlier this month, American air transportation is doing a grand job of accustoming freeborn peoples to behaving like a bovine compliant herd. So no one speaks out, stands up, or exercises simple human judgment and the dying kid gets treated like garbage. But at least everyone complied with the Bureau of Compliance federal regulations, and that's what matters, right?

Silent Night

On this Christmas Eve, one of the great unreported stories throughout what we used to call Christendom is the persecution of Christians around the world. In Egypt, the "Arab Spring" is going so swimmingly that Copts are already fleeing Egypt and, for those Christians that remain, Midnight Mass has to be held in the daylight for security reasons. In Iraq, midnight services have been canceled entirely for fear of bloodshed, part of the remorseless de-Christianizing that has been going on, quite shamefully, under an American imperium.

Not merely the media but Christian leaders in the west seem to be embarrassed by behavior that doesn't conform to their dimwitted sappiness about "Facebook Revolutions". It took a Jew to deliver this line:

When Lord Sacks, chief rabbi in England, rose in the House of Lords to speak about the persecution of Christians, he quoted Martin Luther King. "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

Elisabeth's Barrenness and Ours

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Our lesson today comes from the Gospel according to Luke. No, no, not the manger, the shepherds, the wise men, any of that stuff, but the other birth: “But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.”

#ad#That bit of the Christmas story doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s in there -- Luke 1:13, part of what he’d have called the backstory, if he’d been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician. Of the four gospels, only two bother with the tale of Christ’s birth, and only Luke begins with the tale of two pregnancies. Zacharias is surprised by his impending paternity -- “for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years.” Nonetheless, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth’s pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive. If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle -- the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus’s birth is the miracle; Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth -- all life -- is to a degree miraculous and God-given.

We now live in Elisabeth’s world -- not just because technology has caught up with the Deity and enabled women in their 50s and 60s to become mothers, but in a more basic sense. The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency -- “America’s heading for the same fate as Greece if we don’t change course,” etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren -- i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social-democratic state where workers in “hazardous” professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again.

Look at it another way: Banks are a mechanism by which old people with capital lend to young people with energy and ideas. The Western world has now inverted the concept. If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars’ worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off? As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent’s economic “powerhouse” has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: One in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. “Germany’s working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “Rural areas will see a massive population decline and some villages will simply disappear.”

If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people’s money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: It’s run out of other people, period. Greece is a land of ever fewer customers and fewer workers but ever more retirees and more government. How do you grow your economy in an ever-shrinking market? The developed world, like Elisabeth, is barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it’s made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate’s somewhere around 1.2, 1.3 children per couple -- or about half “replacement rate.” Japan, Germany, and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, 20 percent of 40-year-old women are childless. In a recent poll, invited to state the “ideal” number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered “None.” We are living in Zacharias and Elisabeth’s world -- by choice.

#page#

America is not in as perilous a situation as Europe -- yet. But its rendezvous with fiscal apocalypse also has demographic roots: The Baby Boomers did not have enough children to maintain the solvency of mid-20th-century welfare systems premised on mid-20th-century birthrates. The “Me Decade” turned into a Me Quarter-Century, and beyond. The “me”s are all getting a bit long in the tooth, but they never figured there might come a time when they’d need a few more “them”s still paying into the treasury.

#ad#The notion of life as a self-growth experience is more radical than it sounds. For most of human history, functioning societies have honored the long run: It’s why millions of people have children, build houses, plant trees, start businesses, make wills, put up beautiful churches in ordinary villages, fight and if necessary die for your country . . . A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present, and future, in which the citizens, in Tom Wolfe’s words at the dawn of the “Me Decade,” “conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream.”

Much of the developed world climbed out of the stream. You don’t need to make material sacrifices: The state takes care of all that. You don’t need to have children. And you certainly don’t need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for: It’s no longer a stream, but a stagnant pool.

If you believe in God, the utilitarian argument for religion will seem insufficient and reductive: “These are useful narratives we tell ourselves,” as I once heard a wimpy Congregational pastor explain her position on the Bible. But, if Christianity is merely a “useful” story, it’s a perfectly constructed one, beginning with the decision to establish Christ’s divinity in the miracle of His birth. The hyper-rationalists ought at least to be able to understand that post-Christian “rationalism” has delivered much of Christendom to an utterly irrational business model: a pyramid scheme built on an upside-down pyramid. Luke, a man of faith and a man of science, could have seen where that leads. Like the song says, Merry Christmas, baby.

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. ©2011 Mark Steyn

Re: It's a Wonderful Movie

Kathryn, since you and Peter Dans raise the subject of Holiday Inn, the film that introduced "White Christmas" to the world, I thought I'd mention that I have a little podcast up featuring me and Irving Berlin's daughter discussing her dad's great song. (Mary Ellin plays it for me on her father's piano.) Without giving too much away, Christmas Day was a very painful day for Irving Berlin, which makes his gift to the world of "White Christmas" all the more remarkable.

The Torch Has Been Passed to a New Generation

In Egypt, the short version of the Arab Spring is that after 60 years the Nasser/Mubarak military has decided to throw its lot in with the Muslim Brotherhood. Given that for three decades the army was largely funded and its senior officers trained by the United States, at least we won't have to waste a lot of time on "Who lost Egypt?" analyses.

The consequences for Copts, women, Israeli Embassy staff, etc, have been clear for some time. But just as important over the long run may be the loss of historical memory. A few days ago, during the recent military crackdown, the Institut d'Egypte was burned to the ground -- mainly because young soldiers either joined in the gleeful savagery or declined to prevent it. Millions of manuscripts were lost.

This blogger (politically correct enough to use the terms "BCE" and "CE" rather than "BC and "AD") compares it to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. But I'd put it in the context of the Muslim world's more recent retreat into ignorance represented by the Brotherhood, the Wahhabists, the Ayatollahs et al. The famous statistic from a 2002 UN report -- that more books are translated into Spanish in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand -- suggests at the very minimum an extraordinarily closed society. Such openness to the world as exists was (as at the Institut d'Egypt) facilitated by the West. The journey from, say, Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, set in the ramshackle but pluralistic Egypt of Farouk's day, to the city in recent years is a descent into ever more malign parochialism.

If you're going to turn your country into a squat of theocratic totalitarianism, a stupid population is indispensable. Washington's most basic problem in Afghanistan, for example, is that most of its upcountry villagers are too ill educated even to be aware of the existence of countries such as the United States. When, after 9/11, a bunch of guys in the full Robocop showed up and started blowing stuff up, your average rural Pushtun simply had no more idea who they were or where they came from than the Americans vis a vis the space aliens in Independence Day.

Egypt is now falling into the hands of men who revel in Taliban-scale parochial stupidity and are bent on imposing it. From 1922 to 2011, the country got worse. It's now getting worser. 

The Gingrich Gestalt

I was wrong about Newt. Or, as Newt would say, I was fundamentally wrong. Fundamentally and profoundly wrong. I was as adverbially wrong about Newt as it’s possible to be. Back in the spring, during an analysis of the presidential field, I was asked by Sean Hannity what I thought of Gingrich. If memory serves, I guffawed. I suggested he was this season’s Alan Keyes -- a guy running for president to boost his speaking fees but whose candidacy was otherwise irrelevant. I said I liked the cut of this Tim Pawlenty fellow, who promptly self-destructed. There would be a lot of that in the months ahead: Michele Bachmann ODing on Gardasil, Rick Perry floating the trial balloon of his candidacy all year long, only to puncture it with the jaunty swing of his spur ten minutes into the first debate. And when all the other Un-Romney of the Week candidates were gone, there was Newt, the last man standing, smirking, waddling to the debate podium. Unlike the niche candidates, he offers all the faults of his predecessors rolled into one: Like Michele Bachmann, his staffers quit; like Herman Cain, he spent the latter decades of the last century making anonymous women uncomfortable, mainly through being married to them; like Mitt Romney, he was a flip-flopper, being in favor of government mandates on health care before he was against them, and in favor of big-government climate-change “solutions” before he was against them, and in favor of putting giant mirrors in space to light American highways by night before he was agai#...#oh, wait, that one he may still be in favor of. So, if you live in the I-95 corridor, you might want to buy blackout curtains.



#ad#But, when you draw them, Newt’s still there, shimmering beguilingly, which is the one adverb I fundamentally never thought I’d be using for this most fundamentally adverbial of candidates. A year ago, we were still talking about Palin and Daniels and Christie and Jindal and Ryan, an embarrassment of riches. Barely a month ago, Cain and 9-9-9 were riding high, an embarrassment of a different kind, and Gingrich was still a single-digit asterisk. But, like Gussie Fink-Nottle, we are all Newt-fanciers now. On the eve of Iowa it seems the Republican base’s dream candidate is a Clinton-era retread who proclaims himself a third Roosevelt, with Taft’s waistline and twice as many ex-wives as the first 44 presidents combined; a lead zeppelin with more baggage than the Hindenburg; a self-help guru crossed with a K Street lobbyist, which means he’s helped himself on a scale few of us could dream of. For this the Tea Party spent three years organizing and agitating?



Gingrich’s timing is brilliant — if it was planned. And, if it’s accidental, it’s kind of freaky. You’ll recall that two decades ago, in one of his many Post-it notes to himself, Newt wrote: “Gingrich -- primary mission. Advocate of civilization. Definer of civilization. Teacher of the rules of civilization.” I’m not sure I’m quite ready to acknowledge Newt as the “definer of civilization,” but he is certainly the teacher of the new rules of primary season. Consultants, money, endorsements are for schlubs. The daring candidate is out there running on portentous adverbs: In the land of Cain and Perry, the polysyllabic man is king. Iowa is now all that stands between Newt and the nomination. If he wins there, you might expect New Hampshire to protect its brand by voting for the non-Newt. Instead, what’s left of Romney’s softening lead in the Granite State will vanish as legions of nominal “independents” flood the Republican primary to vote for the candidate they figure will be easiest to beat in the general -- as happened in 1996, when more than a few of my liberal neighbors figured why waste your vote renominating Clinton when you can cross over, boost Pat Buchanan, and sabotage Bob Dole. From New Hampshire, the race moves to South Carolina and Florida, where Gingrich is already ahead, and thence to a slew of southern primaries, to the vast majority of whose electorate Mitt is a Massachusetts squish and to the rest a demonic cultist. So the fate of the Romney campaign now rests on some other candidate -- Ron Paul -- figuring out a way to stop Newt in Iowa.



#page#Warned against his tendency to self-glorification, Gingrich reacted to his amazing revival by modestly comparing himself to Reagan, Thatcher, and the founders of Walmart and McDonald’s. He left it to Joe McQuaid, publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader, to produce a comparison more appropriate to a statesman-historian of his stature: Winston Churchill. Like Churchill resigning as first lord of the Admiralty after the debacle of Gallipoli, Gingrich resigned as Speaker after the humiliation of the 1998 midterms. Like Churchill spending years in the political wilderness, Gingrich spent years in the wilderness of K Street. Like Gingrich demanding that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd be sent to jail for political profiteering, Churchill favored summary execution for the Axis leaders. Like Gingrich getting $1.8 million for services as a “historian” to Freddie Mac, Churchill was on a seven-figure retainer from Goebbels. No, hang on#...#Like Newt on Air Force One, Winston was made to exit King George VI’s Gold State Coach from the rear door. No, that’s not it . . .



#ad#Newt, says former New Hampshire governor John H. Sununu, is “inconsistent, erratic, untrustworthy, and unprincipled.” But, up against an untrustworthy, unprincipled opponent of consistently non-erratic soporific caution, that’s more than enough. Mitt Romney flutters no hearts. If you believe, as many Republican voters do, that a second Obama term is an existential threat to the republic, the house-trained torpor of the Romney campaign is an affront. Whether Newt is the antidote to it is a thornier question. The 44th president doesn’t loom especially large on the Gingrich canvas: If Newt were a disaster movie, Obama would be one of those bit players who get swept away in the general avalanche of devastation. As Gingrich laid it out to Newsweek, “‘You take brain science, you take personal and Social Security savings, you take offering the poor the opportunity to work and have a paycheck instead of food stamps, you take Lean Six Sigma’ -- a management-efficiency doctrine, his latest fascination -- ‘and suddenly you have a Gestalt that is in many ways conservative, but in many ways very moderate.’”



“You have a Gestalt”? Would Rick Perry have a Gestalt? Or Herman Cain? Romney might, but the consultants would have advised against mentioning it after it tested badly with the focus group. Bush was never in danger of having a Gestalt, nor Dole. And, with Newt’s Gestalt, brain science and Social Security savings accounts are only the beginning! You take the repeal of Obamacare, you take a 12.5 percent corporate-tax rate, you take community illegal-immigrant-legalization boards, you take airborne lasers and fire them at North Korea, you take the oceans and pump nitrogen into them to end global warming, you take Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and apply it as a business model to the Congressional Budget Office, you take Deepak Chopra on deep-pan pizza, and suddenly you have a candidate who knows the difference between Gestalt and Gstaad in a way that is kind of conservative but also very#...#



Whoa, hold up there. What exactly is so conservative about the Newt Gestalt? When Romney dared him to return his Freddie Mac windfall, Gingrich responded by demanding that Mitt “give back all of the money he’s earned from bankrupting companies and laying off employees over his years at Bain.” That’s a cute line if you’re a 32-year-old Transgender and Colonialism major trying to warm up the drum circle at Occupy Wall Street, but it’s very odd coming from the supposedly more-conservative candidate on the final stretch of a Republican primary. When Romney attacked Perry’s views on Social Security by accusing him of wanting to shove Granny off a cliff, he was recycling the most shopworn Democratic talking point. Newt effortlessly trumps that by recycling the laziest anti-globalist anarchist talking point. At Freddie Mac, Newt was peddling influence to a quasi-governmental entity. At Bain Capital, Mitt Romney was risking private equity in private business enterprise. What sort of “conservative” would conflate the two?



#page#With his numbers sinking, Mitt was driven to go negative. Asked where his policies differed from Gingrich’s, Romney cut to the chase: “We could start with his idea to have a lunar colony that would mine minerals from the moon.” You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, folks. Both leading conservative candidates have supported government mandates on health care. Both leading conservative candidates have supported massive expansion of entitlements. But they differ on the critical issue of whether we should use large numbers of welfare claimants to mine unpasteurized green cheese from the dark side of the moon. To be fair to Gingrich, he’s generally sounder on economic issues than Romney: Mitt’s reforms would leave us with a corporate-tax rate twice as high as Newt’s, and, in contrast to the Gingrich abolition of taxes on capital gains, Romney is proposing to end them only for those making under $200,000 because it would be wrong to “spend our precious tax dollars for a tax cut.” When “conservatives” think tax cuts are government “spending,” who needs Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank?



#ad#I have little fear that a Gingrich administration will be spending money on lunar mining or giant space mirrors or genetically modifying plant life around the planet to suck all the carbon out. But I rather doubt we’ll get the 12.5 percent corporate-tax rate and the abolition of the tax on capital gains, either. Newt is said to be “unpredictable.” This is true in the narrow sense that one would not have predicted that a social faux pas in placement on state transportation to the Yitzhak Rabin funeral would lead him to shut down the federal government. But, aside from such offenses to his amour-propre, Newt is actually extremely predictable. The surest way to bet is that the big-government stuff will happen and the rest won’t. It was Newt who gave us S-CHIP, the biggest expansion of Medicaid since the program was created. On the other hand, when it came to holding the line on “tax credits” for people who don’t pay any taxes, Gingrich looked into Clinton’s eyes and melted. Newt defends his big-government inclinations by placing them in an historical context of a muscular activist Washington, citing, for example, the Homestead Act of 1862. As it happens, I would be in favor of a new Homestead Act. Government owns far too much land, greater than the sovereign territory of many other major nations, and that fact alone supports the self-indulgent delusion that America can chug along as the Sierra Club writ large, a giant wildlife preserve that no longer needs to be in any business so vulgar as energy extraction, all of which can be outsourced (if you’re Obama) to Latin America or (if you’re Gingrich) to the moon. A small-government conservative might conclude that America would benefit from the equivalent of Mrs. Thatcher’s decision in 1979 to sell off public housing to its tenants: It’s not an especially big thing, but it’s a way of communicating your understanding of the relationship between the citizen and the state. In that sense, few of Gingrich’s proposals bear comparison with the Homestead Act: Instead of enabling Americans to take risks and push the frontiers, they incline mostly to the expansion of bureaucracy and an increase in dependency. As a result of Gingrich’s “reforms,” four out of ten American children are on Medicaid.



Presumably this is what he meant when he told Newsweek that his Gestalt is “in many ways conservative, in many ways very moderate.” I’d prefer to formulate it this way: Gingrich is a pushover for progressivism who’s succeeded in passing himself off as a hard-line right-wing bastard. Which is why Democrats who make the mistake of believing their own talking points on Newt invariably have to improvise hastily. In 2007 John Kerry found himself booked for a debate with Gingrich on climate change and had his speechwriters prepare some boilerplate about Newt’s “marching in lockstep with the climate-change deniers.” Unfortunately for him, the former Speaker spoke first and announced that man-made global warming was a real threat that we needed to address “very actively.” He praised as “a very interesting read” Kerry’s unreadable book on the subject, and for good measure added that he was “very worried about polar bears” because “my name ‘Newt’ actually comes from the Danish ‘Knut,’ and there’s been a major crisis in Germany over a polar bear named ‘Knut.’” Kerry abandoned his prescripted attack on Gingrich, hailed his candor, and put his arm around him. Lest the paying customers feel cheated by the bipartisan love-in, the senator attempted to put a bit of clear blue water between him and the ruthless right-wing bastard by raising the possibility that perhaps Gingrich did not share his enthusiasm for cap-and-trade. Newt said he was willing to be persuaded. “I am going to sell a few more books for you, John,” he declared.



#page#I’m not saying that the presidential debates will end with Gingrich offering to pen a new foreword to Dreams from My Father, only that anyone banking on Newt to clobber Obama is flying on blind faith.



By the way, “Knut” is not the name just of a German polar bear, but also of the Danish and English king better known to us as “Canute” -- the fellow who, at what is now Westminster, took his throne to the shore and commanded the incoming tide not to wet his feet. It declined to obey, as Canute knew it would: He staged the performance in order to teach his courtiers a lesson in the limits of kingly power. No such intimations of human limitation afflict the new Knut. Few politicians are more incisive at identifying the absurdities of America’s bloated, sclerotic leviathan -- as he pointed out recently, the headquarters of the U.S. military’s Africa Command is in Stuttgart, which even Herman Cain might recognize as barely qualifying as the general ballpark. But no other candidate on the right shares the boundless confidence that Leviathan will work just swell if only Knut the Great is there to command it. For Republicans, this is not someone who is both “very conservative” and “very moderate,” but someone who is potentially the worst of all worlds: a man who embraces big-government solutions to health care, climate change, and all the rest, but who gets damned as a mean-spirited vindictive right-wing hater -- the Gingrich who stole Christmas, to revive Newsweek’s 1994 cover story.



#ad#And, as predictably unpredictable as Gingrich is, there remains the drearier routine of his post-Speaker career. When Churchill was forced from the Admiralty in 1915, he went on to serve with the Sixth Battalion, the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front. By contrast, when he was forced from the speakership, Newt stayed in Washington working his Rolodex. These are different times, but even so the Freddie Mac business is not a small thing. Perhaps the single most repellent feature of the political class that has served America so disastrously in recent decades is its shameless venality in parlaying “public service” into a guarantee of an eternal snout at the trough. Newt writes bestselling books about government, produces DVDs about government, sets up websites about government, but he is as foreign to genuine private-sector wealth creation as any life politician. Indeed, his endurance in Washington represents one of the worst aspects of contemporary “public service” -- that a life in politics no longer depends on anything so whimsical as the votes of the people.



So what does that leave? Tonally, his confident swagger is more appealing to the Republican base than Romney’s unctuous aw-shucks wholesomeness -- just as John McCain’s maverickiness was more appealing than Romney last time around. And we know how that worked out for the GOP. The Dems are confident that this is a gift from the heavens: The Stupid Party is stupid enough to put up a scowly, jowly fat guy whose name is a byword for everything from the Nineties Mr. and Mrs. Moderate don’t want to revive.



But Newt wouldn’t be where he is right now if the conventional wisdom were all that wise. It’s easy to dismiss the futurological mumbo-jumbo of his accumulated brainstorms -- “the Triangle of American Progress,” “the Four Great Truths,” “the Five Pillars of American Civilization,” “the Five Pillars of the 21st Century,” “the Nine Zones of Creativity,” “the Fourteen Steps to Renewing American Civilization” -- except that right now he’s heading for the nomination and Paul Ryan and Mitch Daniels aren’t. The Nine Zones and Fourteen Steps have been distilled to the One Singular Sensation: Newt lui-même. The SAS, the British special forces, have a motto: “Who dares wins.” Unlike Mitt, Newt dares -- and he may yet win. As the old Dem bumper stickers used to say, “Newt Happens.”

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. This article originally appeared in the December 31, 2011, issue of National Review.

It Was a Little Spanish Flee...

Boat people - they're not just for Vietnam anymore. From London's Daily Telegraph:

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Treasury is putting measures in place to help evacuate thousands of expatriates living in Spain and Portugal in case they are stranded no access to their savings.

The two countries, which both have sizeable British populations, were among those made vulnerable by the "sustained deterioration" in funding...

“We are looking at how we can help evacuate them if the banks in Spain and Portugal collapse, getting people cash, things like that, sending planes. We did similar things in Lebanon in 2006."

Now there's a comparison every European Union nation wants to hear.

Tweedlemitt and Tweedlenewt

Amidst the torrent of commentary on the Second Coming of Newt, Jonah's point is worth considering:

Mitt Romney is still the sensible choice if you believe these are rough, but generally sensible, times. If, however, you think these are crazy and extraordinary times, then perhaps they call for a crazy, extraordinary — very high-risk, very high-reward — figure like Gingrich. 

This helps explain why Newtzilla is so formidable. In order to stop him, you need to explain to very anxious GOP voters that the times don’t require him.

I'm in the latter camp: I think these are "crazy and extraordinary times". Matter of fact, I wrote a whole book on the subject. So, for me, it's not enough merely to replace Obama: He's a symptom of the problem, rather than the underlying cause. The ship of state has become encrusted with barnacles upon barnacles, and, if the next guy isn't committed to getting rid of them, we're still going to sink.

Is Mitt the fellow to do that? Hillsdale's Paul Rahe considers the matter:

He will do what he needs to do to attract our votes, or, at least, in his awkward, inept way, he will try. And in this one particular he may feel bound to keep his promise. But once in office – like Eisenhower, Nixon, Bush One, and Bush Two – he will drift into extending the power and scope of the administrative entitlements state.

That would seem the way to bet. "Drift" is the best way to sum up his nominal stewardship of Massachusetts. In national office, he might approximate the instincts of David Cameron: Occasionally, depending on the audience he's pandering to, he'll say the right thing, but it's entirely whimsical and arbitrary, and underneath the drift goes on.

This next term is critical for America, not just because (if the IMF is correct) it may mark the end of America's long run as the world's leading economy but because, if ObamaCare is not repealed in the next four years, it will never be repealed. As I've said for years, government health care fundamentally (as Newt would say) redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state into one closer to junkie and pusher. Once the ObamaCare goodies kick in, getting back across the Rubicon will be a tough job. Nothing in Mitt's past suggests he's got either the stomach for that fight or the savvy to win it - and that's before you consider his basic instincts on the matter:

His initial response to Obamacare was to want “to repeal the bad and keep the good,” and among the things he thought good about the President’s healthcare reform were the incentive structure (i.e., the individual mandate enforced by fines) and the provision that insurance be provided to those with pre-existing conditions who had not seen fit to pay for insurance when they thought that they were healthy (i.e., making the responsible pay for the irresponsible).

So, if these are "crazy and extraordinary times", go with the crazy, right? Newt certainly thinks bigger than Mitt, but unfortunately he thinks in the same direction of unbounded micro-managerial faux-technocracy. Professor Rahe again:

Gingrich is a lot like Romney. Neither man recognizes that the source of our problems is government meddling and the distortion that this produces in what would otherwise be a free and relatively efficient market. What they think of as a cure is, in fact, the disease... What these managerial progressives in their desperation to manage the lives of the rest of us fail to understand is that the intellectual presumption underpinning the aspiration to “rational administration” that they embrace is the principal cause of our woes.

It's a tragedy that the Republican nomination has dwindled down to a choice not worth making. Yet not a single real vote has yet been cast. Iowa and New Hampshire will do us all a favor if they look beyond the frontrunners and keep genuinely conservative candidates in the game.

Merry War on Christmas!

Christmas in America is a season of time-honored traditions -- the sacred performance of the annual ACLU lawsuit over the presence of an insufficiently secular “holiday” tree; the ritual provocations of the atheist displays licensed by pitifully appeasing municipalities to sit between the menorah and the giant Frosty the Snowman; the familiar strains of every hack columnist’s “war on Christmas” column rolling off the keyboard as easily as Richard Clayderman playing “Winter Wonderland”#...#

This year has been a choice year. A crucified skeleton Santa Claus was erected as part of the “holiday” display outside the Loudoun County courthouse in Virginia -- because, let’s face it, nothing cheers the hearts of moppets in the Old Dominion like telling them, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus -- and he’s hanging lifeless in the town square.” Alas, a week ago, some local burghers failed to get into the ecumenical spirit and decapitated him. Who are these killjoys? Christians intolerant of the First Amendment (as some have suggested)? Or perhaps a passing Saudi? Our friends in Riyadh only the other day beheaded Amina bin Salem (so to speak) Nasser for “sorcery,” and it would surely be grossly discriminatory not to have some Wahhabist holiday traditions on display in Loudoun County. (The Islamic Saudi Academy, after all, is one of the most prestigious educational institutions of neighboring Fairfax County.) Across the fruitcaked plain in California, the city of Santa Monica allocated permits for “holiday” displays at Palisades Park by means of lottery. Eighteen of the 21 slots went to atheists -- for example, the slogan “37 million Americans know a myth when they see one” over portraits of Jesus, Santa, and Satan.

#ad#I don’t believe I’ve mentioned the city of Santa Monica in this space since my Christmas offering of 1998, when President Clinton was in the midst of difficulties arising from his mentoring of a certain intern. My column that year began:

“Operator, I’d like to call Santa Monica.”

“Why? Just ’cause he’s a little overweight?”

Crickets chirping? Ah, how soon they forget. Perhaps Santa Monica should adopt a less theocratic moniker and change its name to Satan Monica, as its interpretation of the separation of church and state seems to have evolved into expressions of public contempt for large numbers of the citizenry augmented by the traumatizing of their children. Boy, I can’t wait to see what those courageous atheists come up with for Ramadan. Or does that set their hearts aflutter quite as much?

One sympathizes, up to a point. As America degenerates from a land of laws to a land of legalisms, much of life is devoted to forestalling litigation. What’s less understandable is the faintheartedness of explicitly Christian institutions. Last year I chanced to see the e-mail exchanges between college administrators over the choice of that season’s Christmas card. I will spare their blushes, and identify the academy only as a Catholic college in New England. The thread began by asking the distribution list for “thoughts” on the proposed design. No baby, no manger, no star over Bethlehem, but a line drawing of a dove with a sprig of olive in its beak. Underneath the image was the following:

What is Christmas?

It is tenderness for the past, courage for the present, hope for the future.

It is a fervent wish that every cup may overflow with blessings rich and eternal,

and that every path may lead to peace.

Agnes M. Pharo

#page#The Agnes M. Pharo? A writer of such eminence that even the otherwise open-to-all-comers Wikipedia has no entry for her. Still, as a purveyor of vacuous pap to America’s credentialed class for all-purpose cultural cringe, she’s hard to beat. One unfortunate soul on the distribution list wandered deplorably off message and enquired whether the text “is problematic because the answer to the question ‘What is Christmas?’ from a Catholic perspective is that it is the celebration of the birth of Christ.” Her colleague patiently responded that, not to worry, all this religious-type meaning was covered by the word “blessings.” No need to use any insufficiently inclusive language about births of Saviors and whatnot; we all get the cut of Agnes’s jib from the artfully amorphous “blessings.”

#ad#When an explicitly Catholic institution thinks that the meaning of Christmas is “tenderness for the past, vapid generalities for the present, evasive abstractions for the future,” it’s pretty much over. Suffering no such urge to self-abasement, Muslim students at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., recently filed a complaint over the lack of Islamic prayer rooms on the campus. They find it offensive to have to pray surrounded by Christian symbols such as crucifixes and paintings of distinguished theologians. True, this thought might have occurred to them before they applied to an institution called “Catholic University.” On the other hand, it’s surely not unreasonable for them to have expected Catholic University to muster no more than the nominal rump Christianity of that Catholic college in New England. Why wouldn’t you demand Muslim prayer rooms? As much as belligerent atheists, belligerent Muslims reckon that a decade or so hence “Catholic colleges” will be Catholic mainly in the sense that Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia is still a cathedral: That’s to say, it’s a museum, a heritage site for where once was a believing church. And who could object to the embalming of our inheritance? Christmas is all about “tenderness for the past,” right? When Christian college administrators are sending out cards saying “We believe in nothing,” why wouldn’t you take them at their word?

Which brings us back in this season of joy to the Republican presidential debates, the European debt crisis, and all the other fun stuff. The crisis afflicting the West is not primarily one of unsustainable debt and spending. These are mere symptoms of a deeper identity crisis. It is not necessary to be a believing Christian to be unnerved by the ease and speed with which we have cast off our inheritance and trampled it into the dust. When American municipalities are proudly displaying the execution of skeleton Santas and giant Satans on public property, it may just be a heartening exercise of the First Amendment, it may be a trivial example of the narcissism of moral frivolity. Or it could be a sign that eventually societies become too stupid to survive. The fellows building the post-Western world figure they know which it is.

--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn

Include Me Out

Re that NR editorial, I would like, politely, to dissent from my colleagues' dismissal of Perry and Bachmann.

In the former case, a handful of poor debate performances should not disqualify a man from executive responsibility: Our age's veneration for men with "nothing to do but think and talk" (in Churchill's words, on the sort of chaps he didn't want in his war cabinet) is one reason why the Western world is sliding off a cliff.

In the latter case, Congresswoman Bachmann has fought a principled, conservative campaign with only one significant misstep -- her overreach on the Gardasil business. Again, that shouldn't be a disqualification. Nor should having more chiefs of staff than she has foster children (I speak as a guy who believes citizen-legislators shouldn't have chiefs of staff, anyway). To be sexist about it, President Bachmann at her best would be another Thatcher and at her worst another Merkel -- and Chancellor Merkel currently presides over the least worst Western economy. What's not to like? Go, Michele!

As for the assertion of our more hysterical commenters that being reluctant to support a man with an office on K Street and a retainer from Freddie Mac is a sure sign that NRO is full of Beltway cocktail-sippers angling for cosy sinecures in the Romney administration, yeah, sure, whatever: Fellows who try this line of attack on me have failed as spectacularly as it's possible to fail. But, just for the record, in recent years I've visited Washington, D.C., once every 18 months or so, and plan to cut it down to once every 24 months in the next half-decade. And I have no interest in serving as Deputy Assistant Under-Secretary of the Department of Paperwork under Mitt or anyone else. Anyone who thinks that sentient beings require an ulterior motive to be wary of a Newt nomination should have an herbal tea and lie down in a darkened room for half an hour.