Mark Steyn's Blog, page 48

Complacency Watch

Michelle Malkin writes about the various unconservative inclinations of the current Republican Top Four candidates:

Would be nice to get more conservatives to Occupy GOP Debates next time around.

On a related theme, Phyllis Schlafly's column is headlined "America's Decline: Candidates Just Don't Get It":

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, conducted jointly by Democrats and Republicans, reports that 74 percent of Americans think our government is taking us in the wrong direction, and only 17 percent think we are on the right track. Other polls are similar, with Gallup reporting 85 percent dissatisfied with the way our country is headed, and only 13 percent satisfied.

I broadly accept Hugh Hewitt's line - that it's in the nature of competitive politics that I'll wind up with a candidate whom I agree with 70 per cent of the time. But it's very depressing that in the debates so far there's no sense, from either the questions or the answers, of the urgency of the situation. On every meaningful indicator, this country is accelerating toward the cliff. If the multi-trillion debt pile-up is not halted and dramatically reversed within the next presidential term, America will slip too far too fast to recover within its present political arrangements. Were the nominating process to fail this time round (as it did in 2008) it would be not merely a disappointment but an existential threat.

Yet the center of these debates is nowhere near where it ought to be. I accept that there's an element of don't-frighten-the-horses calculation going on, but it's doing the nation a huge disservice. Much of America is seizing up. There are too many barnacles encrusted to the hulk, and the "viable" candidates are arguing about giving them a paint job.

New World Order

My weekend column is (not for the first time, alas) about our suicidal complacency and assumptions of permanence. By way of example:

AFP - China has made a "secret commitment" to prop up the crisis-hit eurozone in return for budget reforms and public sector cuts, the Sunday Times reported, amid ongoing turmoil over the region's debt crisis.

The paper said Chinese representatives at the Paris G20 finance gathering on Saturday had indicated that Beijing was willing to pump tens of billions into the eurozone to purchase infrastructure assets from debt-plagued nations.

Consider how mystefying that opening sentence would seem to any American or westerner of a mere 40 years ago. This is the world we have made - and all the OWS gang have to offer is more of the same self-indulgent profligacy that got us into the hole. 

Crisis of Decadence

When the think-tank chappies ponder “decline,” they tend to see it in geopolitical terms. Great powers gradually being shunted off the world stage have increasing difficulties getting their way: Itsy-bitsy colonial policing operations in dusty ramshackle outposts drag on for years and putter out to no obvious conclusion. If that sounds vaguely familiar, well, the State Department reported last month that the last Christian church in Afghanistan was razed to the ground in 2010. This intriguing factoid came deep within their “International Religious Freedom Report.” It is not, in any meaningful sense of that word, “international”: For the last decade, Afghanistan has been a U.S. client state; its repulsive and corrupt leader is kept alive only by NATO arms; according to the World Bank, the Western military/aid presence accounts for 97 percent of the country’s economy. American taxpayers have spent the best part of half a trillion dollars and lost many brave warriors in that benighted land, and all we have to show for it is a regime openly contemptuous of the global sugar daddy that created and sustained it. In another American client state, the Iraqi government is publicly supporting the murderous goon in Syria and supplying him with essential aid as he attempts to maintain his dictatorship. Your tax dollars at work.



#ad# As America sinks into a multi-trillion-dollar debt pit, it is fascinating to listen to so many of my friends on the right fret about potential cuts to the Pentagon budget. The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we are spending insufficient money, but that so much of that money has been utterly wasted. Dominant powers often wind up with thankless tasks, but the trick is to keep it within budget: London administered the vast sprawling fractious tribal dump of Sudan with about 200 British civil servants for what, with hindsight, was the least worst two-thirds of a century in that country’s existence. These days I doubt 200 civil servants would be enough for the average branch office of the Federal Department of Community Organizer Grant Applications. Abroad as at home, the United States urgently needs to start learning how to do more with less.

As I said, these are more or less conventional symptoms of geopolitical decline: Great powers still go through the motions but increasingly ineffectually. But what the Council on Foreign Relations types often miss is that, for the man in the street, decline can be very pleasant. In Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, the average citizen lives better than he ever did at the height of Empire. Today’s Europeans enjoy more comfortable lives, have better health, and take more vacations than their grandparents did. The state went into decline, but its subjects enjoyed immense upward mobility. Americans could be forgiven for concluding that, if this is “decline,” bring it on.

But it’s not going to be like that for the United States: Unlike Europe, geopolitical decline and mass downward mobility will go hand in hand. Indeed, they’re already underway. Whenever the economy goes south, experts talk of the housing “bubble,” the tech “bubble,” the credit “bubble.” But the real bubble is the 1950 “American moment,” and our failure to understand that moments are not permanent. The United States emerged from the Second World War as the only industrial power with its factories intact and its cities not reduced to rubble, and assumed that that unprecedented preeminence would last forever: We would always be so far ahead and so flush with cash that we could do anything and spend anything and we would still be Number One. That was the thinking of Detroit’s automakers when they figured they could afford to buy off the unions. The industrial powerhouse of 1950 is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases. And yes, Detroit is an outlier, but look at the assumptions its rulers made, and then wonder whether it will seem quite such an outlier in the future.



Take, for example, the complaints of the young Americans currently “occupying” Wall Street. Many protesters have told sympathetic reporters that “it’s our Arab Spring.” Put aside the differences between brutal totalitarian dictatorships and a republic of biennial elections, and simply consider it in economic terms: At the “Occupy” demonstrations, not-so-young college students are demanding that their tuition debt be forgiven. In Egypt, half the population lives in poverty; the country imports more wheat than any other nation on the planet, and the funds to do that will dry up in a couple months’ time. They’re worrying about starvation, not how to fund half a decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U.

#page# One sympathizes. When college tuition is $50,000 a year, you can’t “work your way through college” -- because, after all, an 18-year-old who can earn 50-grand a year wouldn’t need to go to college, would he? Nevertheless, his situation is not the same as some guy halfway up the Nile living on $2 a day: One is a crisis of the economy, the other is a crisis of decadence. And, generally, the former are far easier to solve.

My colleague Rich Lowry correctly notes that many of the beleaguered families testifying on the “We are the 99%” websites have real problems. However, the “Occupy” movement has no real solutions, except more government, more spending, more regulation, more bureaucracy, more unsustainable lethargic pseudo-university with no return on investment, more more more of what got us into this hole. Indeed, for all their youthful mien, the protestors are as mired in America’s post-war moment as their grandparents: One of their demands is for a trillion dollars in “environmental restoration.” Hey, why not? It’s only a trillion.

#ad# Beneath the allegedly young idealism are very cobwebbed assumptions about societal permanence. The agitators for “American Autumn” think that such demands are reasonable for no other reason than that they happen to have been born in America, and expectations that no other society in human history has ever expected are just part of their birthright. But a society can live on the accumulated capital of a glorious inheritance only for so long. And in that sense this bloodless, insipid revolution is just a somewhat smellier front for the sclerotic status quo.

Middle-class America is dying before our eyes: The job market is flatlined, the college fees soar ever upward, the property market is underwater, and Obamacare is already making medical provision both more expensive and more restrictive. That doesn’t leave much else -- although no doubt, as soon as they find something else, the statists will fix that, too. As more and more middle Americans are beginning to notice, they lead more precarious and vulnerable lives than did their blue-collar parents and grandparents without the benefit of college “education” and health “benefits.” For poorer Americans, the prospects are even glummer, augmented by ever grimmer statistics on obesity, childhood diabetes, and much else. Potentially, this is not decline, but a swift devastating downward slide, far beyond what post-war Britain and Europe saw and closer to Peronist Argentina on a Roman scale.

It would be heartening if more presidential candidates understood the urgency. But there is a strange lack of boldness in most of their proposals. They, too, seem victims of that 1950 moment, and assumptions of its permanence.

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

Three-Way Hot Tub Lutherans for Perry

After the New Hampshire debate, Jonah wrote apropos Herman Cain's sunny disposition:

This trait is so important for Republicans in particular because of the tendency to cast conservatives as joyless scolds and the tendency of too many conservatives to live up to that sterotype.

Step forward, Miss Sarah Leal, last seen naked in a hot tub with Ashton Kutcher and another young lady:

After they had sex for the first time, the two made small talk, discussing where she grew up and when her birthday was. She also told him that she was religious -- a Lutheran from Texas.

“He said, ‘Oh, my gosh, are you a Republican?’ I was like, ‘What, do you like Obama?’ He said ‘Yeah,’ and asked if I could name any up-and-coming candidates. I said Rick Perry.”

Then they had sex again.

I'm broadly sympathetic to Jonah's thesis, but I do hope we won't all have to have three-ways in a hot tub with Ashton Kutcher to play against stereotype.

Re: What Happened to Hot Stewardesses?

Daniel, with respect to Megan McArdle, feminist shaming and an anti-discrimination culture do not entirely account for the world-beating dinginess of American "flight attendants". After all, feminism and political correctness have taken hold in other western nations, and their stewardesses haven't sunk to the pitiful levels of our airlines. Nor does "de-regulation" explain it. US air travel has been de-regulated in terms of price, but in terms of behavior it's the most micro-regulated environment in American life. The airline cabin is the sky-high version of Nanny Bloomberg's New York, and that was before 9/11. In a world where the customer's right to "service" no longer exists, why be surprised that you wind up with the developed world's surliest trolley dollies in worn, shiny, shapeless navy stretch pants?

Okay, I don't want to be sexist here. If you want to see America's worst-dressed gay men, take a plane. Where have all the hot stewards gone?

By the way, the other night I chanced to see (for what of anything better to do) the prototype Seventies disaster movie, Airport. Hadn't caught it in several decades. Plenty of hot stewardesses. Sample dialogue:

Stewardess: "I haven't got a thing to wear."

Captain: "Great."

Yet I had clear forgotten that, insofar as the film has any real content, it's the anti-abortion subtext. Dean Martin is the philandering captain and lovely Jacqueline Bisset the stewardess he impregnates. When she breaks the news to him, he demonstrates his tender, sensitive side by refusing to let her go to some "butcher" but instead offering to fly her to Sweden, where they have "clean hospitals". Yet by the end of the nightmare flight and terrorist explosion, he's come to understand the preciousness of life and ends the film rushing the injured gal to hospital to make sure her baby's saved, too. I'm not sure who the 2011 equivalents of Dino and Jackie Bisset are, but I doubt you could get a mainstream star, director, producer or studio to peddle that message in Hollywood today.  

You Better Have a Permit for That Kid You Rescued...

Cable news viewers will be familiar with the Lisa Irwin missing-baby case in Missouri. Today, Bill Stanton, a private investigator and telly celeb, arrived in Kansas City to begin helping the family. The most interesting aspect of this NBC Action News report was the reaction of local PIs:

Ron Rugen says he is legally bound to file a complaint with the state because he says Stanton has no license to be a P.I. in Missouri.

So in a supposedly free society a family cannot call in someone from out of state to help find a missing kid? Somewhere in my latest book, I note that in the Fifties one in twenty Americans required permission from the government to do their jobs, and that today it's one in three. No doubt it'll be one in two within a half-decade or so. But, even so, it's impressive to see how for Mr Rugen & Co it's less important to find the kid than to find out whether you're in compliance with the Bureau of Bureaucratic Compliance.

[Mr Stanton] added, in reponse to those who are questioning his credentials in the State of Missouri that he wants, "to keep the focus on finding the baby."

Good luck with that. If an uncredentialed person recovers the baby, does he have to return her to the kidnapper? 

'It's just my opinion... It's whatever... I'm just putting it out there'

Charles, re that OWS protester who wants his college tuition paid because he wants his college tuition paid, it would be fascinating to know which particular academic institution educated him to such a lethal degree of intellectual reasoning.

That's the problem right there: Most functioning education systems can turn out a solipsistic dope with no cognitive skills by about Sixth Grade and for a few thousand dollars. Only in America does it take till Grade Eighteen and a quarter-million bucks.

The Boy Genius opined: "I think these billionaires are getting a lot of money just out of greed..."

Almost right. Try looking at college costs vs the general rate of inflation over the last 30 years, and then replacing "billionaires" with "deans of admissions". It's just my opinion... I'm just putting it out there... Whatever...

Arab Spring, Coptic Winter

Andy, good luck rousing the western media to the plight of Egypt's Christians. The boobs proclaimed Tahrir Square an "Arab Spring" and then moved on. I chanced to be on Fox News with Megyn Kelly half-an-hour after Mubarak threw in the towel, and, while Anderson Cooper was cooing orgasmically over on CNN, offered the cheerless thought that this was the dawn of the post-western Middle East, and the beginning of something potentially very dark. I'll stand by that. As I wrote in February:

The Kingdom of Egypt in the period between 1922 and 1952 was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it got closer to a functioning, pluralist society than anything in the 60 years since. For example, in 1923, Egypt's first full year as a sovereign state, the country's Minister of Finance was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a Member of Parliament and a Jew.

Try to imagine that now: a Jew serving as an Arab Muslim nation's Finance Minister - or even getting elected as an obscure backbench MP. Sounds like something from a Give-peace-a-chance multifaith fantasy. But it actually happened - and then it stopped happening, and then it became inconceivable for it to happen ever again under any plausible scenario.

Shortly thereafter, Mr Cattaui's great-grandson wrote to me from France, where he now lives. Because it's not just that in Egypt a Jew can't be Finance Minister but that a Jew can't be. Because Egypt spent the second half of the 20th century getting worse, and is spending the new century getting worser. We now accept a Jew-free Egypt as a normal feature of life. No doubt we shall soon do the same with a Copt-free Egypt. But we could at least stop insulting those on the receiving end of the "Arab Spring" by pretending that it's any kind of flowering of freedom.

Re: Monkey-Wrench the Racialist Machine!

Mark, I agree. But the neo-apartheid obsessions of Big Government extend way beyond the Census. I took a friend to a Vermont hospital a couple of weeks back, and was interested to see a notice on the counter at Admissions informing us that under the 2009 American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ie, the trillion dollars of "stimulus" Obama tossed in the Potomac and watched float out to sea) the hospital is "required" to collect information on each patient's ethnic and/or racial identity. Usual stuff: "Pacific Islander", "Asian", "Alaskan native", etc. The notice informed us this "program" is "administered" by the Office of Management & Budget. Evidently administering such programs leaves the Office of Management & Budget with little time for either managing or budgeting, which helps explain why this is the Brokest Nation in History.

The justification for the government's obsession with racialist classification is that it helps them to "direct" "resources". In reality, it's a pretext for ever bigger government, and ever smaller citizenship - for your status as a US citizen counts less and less when weighed against these various government-regulated identity categories. The Office of Management & Budget has no legitimate interest in racial classification of private hospital admissions. Also, it doesn't do anything to "stimulate" the economy - although, in that respect, it's entirely consistent with the rest of the act. 

American Autumn

Michael Oher, offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, was online on Wednesday night when his Twitter feed started filling up with tributes to Steve Jobs. A bewildered Oher tweeted: “Can somebody help me out? Who was Steve Jobs!”

He was on his iPhone at the time.

Who was Steve Jobs? Well, he was a guy who founded a corporation and spent his life as a corporate executive manufacturing corporate products. So he wouldn’t have endeared himself to the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd, even though, underneath the patchouli and lentils, most of them are abundantly accessorized with iPhones and iPads and iPods loaded with iTunes, if only for when the drum circle goes for a bathroom break.

#ad# The above is a somewhat obvious point, although the fact that it’s not obvious even to protesters with an industrial-strength lack of self-awareness is a big part of the problem. But it goes beyond that: If you don’t like to think of Jobs as a corporate exec (and a famously demanding one at that), think of him as a guy who went to work, and worked hard. There’s no appetite for that among those “occupying” Zuccotti Park. In the old days, the tribunes of the masses demanded an honest wage for honest work. Today, the tribunes of America’s leisured varsity class demand a world that puts “people before profits.” If the specifics of their “program” are somewhat contradictory, the general vibe is consistent: They wish to enjoy an advanced Western lifestyle without earning an advanced Western living. The pampered, elderly children of a fin de civilisation overdeveloped world, they appear to regard life as an unending vacation whose bill never comes due.

So they are in favor of open borders, presumably so that exotic Third World peasants can perform the labor to which they are noticeably averse. Of the 13 items on that “proposed list of demands,” Demand Four calls for “free college education,” and Demand Eleven returns to the theme, demanding debt forgiveness for all existing student loans. I yield to no one in my general antipathy to the racket that is American college education, but it’s difficult to see why this is the fault of the mustache-twirling robber barons who head up Global MegaCorp, Inc. One sympathizes, of course. It can’t be easy finding yourself saddled with a six-figure debt and nothing to show for it but some watery bromides from the “Transgender and Colonialism” class. Americans collectively have north of a trillion dollars in personal college debt. Say what you like about Enron and, er, Solyndra and all those other evil corporations, but they didn’t relieve you of a quarter-mil in exchange for a master’s in Maya Angelou. So why not try occupying the dean’s office at Shakedown U?

Ah, but the great advantage of mass moronization is that it leaves you too dumb to figure out who to be mad at. At Liberty Square, one of the signs reads: “F**k your unpaid internship!” Fair enough. But, to a casual observer of the massed ranks of Big Sloth, it’s not entirely clear what precisely anyone would ever pay them to do.

Do you remember Van Jones? He was Obama’s “green jobs” czar back before “green jobs” had been exposed as a gazillion-dollar sinkhole for sluicing taxpayer monies to the president’s corporate cronies. Oh, don’t worry. These cronies aren’t “corporate” in the sense of Steve Jobs. The corporations they run put “people before profits”: That’s to say, they’ve figured out it’s easier to take government money from you people than create a business that makes a profit. In an amusing inversion of the Russian model, Van Jones became a czar after he’d been a Communist. He became a Commie in the mid-Nineties -- i.e., after even the Soviet Union had given up on it. Needless to say, a man who never saw a cobwebbed collectivist nostrum he didn’t like no matter how long past its sell-by date is hot for “Occupy Wall Street.” Indeed, Van Jones thinks that the protests are the start of an “American Autumn.”

#page# In case you don’t get it, that’s the American version of the “Arab Spring.” Steve Jobs might have advised Van Jones he has a branding problem. Spring is the season of new life, young buds and so forth. Autumn is leaves turning brown and fluttering to the ground in a big dead heap. Even in my great state of New Hampshire, where autumn is pretty darn impressive, we understand what that blaze of red and orange leaves means: They burn brightest before they fall and die, and the world turns chill and bare and hard.

So Van Jones may be on to something! American Autumn. The days dwindle down to a precious few, like in whatever that old book was called, The Summer and Fall of the Roman Empire.

#ad# If you’ll forgive a plug for my latest sell-out to my corporate masters, in my new book I quote H. G. Wells’s Victorian Time Traveler after encountering far in the future the soft, effete Eloi: “These people were clothed in pleasant fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals, though undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metalwork. Somehow such things must be made.” And yet he saw “no workshops” or sign of any industry at all. “They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept going.” The Time Traveler might have felt much the same upon landing in Liberty Square in the early 21st century, except for the bit about bathing: It’s increasingly hard in America to “see how things are kept going,” but it’s pretty clear that the members of “Occupy Wall Street” have no plans to contribute to keeping things going. Like Michael Oher using his iPhone to announce his ignorance of Steve Jobs, in the autumn of the republic the beneficiaries of American innovation seem not only utterly disconnected from but actively contemptuous of the world that sustains their comforts.

Why did Steve Jobs do so much of his innovating in computers? Well, obviously, because that’s what got his juices going. But it’s also the case that, because it was a virtually non-existent industry until he came along, it’s about the one area of American life that hasn’t been regulated into sclerosis by the statist behemoth. So Apple and other companies were free to be as corporate as they wanted, and we’re the better off for it. The stunted, inarticulate spawn of America’s educrat monopoly want a world of fewer corporations and lots more government. If their “demands” for a $20 minimum wage and a trillion dollars of spending in “ecological restoration” and all the rest are ever met, there will be a massive expansion of state monopoly power. Would you like to get your iPhone from the DMV? That’s your “American Autumn”: an America that constrains the next Steve Jobs but bigs up Van Jones. Underneath the familiar props of radical chic that hasn’t been either radical or chic in half a century, the zombie youth of the Big Sloth movement are a paradox too ludicrous even for the malign alumni of a desultory half-decade of Complacency Studies: They’re anarchists for Big Government. Do it for the children, the Democrats like to say. They’re the children we did it for, and, if this is the best they can do, they’re done for.

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