Mark Steyn's Blog, page 49

Anthems of the Revolution

After catching up with America's Funniest "Occupy Wall Street" Videos, I chanced to read Comrade Nordlinger's column. Jay writes about my speech a few months back in support of Andrew Bolt's campaign for freedom of expression Down Under, and specifically my reference of the recent English case, in which a singer performing "Kung Fu Fighting" was arrested for "racism". I sang a few bars of the song and encouraged others to join in - which led Jay to his point:

The Right is no good at “street theater,” never has been. I borrow the phrase from Bill Buckley: He once referred, with a slight sneer, to “the street theater of the Left.” They are very good at this, these theatrical protests. For instance, they will have a “kiss-in,” or a “die-in,” or a “teach-in.” It stands to reason that the Left is better at collective action than we are. Conservatives are apt to recoil at the very thought of a group.

But wouldn’t it have been neat if conservatives and classical liberals had leapt to Simon Ledger’s defense with a “sing-in” — a mass singing of “Kung Fu Fighting,” at the top of our lungs? The spirit would have been, “Come and get me, copper! You can’t arrest us all! Or can you?”

He's right. But it's not just that conservatives are by nature antipathetic to collective action, but also that you need a certain blindness to self-evident absurdity. There is almost nothing so stupid that Frances Fox-Piven won't say it in public - and, as a result, things are going her way pretty swimmingly. Years ago, Jule Styne, the great composer of "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!", gave me a word of advice: He said the quickest way to make a million dollars was to take the joke that makes you laugh most and play it for real. In the 1927 Broadway season, George Abbott was working on what was supposed to be a comedy about southern morals that results in the gal's dad shooting her suitor dead. It was going nowhere as a comedy, so he decided to play it as melodrama, and Coquette was the box-office smash of the season: "You never heard such weeping in the theatre in your life," he told me.

I think the sheer plonking earnestness of leftist agitprop makes the same point. I mean, is there anything as hilarious as anarchists demanding more total government control, which is in essence what "Occupy Wall Street" boils down to? Yet those guys are out there playing it for real, and very convincingly - as they do with all the most exquisite jests, from "climate change" to transgendered bathrooms. When I sang "Kung Fu Fighting", I prefaced it by saying that in an ideal world this is not the hill of western civilization I would have chosen to die on. But we don't get a choice, and Jay's correct. Instead of doing eight bars as a droll after-dinner jape, I should be out in the street leading thousands of angry "activists" in the full twelve-minute megamix. As my compatriot Kate McMillan likes to say, "Not showing up to riot is a failed conservative policy."

Motorcade of Lemmings

Michael, re the imperial entourage, I made a similar point a couple of weeks back when the citizen-executive was graciously blessing the simple-minded folk of Iowa with a glimpse of his weaponized Canadian bus. Since your aphorism "The smaller the man, the greater the motorcade" seems to be grating on some of your commenters, let me in a bipartisan spirit agree that at international summits there has always been something faintly ridiculous about the president of the United States having a bigger entourage than all other attendees combined. It is conceivable, I suppose, that in certain circumstances a 40-car motorcade communicates might. But not anymore. When you're the Brokest Nation in History and you're taking 40 cars to visit an ice-cream parlor on Martha's Vineyard, you're not communicating might but only the fact that you're a joke that's lost all sense of proportion.

The Democrat model of government is to spend $4 trillion while only raising $2 trillion. That gap can never be closed. And once you notice it, it's odd how almost every glimpse of U.S. government expenditure seems at least twice as expensive as it ought to be. That's true of the new multimillion-dollar rural border posts in the middle of the woods in Vermont, which likewise communicate not the awesome power of the imperial state but only an absurd loss of proportion. And it's also true of the presidential motorcade, which is at least twice as long as it needs to be, and, when it descends on an American municipality, closes at least twice as many streets as it ought to close.

 David Pryce-Jones pointed out over in his corner of the NR ummah a few weeks ago (can't find the link) that for the least worst period in its history (the six decades or so before 1956) Sudan, a vast land of 500 tribes of different ethnicities and languages, was governed by about 200 British civil servants. That's fewer public employees than the president of the United States takes to visit a town in his own country. This is not just unrepublican but, as the eco-bores like to say, unsustainable. If this nation is to survive, American government is going to have to learn to do more with less.

'Soft' Nation

‘The way I think about it,” Barack Obama told a TV station in Orlando, “is, you know, this is a great, great country that had gotten a little soft.”



He has a point. This is a great, great country that got so soft that 53 percent of electors voted for a ludicrously unqualified chief executive who would be regarded as a joke candidate in any serious nation. One should not begrudge a man who seizes his opportunity. But one should certainly hold in contempt those who allow him to seize it on the basis of such flaccid generalities as “hope” and “change”: That’s more than “a little” soft. “He’s probably the smartest guy ever to become president,” declared presidential historian Michael Beschloss the day after the 2008 election. But you don’t have to be that smart to put one over on all the smart guys. “I’m a sap, a specific kind of sap. I’m an Obama Sap,” admits David Brooks, the softest touch at the New York Times. Tina Brown, editor of Newsweek, now says of the president: “He wasn’t ready, it turns out, really.”



#ad# If you’re a tenured columnist at the New York Times, you can just about afford the consequences of your sappiness. But out there among the hundreds of thousands of your readers who didn’t know you were a sap until you told them three years later, soft choices have hard consequences. If you’re one of Obama’s core constituencies, the ones who looked so photogenic at all the hopeychangey rallies, things are really hard: “Young Becoming ‘Lost Generation’    Amid Recession” (CBS News). Tough luck, rubes. You got a bumper sticker; he got to make things worse.



But don’t worry, it’s not much better at the other end of the spectrum: “Obama’s Wall Street Donors Look Elsewhere” (UPI). Gee, aren’t you the fellows who, when you buy a company, do something called “due diligence”? But you sunk everything into stock in Obamania Inc. on the basis of his “perfectly creased pant leg” or whatever David Brooks was drooling about that day? You handed a multi-trillion-dollar economy to a community organizer and you’re surprised that it led to more taxes, more bureaucracy, more regulation, more barnacles on an already rusting hulk?



Hard statism is usually murmured in soft, soothing, beguiling terms: Regulation is about cleaner air, healthier restaurants, safer children’s toys. Sounds so nice. But federal regulation alone sucks up 10 percent of GDP. That’s to say, Americans take the equivalent of the Canadian economy and toss it down the toilet just in complying with federal paperwork. Obama and the great toxic alphabet soup of federal regulation -- EPA, OSHA, SEC, DHSS -- want to take that 10 percent and crank it up to 12, 14, 15 percent.



Who could have foreseen that? The most dismal thing about that David Brooks column conceding that “yes, I’m a sap#...#remember, I’m a sap#...#as you know, I’m a sap” was the headline his New York Times editors chose to append to it: “Obama Rejects Obamaism.”



In other words, even in a column remorselessly cataloguing how one of its smartest smart guys had been repeatedly suckered by Obama on jobs, on Medicare, on deficits, on tax reform, etc., the New York Times chose to insist that there is still something called “Obamaism” -- prudent, centrist, responsible -- that for some perverse reason the man for whom this political philosophy is named insists on betraying, 24/7, week in, month out, spring, summer, autumn, tax season. You can set your clock by Obama’s rejection of “Obamaism.”



That’s because there’s no such thing. There never was. “Obamaism” was the Emperor’s new centrism: To a fool such as your average talk-radio host, His Majesty appears to be a man of minimal accomplishments other than self-promotion marinated in a radical faculty-lounge view of the world and the role of government. But, to a wise man such as your average presidential historian or New York Times columnist, he is the smartest guy ever to become president.



#page# In part, this is a natural extension of an ever more conformist and unrepresentative establishment’s view of where “the center” is. On issues from abortion to climate change, a Times man or Hollywood activist or media professor’s notion of “centrism” is well to the left of where American opinion is. That’s one reason why a supposedly “center-right” nation has wound up regulated into sclerosis, drowning in debt, and embarking on its last decade as the world’s leading economy. But in the case of Obama the chasm between soft, seductive, politico-media “centrism” and hard, grim reality is too big to bridge, and getting wider all the time.



You would think this might prompt some sober reflection from an American mainstream press dying in part because of its dreary ideological conformity. After all, a key reason why 53 percent voted for a man who was not, in Tina Brown’s word, “ready” is that Tina and all her pals assured us he was. Occidental, Columbia, Harvard Law, a little light community organizing, a couple of years timeserving in a state legislature: That’s what America’s elites regard as an impressive resume rather than a bleak indictment of contemporary notions of “accomplishment.” Obama would not have withstood scrutiny in any society with a healthy, skeptical press. Yet, like the high-rolling Wall Street moneybags, they failed to do due diligence.



#ad# Three years on, nothing has changed. Obama is proposing to raise taxes because of some cockamamie yarn Warren Buffett has been peddling about his allegedly overtaxed secretary. Yet the court eunuchs of the media persist in taking Buffett seriously as an archetypal exemplar of the “American business community” rather than as an especially well-connected crony. Sometimes, Obama cronyism is merely fiscally wasteful, as in the still-underreported Solyndra “green jobs” scandal. One sympathizes with reporters assigned to the story: It’s hard to get all the public monies and Solyndra-exec White House visit logs lined up in digestible form for the casual reader. But sometimes Obama cronyism is murderous: Eric Holder, a man unfit to be attorney general of the United States, continues to stonewall the “Fast and Furious” investigation into taxpayer-funded government gun-running to Mexican drug cartels. It is alleged that the administration chose to facilitate the sale of American weapons to crime kingpins south of the border in order to support a case for gun control north of the border. Evidence keeps piling up: The other day, a letter emerged from ATF supervisor David Voth authorizing Special Agent John Dodson to buy Draco pistols to sell directly to known criminals. Over 200 Mexicans are believed to have been killed by “Fast and Furious” weapons -- that’s to say, they were killed by a U.S.-government program.



Doesn’t the New York Times care about dead Mexicans? Doesn’t Newsweek or CBS News? Isn’t Obamaism with a body count sufficiently eye-catching even for the U.S. press? Or, three years in, are the enablers of Obama still so cynical that they accept it as a necessary price to pay for “change you can believe in”? You can’t make a hopenchange omelette without breaking a couple hundred Mexican eggs?



Obama says America has “gotten a little soft.” But there’s nothing soft about a dead-parrot economy, a flatline jobs market, regulatory sclerosis, “green jobs” multi-billion-dollar squandering -- and a mountain of dead Mexicans. In a soft nation, “centrist” government is hard and cruel. Only the media coverage is soft-focus.

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

Re: Free Speech Disaster in Australia

Stan, I was traveling when the guilty verdict against Andrew Bolt came through, and, cut off from news coverage, I had hoped it might at least be narrowly drawn. But Justice Mordecai Bromberg's ruling is absolutely appalling in the precedent it sets for "freedom" of speech in Australia.

Just to recap, Andrew Bolt is Oz's leading political columnist, in print, radio, TV (think George Will) and he commented on the striking number of extremely light-skinned Aboriginal activists of mainly Caucasian descent and appearance who choose to identify as Aboriginal for the purpose of accessing lucrative identity-politics gigs. The key passage in Bromberg's decision is:

I am satisfied that fair-skinned Aboriginal people (or some of them) were reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to have been offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated by the imputations conveyed by the newspaper articles.

"Fair-skinned Aboriginal people (or some of them)"? Any idea of the percentages? What proportion were offended and what weren't? This is a case without victims, in which the judge has ruled that it is "reasonably likely" there are some victims out there somewhere or other. As to it being "reasonably likely" that they were offended, is it "reasonably likely" beyond a reasonable doubt? Or does every bedrock principles of English law have to subordinate itself to the human right not to be offended?

I touched on the Bolt case in a recent NR cover story on the shriveling of freedom of speech across the Western world:

If the state creates a human right to be offended and extends it only to members of certain interest groups, it is quite naturally incentivizing membership in those membership groups. Andrew Bolt, Australia’s leading columnist, was struck by the very noticeable non-blackness of so many prominent Aussie “blacks”, and wrote a couple of columns on the theme of identity-group opportunism. He’s now been dragged into court and denounced as a “racist” – “racism” having degenerated into a term for anyone who so much as broaches the subject. But, if the law confers particular privileges on members of approved identity groups, how we define the criteria for membership of those groups is surely a legitimate subject for public debate.

I'll stand by that. Instead, Bromberg's execrable decision has dramatically incentivized the willingness of favored groups to take offence - and dramatically constrained the ability of mainstream media commentators even to raise the issue. Shame on Australia.

Undocumented Investments

Mark (Krikorian), I'd missed that Christian Schneider post on in-state tuition rates for illegal aliens, which is probably just as well given the vein-popping it caused. But, if that's the - or even a - "conservative" position, the republic might as well hold its going-out-of-business sale this weekend. To reprise the Schneider justification:

By the time an undocumented [sic!] child makes it from first grade to graduating high school, taxpayers have already sunk over $100,000 into that child’s education. To pull the plug on those children because of the actions of their parents would be unfair, and would nullify the investment taxpayers have already made in the kid. …

So while they’re here, our state would be better off giving these kids the chance to make our country better, rather than sentencing them to a second-class existence.

Good grief. First, the fact that 12 years of American education costs over a hundred grand ought to be an outrage, not an initial down-payment: We spend more per pupil than any advanced nation other than Luxembourg, and at least the Luxembourgers have something to show for it.

Second, the idea that government spending is an "investment" as opposed to prudent budgeting for necessary responsibilities is a classic all-purpose leftist euphemism for statism without end that no conservative should have any truck with: Why, to end our "investment" in "these kids"  after a mere 12 years is to "sentence" people to a "second-class existence"! (And incidentally, how many taxpayers willingly chose this particular investment for their portfolio?)

Third, if massive expansion of college education helps "make our country better", why are we the Brokest Nation in History? In 1940, a majority of the US population had no more than a Grade Eight education. By 2008, 40 per cent of 18-24 year-olds were enrolled in college. Eighth Grade America built a great nation, won a global war and emerged as the planet's economic superpower - until Eighteenth Grade America drove it off a cliff. Yet a supposed "conservative" says, oh, no, diverting 40 per cent of young adults into a desultory half-decade Bachelor's in Complacency Studies isn't enough: We so fetishize pseudo-credentialization we must extend it even to illegal aliens.

Why stop there? We've spent over 20 grand per capita in Afghanistan. Why "nullify" that "investment"? Why don't we send every Afghan to Harvard? Maybe they can all become diversity officers and community organizers, and Recovery Summer will really be going gangbusters.

That's the "conservative" position? If Christian Schneider isn't a satirical Rob Long invention, we're doomed. 

On the Atchison, Topeka and the St. Tropez

Over at the Los Angeles Times, Andrew Malcolm notes that Obama referred to America being "the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad," and that, in striking contrast to their treatment of Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann et al in such matters, the media declined to draw attention to the Smartest President in History's latest verbal infelicity.

True. But I'm kind of relieved "the Intercontinental Railroad" is just another Obama gaffe as opposed to the latest shovel-ready stimulus project. An Intercontinental Railroad built by retrained Navy corpsemen to ferry passengers from all 57 states from Washington to Vienna with conductors who can speak both English and the Austrian language while the President of Canada rides in the club-car having given up his corporate jet is just the kind of audacity of change people were voting for.

PS Yes, it turns out to be at least the second time he said it*, but give the guy a break. At the U.N., I'm sure he expressed "grave concern" about Iran's plans to build an Intercontinental Ballistic Railroad.

[UPDATE: *Okay, fifth.]   

On the Atchison, Topeka and the St Tropez

Over at The Los Angeles Times, Andrew Malcolm notes that Obama referred to America being "the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad", and that, in striking contrast to their treatment of Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann et al in such matters, the media declined to draw attention to the Smartest President in History's latest verbal infelicity.

True. But I'm kind of relieved "the Intercontinental Railroad" is just another Obama gaffe as opposed to the latest shovel-ready stimulus project. An Intercontinental Railroad built by retrained Navy corpsemen to ferry passengers from all 57 states from Washington to Vienna with conductors who can speak both English and the Austrian language while the President of Canada rides in the club-car having given up his corporate jet is just the kind of audacity of change people were voting for.

PS Yes, it turns out to be at least the second time he said it*, but give the guy a break. At the UN, I'm sure he expressed "grave concern" about Iran's plans to build an Intercontinental Ballistic Railroad.

[UPDATE: *Okay, fifth.]   

Global Bust-Up

‘It’s the end of the world as we know it,” sang the popular musical artistes R.E.M. many years ago. And it is. R.E.M. has announced that they’re splitting up after almost a third of a century. But these days who isn’t? The eurozone, the world’s first geriatric boy band, is on the verge of busting apart. Chimerica (Prof. Niall Ferguson’s amusing name for the Chinese-American economic partnership that started around the same time R.E.M. did) is going the way of Wham!, with Beijing figuring it’s the George Michael of the relationship and that it’s tired of wossname, the other fellow, who gets equal billing but doesn’t really do anything. The deeper problem may be that this is a double act with two wossnames.

#ad#Still, it’s the end of the world as we know it. Headline from CNBC: “Global Meltdown: Investors Are Dumping Nearly Everything.” I assumed “Nearly Everything” was the cute name of a bankrupt, worthless, planet-saving green-jobs start-up backed by Obama bundlers and funded with a gazillion dollars of stimulus payback. But apparently it’s “Nearly Everything” in the sense of the entire global economy. Headline from the Daily Telegraph of London: “David Cameron: Euro Debt ‘Threatens World Stability.’” But, if you’re not in the general vicinity of the world, you should be okay. Headline from the Wall Street Journal: “World Bank’s Zoellick: World In ‘Danger Zone.’” But, if you’re not in the general vicinity of#...#no, wait, I did that gag with the last headline.



I mentioned in this space a few weeks ago the IMF’s calculation that China will become the planet’s leading economic power by the year 2016. And I added that, if that proves correct, it means the fellow elected next November will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world’s dominant economy. I thought that line might catch on. After all, we’re always told that every election is the most critical consequential watershed election of all time, but this one actually would be: For the first time since Grover Cleveland’s first term, America would be electing a global also-ran. But there’s not a lot of sense of America’s looming date with destiny in these presidential debates. I don’t mean so much from the candidates as from their media interrogators -- which is more revealing of where the meter on our political conversation is likely to be during the general election. On Thursday night, there was a question on gays in the military but none on the accelerating European debt crisis. It is certainly important to establish whether a would-be president is sufficiently non-homophobic to authorize a crack team of lesbian paratroopers to rappel into the Chinese treasury, break the safe, and burn all our IOUs. But the curious complacency about the bigger questions is disturbing.



Greece is reported to be within weeks if not days of default. There are two likely outcomes to this scenario: 1) Greece will default. 2) Germany and the Eurocrats will decide that default would be too embarrassing for the EU’s pretentions and will throw whatever sum of money is necessary into the great sucking maw of toxic ouzo to stave it off a while longer.



But Option Two doesn’t alter the underlying reality -- that, if words have any meaning, Greece is insolvent, and given its rapidly aging population (100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren) is unlikely to be non-insolvent under any conceivable scenario, no matter how tightly German taxpayers are squeezed to pay for it. By the same measure, so are many other Western nations.



On the other hand, attempting to postpone the Club Med welfare junkies’ rendezvous with self-extinction will destabilize internal German politics (which always adds to the gaiety of nations) and strain to breaking point what’s left of the European banking system. BNP Paribas, formerly Saddam’s favorite banker and Gallicly insouciant about who it climbs into bed with, was reported in recent days to be cruising the flusher sheikhdoms and emirates in search of a new sugar daddy. Delivering French banks into the hands of Islamic imperialists seems a high price to pay for bailing out Athenian deadbeats.



#page# The question to ask is: What’s holding the joint up? In the case of the global economy, the answer is: Not much. The developed world’s combined economic-growth rate for 2012 is projected to be under 2 percent -- and that’s a best-case scenario in times that don’t warrant much optimism. As its own contribution to the end of the world as we know it, the Obama administration has just released a document called “Living Within Our Means and Investing in the Future: The President’s Plan for Economic Growth and Deficit Reduction.” If you’re curious about the first part of the title -- “Living Within Our Means” -- Veronique de Rugy pointed out at National Review that under this plan debt held by the public will grow from just over $10 trillion to $17.7 trillion by 2021. In other words, the president’s definition of “Living Within Our Means” is to burn through the equivalent of the entire German, French, and British economies in new debt between now and the end of the decade. You can try this yourself next time your bank manager politely suggests you should try “living within your means”: Tell him you’ve got an ingenious plan to get your spending under control by near doubling your present debt in the course of a mere decade. He’s sure to be impressed.



#ad# As for the “Investing in the Future” part of the president’s plan, that means lots more government, lots more half-billion-dollar payoffs to pseudo-businesses cooked up by cronies, lots more $4.8 million–per–job taxpayer subsidies paid for with money borrowed from our unborn grandchildren. In a perfect snapshot of this administration’s witless banality, the president traveled last week to the Brent Spence Bridge across the Ohio River and claimed that, despite the fact that the structure connects the home states of the Republican House leader and the Republican Senate leader, the meanspirited GOP is going to kill the jobs bill and thus all prospects for a new bridge between their two states.



The bridge has nothing to do with the jobs bill. Work on a new bridge is not scheduled to begin for four years and wouldn’t be completed until 2022 at the earliest. Because in the Republic at twilight you can run up another seven-and-a-half-trillion dollars of new debt in less time than it takes to put up a bridge. Even as cheap political showboating the president’s photo op was a pathetic joke, with the laugh on you.



If this is the best America can do, there won’t be a 2022, not for the United States, or anything that would be recognizable as such. Like R.E.M. says, it’s the end of the world as we know it. And, as their split suggests, they no longer feel fine. And nor should you.

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

My Kind of Town

Over at The Hill, Bernie Quigley notes a spate of similarly-titled apocalyptic tomes:

Several recent books see the end coming. John Birmingham’s “After America”: Fighter bombers rushing at us on the cover. You get the picture. Paul Starobin’s “After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age”: Planet of the Apes with nerds instead of apes. Be afraid. But not that afraid. Mark Steyn’s “After America: Get Ready for Armageddon”: Self-explanatory. Andrew Breitbart said, “May puke I’m so happy.” Meaning he liked it.

These books see America as an idea rather than a place because the authors don’t understand place and have probably never been to an American place they were inclined to stay in. They would get a rash in real places like Tobaccoville, N.C., Haverhill, N.H. or Luckenbach, Texas, where Waylon, Willie and the boys hang.

There are arguments to be made against my book, but that's probably not the one to hang your hat on. As it happens, the Steyn global corporate headquarters are located in Haverhill, NH. (Woodsville is a quartier of the Town of Haverhill.) My Corner posts are filed from Haverhill. My NR columns are filed from Haverhill. My fabulous hair for tonight's O'Reilly Factor was coiffed by Amanda, my Haverhill hairdresser. I'll be guest-hosting the Rush Limbaugh Show live from Haverhill this Friday, and, if Mr. Quigley cares to swing by the studio, I promise to do the show naked so he can observe that I have no rash.

Better luck next time, genius. 

Economic Freedom Hit Parade

Jonah, if the United States can barely scrape the bottom of the Top Ten in economic freedom in 2009, it's not hard to figure out where this number's headed for next year's survey. I note that eight of the Top Ten countries are current or former realms of the British Crown: Genuine economic liberty derives from a relatively narrow cultural tradition. The cronyism that is the most consistent feature of Obama-era Big Government suggest we're destined for the Latin-American part of the rankings.