Mark Steyn's Blog, page 51

How Soon They Forget

The Chicago Sun-Times, in whose Sunday edition I appeared for a decade, has a little box on its Bestsellers page synopsysing one of the authors on the list. This week, they've chosen me and my latest slab of apocalyptic doom-mongering. But, if you glance at the accompanying photograph and you're thinking, "Wow, Steyn has gotten way hunkier", that's not yours truly, alas, but the great Brad Thor. I hope they get him to play me in the movie.

(By the way, I just picked up Brad's book Full Black - at full price - and I'm a couple of chapters into it. Terrific stuff.)   

Spirit of the Age

My weekend column is on cultural decay. Speaking of which, Forbes reports on a fascinating legal question with which less evolved civilizations did not have to trouble themselves. Meet Susan Clements-Jeffrey:

She unknowingly used a stolen laptop to exchange explicit photos with her boyfriend and those photos wound up in the hands of a theft-recovery company and a couple of detectives, who called them “disgusting” when they arrested her.

Could happen to anyone.

Little did Clements-Jeffrey and her bf, Carlton Smith, know that the laptop had theft-recovery security software installed on it... Once activated, it reported the laptop’s IP address, and granted Absolute remote access over the computer, with the ability to intercept emails, capture screenshots, and log key strokes.

Absolute captured screenshots of both lovebirds doing their best porn star poses. The Absolute recovery officer sent the explicit photos along with location information for the stolen laptop to the Springfield Police Department. The police made their way to Clements-Jeffrey’s house with a warrant to seize the laptop... One of the prudish detectives wasn’t a fan of the photos, calling them “disgusting.”

Ms. Clements-Jeffrey, the "lovebird" with the "porn star poses," is, of course, a 52-year-old high-school teacher. A couple of years from now, Hollywood will make one of those courageous freedom-of-expression movies about this landmark case. 1996: The People vs Larry Flynt. 2011: The People are Larry Flynt.

 Hat-tip to the blogger Scaramouche, who also notes another sign of the times. Stand well back:

Woman's Breast Implant Explodes While Playing Paintball 

A Tale of Two Declines

I was on a very long flight the other day and, to get me through it, I had two books: the new bestseller Of Thee I Zing by Laura Ingraham, and a book I last read twenty years ago, The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. The former is the latest hit from one of America’s most popular talk radio hosts; the latter is an Austrian novel from 1932 by a fellow who drank himself to death just before the Second World War, which, if you’re planning on drinking yourself to death, is a better pretext than most. Don’t worry, I’ll save the Germanic alcoholic guy for a couple of paragraphs, although the two books are oddly related.

#ad#Of Thee I Zing’s subtitle is “America’s Cultural Decline: From Muffin Tops To Body Shots.” If you are sufficiently culturally aware to know what a “muffin top” and a “body shot” are (and incidentally, if you don’t have time to master all these exciting new trends, these two can be combined into one convenient “muffin shot”), you may not think them the most pressing concerns as the Republic sinks beneath its multitrillion-dollar debt burden. But, as Miss Ingraham says, “Even if our economic and national security challenges disappeared overnight, we’d still have to climb out of the cultural abyss into which we’ve tumbled.” 

Actually, I think I’d go a little further than the author on that. I’m a great believer that culture trumps economics. Every time the government in Athens calls up the Germans and says, okay, we’ve burned through the last bailout, time for the next one, Angela Merkel understands all too well that the real problem in Greece is not the Greek finances but the Greek people. Even somnolent liberal columnists grasp this: a recent Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times was headlined, “Can Greeks Become Germans?” I think we all know the answer to that. Any society eventually winds up with the finances you’d expect. So think of our culture as one almighty muffin shot, with America as a giant navel filled with the cheap tequila of our rising debt and#... #no, wait, this metaphor’s getting way out of hand.

These are difficult issues for social conservatives to write about. When we venture into this terrain, we’re invariably dismissed as uptight squares who can’t get any action. That happens to be true in my case, but Laura Ingraham has the advantage of being a “pretty girl,” as disgraced Congressman Charlie Rangel made the mistake of calling her on TV the other day in an interview that went hilariously downhill thereafter. So, she has a little more credibility on this turf than I would. She opens with a lurid account of a recent visit to a north Virginia mall -- zombie teens texting, a thirtysomething metrosexual having his eyebrows threaded, a fiftysomething cougar spilling out of her tube top, grade-schoolers in the latest “prostitot” fashions -- and then embarks on a lively tour of American cultural levers, from schools to social media to churches to Hollywood. If there is a common theme in the various rubble of cultural ruin, it’s the urge to enter adolescence ever earlier and leave it later and later, if at all. So we have skanky tweens “dry humping” at middle-school dances, and an ever greater proportion of “men” in their thirties living at home with their parents.

Adolescence, like retirement, is an invention of the modern age. If the extension of retirement into a multi-decade government-funded vacation is largely a function of increased life expectancy, the prolongation of adolescence seems to derive from the bleak fact that, without an efficient societal conveyor belt to move you on, it appears to be the default setting of huge swathes of humanity. It was striking, during the Hurricane Irene frenzy, to hear the Federal Emergency Management Agency refer to itself repeatedly as “the federal family.” If Big Government is a “family,” with the bureaucracy as its parents, why be surprised that the citizens are content to live as eternal adolescents?

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Perhaps the saddest part of the book is Ingraham’s brisk tour of recent romantic ballads. Exhibit A, Enrique Iglesias:

Please excuse me, I don’t mean to be rude

But tonight I’m f**king you#...#

 Well, at least he said “excuse me,” which is more than this young swain did:

Take my order ’cause your body like a carry out

Let me walk into your body until it’s lights out.

#ad#Lovely:  I am so hot for you I look on you as a Burger King drive-thru.  That’s what the chicks dig. That’s what you’ll be asking the band to play at your silver wedding anniversary as you tell the young ’uns that they don’t write ’em like they used to. Even better, this exquisite love song is sung not by some bling-dripping braggart hoodlum of the rap fraternity but by the quintessential child-man of contemporary pop culture, ex-Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake.

It’s not the vulgarity or the crassness or even the grunting moronic ugliness, but something more basic: the absence of tenderness. A song such as “It Had To Be You” or “The Way You Look Tonight” presupposes certain courtship rituals. If a society no longer has those, it’s not surprising that it can no longer produce songs to embody them: After all, a great love ballad is, to a certain extent, aspirational; you hope to have a love worthy of such a song. A number like “Carry Out” is enough to make you question whether the fundamental things really do apply as time goes by.

Yet one of the curious features of a hypersexualized society is that it becomes paradoxically sexless and joyless. Guys who confidently bellow along with Enrique’s “F**king You” no longer quite know how to ask a girl for a chocolate malt at the soda fountain. It’s hardly surprising that, as Miss Ingraham reports, the formerly fringe activity of computer dating has now gone mainstream on an industrial scale. And, even then, as a couple of young ladies happened to mention to me after various recent encounters through Match.com and the like, an alarming number of chaps would rather see you naked on their iPhones Anthony Weiner--style than actually get you naked in their bachelor pads. I was reminded of The Children Of Men, set in an infertile world, in which P.D. James’s characters, liberated from procreation, increasingly find sex too much trouble.

Laura Ingraham’s book is a rollicking read. But, as I said, I picked it up after a re-immersion in The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, a melancholy portrait of the decline of the Habsburg Empire seen through the eyes of three generations of minor nobility and imperial civil servants in the years before the Great War swept away an entire world order and its assumptions of permanence. Roth was a man of the post-war era, yet he could not write his story without an instinctive respect for the lost rituals of a doomed world: The novel takes its title from the great Strauss march that the town band plays in front of the District Commissioner’s home every Sunday. As much as the Habsburgs, we too are invested in the illusions of permanence, and perhaps one day it will fall to someone to write a bittersweet novel about the final years of the republic. But we will not even enjoy the consolations of a Strauss march. It doesn’t have quite the same ring if you call the book “Carry Out” or “F**king You.”

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

Take It Away!

John Hinderaker provides a good precis of the Gibson guitar raids. It seems a curious law-enforcement priority even for the Brokest Nation in History. Very few pianos are now made in the United States, but hey, that's no reason not to do the same to the guitar industry. I would only add that the (century-old but recently expanded) Lacey Act is a characteristic example of the degeneration of federal "law"-making, whereby narrowly drawn legislation metastasizes way beyond its original intent to the point that no reasonable man, no matter how prudent, can know whether he is or isn't in breach of it.

Such open-ended "laws" are an invitation to tyranny, and it would be expecting an awful lot for a money-no-object bureaucracy not to take advantage of it. For example:

Consider the recent experience of Pascal Vieillard, whose Atlanta-area company, A-440 Pianos, imported several antique Bösendorfers. Mr. Vieillard asked officials at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species how to fill out the correct paperwork—which simply encouraged them to alert U.S. Customs to give his shipment added scrutiny.

There was never any question that the instruments were old enough to have grandfathered ivory keys. But Mr. Vieillard didn't have his paperwork straight when two-dozen federal agents came calling.

Two dozen federal agents? To raid a piano importer? Does the piano industry have a particular reputation for violent armed resistance? Or is it that the most footling bureaucrat now feels he has no credibility unless he's got his own elite commando team? When you're wondering how America's national government settled into the habit of spending $4 trillion a year while only raising $2 trillion, it's easy to get hung up on fine calibrations of entitlement reform circa 2030. But look at it this way: Imagine if, instead of 24 agents, the federal piano police had to make do with a mere dozen to raid a small importer.

Note this, too:

Facing criminal charges that might have put him in prison for years, Mr. Vieillard pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of violating the Lacey Act, and was handed a $17,500 fine and three years probation.

They're antique pianos. They come with ivory keys. They're grandfathered in. There is no criminal intent and, in the most basic sense, no underlying crime. Yet he's looking at being tossed in jail "for years"? Any "justice" system with such an utter lack of proportion is not justice at all. It speaks very poorly for us that we tolerate it.

Outsourcing the Future

My previous book was famously "alarmist" (and so no doubt is my new one), but, if you're disinclined to meet me halfway in my demographic analysis, try the United Kingdom's Office of National Statistics:

In 2010, a quarter of births were to mothers born outside the UK, according to the ONS...

If a quarter of all babies born in England and Wales are to foreign mothers, then we’re experiencing the biggest change in our demographic identity since the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the fifth century. Future historians will regard this as the major development in early 21st-century British history...

Nothing like this has happened before. Please pay no attention next time a Left-wing historian pops up on TV to romanticise the arrival of the Normans, Huguenots, Eastern European Jews etc. These were significant influxes, but Great Britain has never been “a nation of immigrants”. Even cosmopolitan London has witnessed nothing remotely comparable to the population shift recorded by the ONS statistics. More than half of all babies born in the capital in 2010 were to foreign mothers; in the borough of Newham more than three quarters of all new mothers were born abroad.

A lot of people reading Ed West will say: "Well, so what? What's the problem?" That's fine if you want to turn some of the oldest nation states on the planet into an ongoing experiment. Maybe the experiment will work out fine, maybe it won't. But, given that the nations most enthusiastically embarking on it are responsible for 90 per cent of everything the modern world takes for granted, you'd think more people might at least give some thought as to whether the gamble is worth it.

For my own part, I'd bet that many parts of mid-century Britain will be a violent, brutish, Balkanized ruin. Let's meet for lunch circa 2035 and see who's right.  

The Desperation-of-Deprivation Myth

Unlike many of my comrades in the punditry game, I don’t do a lot of TV. But I’m currently promoting my latest doom-mongering bestseller, so I’m spending more time than usual on the telly circuit. This week I was on the BBC’s current-affairs flagship Newsnight. My moment in the spotlight followed a report on the recent riots in English cities, in the course of which an undercover reporter interviewed various rioters from Manchester who’d had a grand old time setting their city ablaze and then expressed no remorse over it. There then followed a studio discussion, along the usual lines. The host introduced a security guard who’d fought for Queen and country in Afghanistan and Bosnia and asked whether he sympathized with his neighbors. He did. When you live in an “impoverished society,” he said, “people do what they have to do to survive.”

#ad#When we right-wing madmen make our twice-a-decade appearance on mainstream TV, we’re invariably struck by how narrow are the bounds of acceptable discourse in polite society. But in this instance I was even more impressed by how liberal pieties triumph even over the supposed advantages of the medium. Television, we’re told, favors strong images -- Nixon sweaty and unshaven, Kennedy groomed and glamorous, etc. But, in this instance, the security guard’s analysis, shared by three-quarters of the panel, was entirely at odds with the visual evidence: There was no “impoverished society.” The preceding film had shown a neat subdivision of pleasant red-brick maisonettes set in relatively landscaped grounds. There was grass, and it looked maintained. Granted, it was not as bucolic as my beloved New Hampshire, but, compared to the brutalized concrete bunkers in which the French and the Swedes entomb their seething Muslim populations, it was nothing to riot over. Nonetheless, someone explained that these riotous Mancunian youth were growing up in “deprivation,” and the rioters themselves seemed disposed to agree. Like they say in West Side Story, “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived.” We’ve so accepted the correlation that we don’t even notice that they’re no longer deprived, but they are significantly more depraved.

In fact, these feral youth live better than 90 percent of the population of the planet. They certainly live better than their fellow youths halfway around the world who go to work each day in factories across China and India to make the cool electronic toys young Westerners expect to enjoy as their birthright. In Britain, as in America and Europe, the young take it for granted that this agreeable division of responsibilities is as permanent a feature of life as the earth and sky: Rajiv and Suresh in Bangalore make the state-of-the-art gizmo, Kevin and Ron in Birmingham get to play with it. That’s just the way it is. And, because that’s the way it is, Kevin and Ron and the welfare state that attends their every need assume ’twill always be so.

To justify their looting, the looters appealed to the conventional desperation-of-deprivation narrative: They’d “do anything to get more money.” Anything, that is, except get up in the morning, put on a clean shirt, and go off to do a day’s work. That concept is all but unknown to the homes in which these guys were raised. Indeed, Newsnight immediately followed the riot discussion with a report on immigration to Britain from Eastern Europe. Any tourist in London quickly accepts that, unless he hails a cab or gets mugged, he will never be served by a native Londoner: Polish baristas, Balkan waitresses, but, until the mob shows up to torch his hotel, not a lot of Cockneys. A genial Member of Parliament argued that the real issue underlying the riots is “education and jobs,” but large numbers of employers seem to have concluded that, if you’ve got a job to offer, the best person to give it to is someone with the least exposure to a British education.

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The rioters, meanwhile, have a crude understanding of how the system works. The proprietor of a Bang & Olufsen franchise revealed that the looters had expressed mystification as to why he objected to them stealing his goods. After all, he was insured, wasn’t he? So the insurance would pay for his stolen TVs and DVD players, wouldn’t it? The notion that, ultimately, someone has to pay for the insurance seemed to elude them, in the same way it seems to elude our elites that ultimately someone has to pay for Britain’s system of “National Insurance” -- or what Canada calls “Social Insurance” and America “Social Security.”

#ad#The problem for the Western world is that it has incentivized non-productivity on an industrial scale. For large numbers at the lower end of the spectrum (still quaintly referred to by British reporters as “working class”), the ritual of work -- of lifetime employment as a normal feature of life -- has been all but bred out by multigenerational dependency. At the upper end of the spectrum, too many of us seem to regard an advanced Western society as the geopolitical version of a lavishly endowed charitable foundation that funds somnolent programming on NPR. I was talking to a trustiefundie Vermont student the other day who informed me her ambition is to “work for a non-profit.”

“What kind of ambition is that?” I said, a little bewildered. But she meant it, and so do most of her friends. Doesn’t care particularly what kind of “non-profit” it is: as long as no profits are involved, she’s eager to run up a six-figure college debt for a piece of the non-action. The entire state of Vermont is becoming a non-profit. And so in a certain sense is an America that’s 15 trillion dollars in the hole, and still cheerfully spending away.

In between the non-profit class and the non-working class, we have diverted too much human capital into a secure and undemanding bureaucracy-for-life: President Obama has further incentivized statism as a career through his education “reforms,” under which anyone who goes into “public service” will have their college loans forgiven after ten years.

Why?

As I point out in my book, in the last six decades the size of America’s state and local government workforce has increased over three times faster than the general population. Yet Obama says it’s still not enough: The bureaucracy needs even more of our manpower. Up north, Canada is currently undergoing a festival of mawkish sub--Princess Di grief-feasting over the death from cancer of the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Jack Layton’s career is most instructive. He came from a family of successful piano manufacturers -- in 1887 H. A. Layton was presented with a prize for tuning by Queen Victoria’s daughter. But by the time Jack came along, the family’s private-sector wealth-creation gene had been pretty much tuned out for good: He was a career politician, so is his wife, and his son. They’re giving him a state funeral because being chair of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative is apparently more admirable than being chairman of Layton Bros Pianos Ltd.

Again: Why?

The piano manufacturer pays for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, not the other way round. The private sector pays for the Vermont non-profits and the Manchester rioters and the entire malign alliance of the statism class and the dependency class currently crushing the Western world. America, Britain, Canada, and Europe are operating on a defective business model: Not enough of us do not enough productive work for not enough of our lives. The numbers are a symptom, but the real problem, in the excuses for Manchester, in the obsequies in Ottawa, in the ambitions of Vermont, is the waste of human capital.

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

Jurisdictional Distinctions

In case you're wondering:

It's the responsibility of municipal cops to bust up kids' lemonade stands.

But it's the responsibility of state troopers to bust up kids' green-tea stands.

In the new America, there's micro-tyranny enough for all levels of government!

A milk-shake stand? My best guess is the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Frappes).

Peking Duck

Peter Kirsanow suggests my new book may get the blame for the earthquake. I'm happy to take credit for the downgrade and the London riots, but to the best of my recollection there's no 'quake in there. However, since he brought it up, I'd like to put in a word for my book's general line on China re Joe Biden's disgusting remarks on Beijing's one-child policy and its attendant industrial-scale "gendercide." My views on this have been well aired in this space over the years.

China is a weak power. When I point that out, people think that's the good news. It's not. As I say in the prologue to my new book;

That’s actually worse news than if China was cruising to uncontested global hegemony – because it means that Beijing’s calculations on how the Sino-American relationship evolves are even less likely to align with ours. China has to maximize its power before demographic decay sets in. In other words, it has strong incentives to be bold and to push, hard and fast.

Nevertheless, we owe 'em a ton of money. Which means you can figure for yourself the likelihood of an American vice president standing up in public and expressing his repugnance at the wholesale slaughter of China's baby girls. A few lines before the passage above, I quote Jonathan Swift's "Run Upon The Bankers": "They have his soul, who have his bonds." China has our bonds, and thus in a certain sense they have our soul. Or at any rate Joe Biden's. The big theme of my book's prologue is that it starts with the money but it never stops there. For three decades, U.S. foreign policy "realists" have assured us that China's economic liberalization would inevitably lead to political liberalization. As Biden's wretched remarks suggest, the inverse was always more likely: The reality of China's economic dominance is Western acquiescence in its repulsive politics.

Later on in my book, I discuss the post-Second World War transfer of global dominance from Britain to America. As these things go, that went relatively smoothly -- except for Suez in 1956, when Eisenhower decided to scuttle the Anglo-French-Israeli operation against Egypt. Like China vis a vis America today, Washington had London's bonds (the World War Two debt) -- and Ike ordered the Treasury to sell them:

In London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, reported to the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, that Britain could not survive such an action by Washington. The sell-off would prompt a run on the pound, and economic collapse, very quickly. Britain, humiliated, withdrew from Suez, and from global power.

It starts with the money. But it won’t end there. It never does.

What might prompt the Sino-American rerun of Suez? Taiwan? North Korea? Something subtler involving China's resource interests in Africa and beyond?

But you can bet it will be something. One day Washington will be on the receiving end of Beijing’s Suez moment. They have our soul who have our bonds.

It's the Stupidity, Economists

Here's a footnote to my weekend column about the revoltingly unrepublican lifestyle of the modern presidency. 

Walter Bagehot, the great English constitutionalist, used to distinguish between the "dignified" and "efficient" parts of the Westminster system - ie, the monarchy and the executive. The United States combines them in one person. Judging from the 40-car conga line to stage a pseudo-browse at a mom'n'pop bookstore on Martha's Vineyard, President Obama and the court eunuchs of the media seem to prefer the ceremonial side ("dignified" hardly seems the word for these leaden rituals).

But, whether in one person or two, the "dignified" and "efficient" parts of a functioning government are supposed to synchronize. Here was last week's pre-Martha bit of ersatz presidential theatre, in the less fashionable zip codes of Minnesota:

Passing trade deals is something that “Congress can do right now,” remarked President Obama Monday at a town hall meeting in Cannon Falls, Minnesota.

Really?

The truth is that Congress can’t do anything on free trade agreements “right now,” because the President has yet to send the agreements to Congress for final approval.

Oh.

I am assured by my liberal friends that Barack Obama is not intentionally attempting to destroy America. Let us also grant that an honorable man would not intentionally deceive the burghers of Cannon Falls for cheap political point-scoring. So what does that leave? That the President is merely ignorant, incompetent and doesn't know his job?

That single line from a single speech is an almost perfect vignette of everything that's wrong with the Washington leviathan. The American taxpayers pay for a luxury Canadian bus, dozens of accompanying vehicles, salaried aides and federal speechwriters in order to zip the President halfway across the country to blame somebody else for something only he can do - if only he'd stayed back at the office.

In many organizations, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. We're way beyond that. Not only does the President's left hand not know what the right hand is even supposed to do, but his left hand cannot even issue a cheap self-serving whine about something his right hand has failed to do without blowing gazillions of taxpayer dollars.

The Imperial Presidency

Rick Perry, governor of Texas, has only been in the presidential race for 20 minutes, but he’s already delivered one of the best lines in the campaign:

“I’ll work every day to try to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can.”

This will be grand news to Schylar Capo, eleven years old, of Virginia, who made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days, and for her pains, was visited by a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter (with accompanying state troopers) who charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species and issued her a $535 fine. If the federal child-abuser has that much time on his hands, he should have charged the cat, who was illegally transporting the protected species from his gullet to his intestine.

#ad# So eleven-year-old Schylar and other middle-schoolers targeted by the micro-regulatory superstate might well appreciate Governor Perry’s pledge. But you never know, it might just catch on with the broader population, too.

Bill Clinton thought otherwise. “I got tickled by watching Governor Perry,” said the former president. “And he’s saying, ‘Oh, I’m going to Washington to make sure that the federal government stays as far away from you as possible -- while I ride on Air Force One and that Marine One helicopter and go to Camp David and travel around the world and have a good time.’ I mean, this is crazy.”

This is the best argument the supposedly smartest operator in the Democratic party can muster? If Bill Clinton wants to make the increasingly and revoltingly unrepublican lifestyle of the American president a campaign issue, Governor Perry should call his bluff. If I understand correctly the justification advanced by spokesgropers for the Transport Security Administration, the reason they poke around the genitalia of three-year-old girls and make wheelchair-bound nonagenarians in the final stages of multiple sclerosis remove their diapers in public is that by doing so they have made commercial air travel the most secure environment in the United States. In that case, why can’t the president fly commercial?

You’d be surprised how many heads of state do. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands flies long haul on KLM. Don’t worry, she’s not in coach all night squeezed next to the mom with the crying baby and the party of English soccer hooligans baying moronic victory chants all night. She rides up front and has so many aides that sometimes she’ll book the entire first class cabin! By contrast, the president of the United States took his personal 747 (a transatlantic aircraft designed to hold 500 people that costs a fifth of a million dollars per hour to run) to go from Washington to a Democratic party retreat in Williamsburg, Va., 150 miles away.

Queen Margrethe of Denmark flies commercial, too. For local trips she has a small Challenger jet. When she’s not zipping around in it, they use it for fishery enforcement off Greenland. Does that detail alone suggest that a thousand-year dynasty dating back to King Gorm the Sleepy (regnant 936–958) travels in rather less luxury than the supposed citizen-executive of a so-called republic of limited government? Undoubtedly King Gorm the Sleepy would have slept a lot better on Air Force One, yet the Danish royal family seems to get by.

Symbols are important. In other circumstances, the Obamas’ vacation on Martha’s Vineyard might not be terribly relevant. But this is a president who blames his dead-parrot economy on “bad luck” -- specifically, the Arab Spring and the Japanese tsunami: As Harry S. Truman would have said, the buck stops at that big hole in the ground that’s just opened up over in Japan. Let us take these whiny excuses at face value and accept for the sake of argument that Obama’s Recovery Summer would now be going gangbusters had not the Libyan rebels seized Benghazi and sent the economy into a tailspin. Did no one in the smartest administration in history think this might be the time for the president to share in some of the “bad luck” and forgo an ostentatious vacation in the exclusive playground of the rich? When you’re the presiding genius of the Brokest Nation in History, enjoying the lifestyle of the super-rich while allegedly in “public service” sends a strikingly Latin American message. Underlining the point, the president then decided to pass among his suffering people by touring small town Minnesota in an armored Canadian bus accompanied by a 40-car motorcade. In some of these one-stoplight burgs, the president’s escort had more vehicles than the municipality he was graciously blessing with his presence.

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By sheer coincidence, I happen to be writing a conspiracy thriller in which a state-of-the-art Canadian bus transporting Pres. Michael Douglas on a tour of Minnesota goes rogue and takes over the government of the United States. Eventually, crack CIA operative Keira Knightley breaks in the rear window and points out to the Canadian bus that it’s now $15 trillion in debt. In a white-knuckle finale, the distraught and traumatized bus makes a break for Winnipeg pursued by Chinese creditors.

#ad# Where was I? Oh, yes. Instead of demonstrating the common touch -- that Obama is feeling your pain Clinton-style -- the motorcade tour seemed an ingenious parody of what (in Victor Davis Hanson’s words) “a wealthy person would do if he wanted to act ‘real’ for a bit” -- in the way that swanky Park Avenue types 80 years ago liked to go slumming up in Harlem. Why exactly does the president need a 40-car escort to drive past his subjects in Dead Moose Junction? It doesn’t communicate strength, but only waste, and decadence. Are these vehicles filled with “aides” working round the clock on his super-secret magic plan to “create” “jobs” that King Barack the Growth-Slayer is planning to lay before Congress in the fall or winter, spring, whatever? If the argument is that the president cannot travel without that level of security, I note that Prince William and his lovely bride did not require a 40-car motorcade on their recent visit to Los Angeles, and there are at least as many people on the planet who want a piece of Wills and Kate as do of Obama. Like the president, the couple made do with Canuck transportation, but in their case they flew in and out on a Royal Canadian Air Force transport described as “no more luxurious than a good motor home”: The shower is the size of a pay phone. It did not seem to diminish Her Royal Highness’s glamour.

I wish Governor Perry well in his stated goal of banishing Washington to the periphery of Americans’ lives. One way he could set the tone is by forgoing much of the waste and excess that attends the imperial presidency. Believe it or not, many presidents and prime ministers manage to get by with only a 14-car or even a four-car motorcade. I know: Hard to imagine, but there it is. A post-prosperity America that has dug itself into a multi-trillion-dollar hole will eventually have to stop digging. When it does so, the government of the United States will have to learn to do more with less. A good place to start would be restoring the lifestyle of the president to something Calvin Coolidge might recognize.

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