Mark Steyn (born 1959) is a Canadian writer, political commentator and cultural critic. He has written five books, including America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, a New York Times bestseller. He is published in newspapers and magazines, and also appears on radio shows such as those of Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt. Steyn, a Canadian citizen, now resides mainly in New Hampshire in the United States. He is married with three children.
Steyn on America
CONGRESSIONAL OVERSIGHT IN ACTION
Thursday, 08 April 2010
Watching the Commander of the Pacific Fleet's deadpan face as Congressman Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) asks him about the danger of the island of Guam tipping over and capsizing is a glimpse of how the viziers to the loopier Ottoman sultans must have felt.
Presumably, when you're the head guy of a major fleet for a big-time navy, you've got plenty of other ways of filling your time other than reassuring congressmen on whether miscellaneous land masses are likely to tip over and sink. But it's business as usual in Congress. The Toyota execs hauled up to account for an entirely mythical epidemic of runaway Priuses surely had similar feelings — as will the Verizon/Caterpillar/John Deere CEOs summoned by Henry Waxman to explain why they had the lèse-majesté to factor the costs of Obamacare into their federally required earnings statements.
I understand Representative Johnson is ill. The fact that this plea is entered in mitigation rather than as grounds for retirement says a lot about what's wrong with Congress.
A couple of days ago, I mentioned François Houle, the leftist apparatchik and provost of the University of Ottawa who threatened Ann Coulter with criminal prosecution before she'd even set foot on Canadian soil.
M. Houle warned Miss Coulter not to “promote hatred.” As this young lady points out in her report from the university, the only hate-promoter here is the buffoon Houle, whose barely veiled threats led to a gang of menacing Houligans (le mot juste) getting the event closed down. Alliances between the state’s ideological commissars and street mobs are a familiar feature of certain kinds of societies, and I suppose Canada will soon get used to its membership of this unlovely club. Ann Coulter says of her experience in the Great White North:
This has never, ever, ever happened before — even at the stupidest American university... Since I’ve arrived in Canada, I’ve been denounced on the floor of Parliament — which, by the way, is on my bucket list — my posters have been banned, I’ve been accused of committing a crime in a speech that I have not yet given, I was banned by the student council. So welcome to Canada!
In one of the oldest settled democracies on the planet, freedom of speech flickers very dimly. To recap:
I would, however, like to inform you, or perhaps remind you, that our domestic laws, both provincial and federal, delineate freedom of expression (or “free speech”) in a manner that is somewhat different than the approach taken in the United States. I therefore encourage you to educate yourself, if need be, as to what is acceptable in Canada...
Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don’t give it any value.
Susan Cole, Canadian “feminist,” defending the mob on Fox News:
We don’t have that same political culture here in (Canada)....We don’t have a 1st Amendment, we don’t have a religion of free speech....Students sign off on all kinds of agreements as to how they’ll behave on campus, in order to respect diversity, equity, all of the values that Canadians really care about. Those are the things that drive our political culture. Not freedoms, not rugged individualism, not free speech. It’s different, and for us, it works.
Translated from the original Canadian, “diversity” means “state-mandated mob-enforced conformity.” As for whether “it works” for Canadians, ask Guy Earle. On Monday Mr Earle, a stand-up comedian of conventionally Trudeaupian views, goes on trial at the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal for putting down two hecklers at his nightclub act. They were, alas for him, of the lesbian persuasion, and so he is now charged with “homophobia.” What a wretched embarrassment to a once free society.
“I see some young people in the audience,” said President Obama in Ohio the other day. Not that young. For he assured them that, under Obamacare, they’d be eligible to remain on their parents’ health coverage until they were 26.
The audience applauded.
Why?
Because, as the politicians say, “it’s about the future of all our children”. And in the future we’ll all be children. For most of human history, across all societies, a 26-year old has been considered an adult, and not starting out but well into it. Not someone who remains a dependent of his parent, but someone who might well have parental responsibilities himself. But, if we’re going to remain dependents at 26, why stop there? Why not 36? An Italian court ruled recently that Signor Giancarlo Casagrande of Bergamo is obligated to pay his daughter Marina a monthly allowance of 350 euros – or approximately 500 bucks. Marina is 32, and has been working on her college thesis (“about the Holy Grail”) for over eight years.
America is not yet as “progressive” as Italy, so let us take President Obama at his word – that, for the moment, your 27th birthday marks the point at which a boy becomes a man and moves out of his parents’ health insurance agency. At what point then does an adult re-enter dependency? Well, in Greece, a female working in a “hazardous” job can retire with a full government pension at 50. “Hazardous” used to mean bomb disposal, and mining. But, as is the way of government entitlements, the category growed like Topsy. Five hundred and eighty professions now qualify as “hazardous”, among them hairdressing. “I use a hundred different chemicals every day — dyes, ammonia, you name it,” 28-year old Vasia Veremi told The New York Times. “You think there’s no risk in that?” Not to mention all those scissors. TV and radio hosts can retire at 50, because they use microphones which could increase their exposure to bacteria. Is column-writing also “hazardous”? It used to be, what with the significant risk of paper cuts. Takes its toll over the years.
So working life is now an ever shrinking window of opportunity between adolescence and retirement. These two happy conditions are the contribution of the advanced social democratic state to the traditional life cycle. In the old days, you were a child until 13 or so. Then you worked. Then you died. And that’s it. Now the interludes between childhood and adulthood and between adulthood and death consume more time than the main acts.
So, if adolescence ends somewhere between 27 and 32 in advanced western nations, when does it begin? We turn for guidance to The Daily Mail in London:
Girls as young as 11 are to be offered pregnancy tests at school.
They will also have access to contraception, the morning-after pill and advice on sexually transmitted infections.
Whatever it takes to get you through recess. So a Sixth Grader can be taught oral sex – “outercourse”, as British teachers call it – and given the abortion helpline number without parental consent. Because, as everyone knows, our bodies “mature” earlier so it would be unreasonable not to expect our grade-schoolers to be rogering anything that moves, and the most we can hope to do is ensure there’s a government-funded condom dispenser nearby. But, evidently, our minds mature later and later, pushing into what less evolved societies regarded as early middle age, so it would be unreasonable to expect people who’ve been fully expert in “sexually transmitted infections” for the best part of two decades to assume responsibility for their broader health care arrangements.
And, if retirement begins at 50, when does it end? Life expectancy in most advanced nations is nudging 80. When Bismarck introduced the Old Age Pension in 1889, you had to be 70 to get it at a time when life expectancy was 45. We haven’t precisely inverted that equation, but we’re getting there. So the “death panel” has a certain rationale. The Dutch, pioneers in medically assisted suicide, are now debating whether to let non-medical persons assist in dispatching people who don’t have anything wrong with them: For citizens who’ve reached the age of 70 and “consider their lives complete”, well, don’t let us stop you.
The economic impact of an aging populace has been well aired, even if not much has been done about it. But European politicians are frantically trying to wean their citizens off unsustainably early retirement on lavish public pensions that, in Greece and elsewhere, will swallow the state if not rolled back. The impact of an ever extended adolescence is also economic – and demographic: The longer you stay in school, the longer you delay forming a family, the fewer children you’ll have to pay taxes to fund your third-of-a-century-long “retirement”. When American politicians promise airily a future in which every child can go to college they presumably haven’t thought through all the ramifications.
Yet the impact of an endlessly deferred adulthood is, I’d say, primarily psychological. What kind of adults emerge from the two-decade cocoon of modern adolescence? Even as the western world atrophies, not merely its pop culture but its entire societal aesthetic seems mired in arrested development. In Men To Boys: The Making Of Modern Immaturity, Gary Cross asks simply: “Where have all the men gone?” Like George Will, Victor Davis Hanson and others who’ve posed that question, Professor Cross is no doubt aware that he sounds old and square. But in a land of middle-aged teenagers somebody has to be.
from National Review
ALLEGEDLY ALLERGIC
Steyn on America
Monday, 04 January 2010
Jonah, your allegedly alleged reader's observation on "clinical legalism" is just right. Putting aside the stuff that was just plain wrong (this guy's an "isolated extremist" — oh, yeah?), the president's remarks had a horrible desiccated complacency. "Alleged . . ." "suspect . . ." "charged . . ." — because this is no different from a punk holding up a gas station, right? In all their alleged allegedness, this administration has an allergy to the concept of war, and thus to the tools of war, including strategy and war aims. In essence, they've accepted a Fort Hood model for this challenge: every so often, something will happen and people will die, and we'll seal off the crime scene and take the alleged suspect into alleged custody. But it's reactive, and it cripples our ability to prevent the death of innocents.
There's a difference between an alleged suspect (which is what he is is the president's fantasy) and an enemy combatant (which is what he is in reality). If this were a war, we would question him about who he hooked up with in Yemen, who did he meet with in London, and maybe get a lead on attacks to come. Instead, the authorities, having issued the Knickerbomber a multi-entry visa, having permitted him to board the plane, and having failed to detect his incendiary unwear, now allow him to lawyer up and ensure that we'll never know who he knew in Yemen or anywhere else.
This would be a big enough gamble in the best of circumstances. Up against the broader background Derb discusses, it makes disaster inevitable.
Ushering Rush Limbaugh's audience into 2010 this afternoon was regular fill-in Mark Steyn. He started off by letting us know that Rush would return to the microphone on Wednesday, and he read some of Rush's remarks following his health scare last week. Steyn mentioned that Rush said his experience in a Hawaii hospital showed that the American health care system "is working just fine." Steyn echoed Rush's sentiment, explaining that what is wrong with government health care systems is that they allow bureaucrats to deny you treatment. (Note to Limbaugh and Steyn: Hawaii actually has "nearly-universal employer-mandated" health insurance.)
Then Steyn began to talk about a subject that would occupy him for most of the remainder of the hour: the recent missteps and controversies involving the Transportation Security Administration. Steyn said the "good news" about the TSA was that it started "profiling" people from 14 countries of interest. The "bad news" was the absolute mess that occurred yesterday at Newark Airport. Steyn criticized the TSA's "brain-dead lockdown procedures" Newark put in place yesterday and called them an "affront to liberty."
Later in the hour, Steyn went on about the Christmas underwear bomber and the inefficiencies of the bureaucracies involved that allowed Abdulmutallab to fly even after his own father alerted U.S. authorities about his behavior.
The second hour began with a lengthy monologue based on the idea that if 2010 turns out to be like 2009, then "we're done for." Steyn discussed how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac represent everything that has gone wrong with U.S. capitalism. Steyn warned that if there was another year of this, plus health care reform and cap and trade, then the "dynamism" of the United States will be "slipping perilously close to the cliff" and the American dream will cease to exist. Steyn added that Rep. Barney Frank, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama are making the idea of upward progress impossible.
Staying on this theme, Steyn talked about how the United States was on the same path as Europe, creating social entitlements that would "doom" us in the long run. He also said that government health care in the United States would be worse than in Canada and the U.K. because we won't have the mitigating factor of the "equality of awfulness."
After a commercial break, Steyn took a caller who compared the "decline" of the United States to the decline of the Roman Empire. Steyn agreed that just like in Rome, people find it hard to pick up on incremental decline. Steyn issued another warning: that Americans are choosing decline by following Obama, Pelosi, and Frank down this path.
Steyn concluded the hour discussing how he would reform health care: get rid of "third parties" (health insurers, the government) from health care and "restore" the free market in health care, a favorite argument of Steyn's we've previously countered.
The final hour (for the day -- Steyn will be back tomorrow!) commenced with our guest host explaining how health care reform could bring about the end of the United States as we know it:
STEYN: Centralized states always fail unless they are small and unless they are homogeneous. And if you look at the history of the last 20 years of the -- or so, the Soviet Union went belly up, Yugoslavia went belly up. Big countries -- big centralized nations always break up. And there was a book written on this theme a few years back that made the interesting point that if the United States had had as centralized a government as France, it would have broken up 200 years ago; that would be it. What we're trying to see now -- what we're seeing now is a federal government that is trying to impose as centralized a regime as France. And it's going to be disastrous.
Then Steyn discussed how Republicans should campaign for the midterm elections in November. Steyn asked if it would be enough for Republicans just to oppose Obama, or if they actually would have to articulate something more specific. Steyn appeared to favor the latter option, and said that the health care bill passed by the Senate "stands for" the government annexation of your body.
The hour proceeded from there with more vague complaints about "big government" and advocacy for a "free market" approach to health care. At one point, Steyn explained that the difference between American health care horror stories and those from Canada and the U.K. is that the latter are about the bureaucracies, while the American ones are about "nurses and doctors." Then Steyn took a caller who thought the government should have some sort of mandated catastrophic coverage. Steyn disagreed and rehashed his free-market health care argument, causing the caller to hang up out of apparent frustration when Steyn asked him what the "market price" for a hernia was.
Zachary Pleat contributed to this edition of the Limbaugh Wire
December 26, 2009, 7:00 a.m.
Cross the River, Burn the Bridge Obamacare is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture.
By Mark Steyn
Last week, during a bit of banter on Fox News, my colleague Jonah Goldberg reminded me of something I’d all but forgotten. Last September, during his address to Congress on health care, Barack Obama declared: “I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”
Dream on. The monstrous mountain of toxic pustules sprouting from greasy boils metastasizing from malign carbuncles that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve is not the last word in “health” “care,” but the first. It ensures that this is all we’ll be talking about, now and forever.
Government can’t just annex “one-sixth of the U.S. economy” (i.e., the equivalent of annexing the entire British or French economy, or annexing the entire Indian economy twice over) and then just say: “Okay, what’s next? On to cap-and-trade . . . ” Nations that governmentalize health care soon find themselves talking about little else.
In Canada, once the wait times for MRIs and hip surgery start creeping up over two years, the government distracts the citizenry with a Royal Commission appointed to study possible “reforms” which reports back a couple of years later usually with recommendations to “strengthen” the government’s “commitment” to every Canadian’s “right” to health care by renaming the Department of Health the Department of Health Services and abolishing the Agency of Health Administration and replacing it with a new Agency of Administrative Health Operations which would report to a reformed Council of Health Policy Administrative Coordination to be supervised by a streamlined Public Health Operations & Administration Assessment Bureau. This package of “reforms” would cost a mere 12.3 gazillion dollars and usually keeps the lid on the pot until the wait times for MRIs start creeping up over three years.
The other alternative is what the British did earlier this year: They created an exciting new “Patient’s Bill of Rights,” promising every Briton the “right” to hospital treatment within 18 weeks. Believe it or not, that distant deadline shimmering woozily in the languid desert haze can be oddly reassuring if you’ve ever visited a Scottish emergency room on a holiday weekend. And, if the four-and-a-half months go by and you still haven’t been treated, you get your (tax) money back? Ah, no. But there is a free helpline you can call which will give you continuously updated estimates on which month your operation has been rescheduled for. I mention these not as a preview of the horrors to come, but because I’ve come to the bleak conclusion that U.S.-style “health” “reform” is going to be far worse.
We were told we had to do it because of the however many millions of uninsured, yet this bill will leave some 25 million Americans uninsured. On the other hand, millions of young fit healthy Americans in their first jobs who currently take the entirely reasonable view that they do not require health insurance at this stage in their lives will be forced to pay for coverage they neither want nor need. On the other other hand, those Americans who’ve done the boring responsible grown-up thing and have health plans Harry Reid determines to be excessively “generous” will be subject to punitive taxes up to 40 percent. On the other other other hand, if you’re the member of a union which enjoys privileged relations with Commissar Reid you’ll be exempt from that 40 percent shakedown. On the other other other other hand, if you’re already enjoying government health care, well, you’re 83 years old and, let’s face it, it’s hardly worth us giving you that surgery for the minimal contribution you make to society, so in the cause of extending government health care to millions of people who don’t currently get it we’re going to ration it for those currently entitled to it.
Looking at the millions of Americans it leaves uninsured, and the millions it leaves with worse treatment and reduced access, and the millions it makes pay significantly more for their current health care, one can only marvel at Harry Reid’s genius: government health care turns out to be all government and no health care. Adding up the zillions of new taxes and bureaucracies and regulations it imposes on the citizenry, one might almost think that was the only point of the exercise.
That’s why I believe America’s belated embrace of government health care is going to be far more expensive and disastrous than the Euro-Canadian models. Whatever one’s philosophical objection to the Canadian health system, it is, broadly, fair: Unless you’re a cabinet minister or a bigtime hockey player, you’ll enjoy the same equality of crappiness and universal lack of access that everybody else does. But, even before it’s up-and-running, Pelosi-Reid-Obamacare is an impenetrable thicket of contradictory boondoggles, shameless payoffs, and arbitrary shakedowns.
That’s why Nebraska’s grotesque zombie senator Ben Nelson is the perfect poster boy for the new arrangements, and not just another so-called Blue Dog Democrat spayed into compliance by a massive cash injection. There is no reason on earth why Nebraska should be the only state in this Union to have every dime of its increased Medicare tab picked up by the 49 others. So either that privilege will be extended to all, or to favored others, or its asymmetry will be balanced by other precisely targeted lollipops hither and yon. Whatever happens, it’s a dagger at the heart of American federalism, just as the bill’s magisterial proclamation that the Independent Medicare Advisory Board can only be abolished by a two-thirds vote of the Senate strikes at one of the most basic principles of a free society — that no parliament can bind its successors.
These details are obnoxious not merely in and of themselves but because they tell us the truth about where we’re headed: Think of the way almost every Big Government project bursts its bodice and winds up bigger and more bloated than its creators allegedly foresaw. In this instance, the stays come pre-loosened, and studded with loopholes. Because the Democrat operators — the Nancy Pelosis and Barney Franks — know that what matters is to get something, anything across the river, and then burn the bridge behind you.
My Republican friends often seem to miss the point in this debate: The so-called “public option” is not Page 3,079, Section (f), Clause VII. The entire bill is a public option — because that’s where it leads, remorselessly. The so-called “death panel” is not Page 2,721, Paragraph 19, Sub-section (d), but again the entire bill — because it inserts the power of the state between you and your doctor, and in effect assumes jurisdiction over your body. As the savvier Dems have always known, once you’ve crossed the Rubicon, you can endlessly re-reform your health reform until the end of time, and all the stuff you didn’t get this go-round will fall into place, and very quickly.
As I’ve been saying for over a year now, “health care” is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture. The unlovely Democrats on public display in the week before Christmas may seem like just a bunch of jelly-spined opportunists, grubby wardheelers and rapacious kleptocrats, but the smarter ones are showing great strategic clarity. Alas for the rest of us, Euro-style government on a Harry Reid/Chris Dodd/Ben Nelson scale will lead to ruin.
A couple of years back, the Rev. Stephen Boissoin committed the crime of writing a letter to a local newspaper objecting to various aspects of "the homosexual agenda." The Alberta "Human Rights" Tribunal convicted him of this crime and imposed a lifetime speech ban preventing him, in essence, from saying anything about homosexuality in public or private ever again anywhere for the rest of his life.
The Court of Queen's Bench in Alberta has now struck down this outrageous decision. Mr. Justice Wilson's ruling could not be plainer. He rejects all the Tribunal's punishments as "illegal," not least the speech ban:
The direction to cease and desist the publishing of "disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals' is beyond the power of the Panel. "Disparaging remarks"were not defined by the Panel. But clearly, "disparaging remarks" are remarks much less serious than hateful and contemptuous remarks and are quite lawful to make. They are beyond the power of the Act to regulate and the power of the Province to restrain.
Quite so. And how sad that an appeals court should have to point out something so obvious. The Reverend Boissoin has won a belated and costly victory over the ideological control-freaks of the Canadian thought police. On the broader questions, Mr. Justice Wilson is more reserved, pointing out correctly that these are matters for the legislature. Unfortunately, Canada's political class are in no hurry to take it up. Nonetheless, the Court of Queen's Bench decision (not to mention its reference to yours truly) would have been less likely before the campaign to restore freedom of speech up north. The cravenness of the politicians is depressing, but Ezra and I and a few others have helped to change the climate — and, for the moment, rendered these disgusting laws unenforceable.
As for America, you see in the recent push for "hate crimes" legislation how easily the same temptations apply here.
Martha Stewart's seasonal pie advice to yours truly on The Mark Steyn Christmas Show reminded me to pull Martha Stewart's Christmas off the bookshelf. And once I'd dipped into that it was hard to stop:
I'm one of those guys who tend to leave the old Yuletide preparations until around 2 p.m. on Christmas Eve only to discover that half the stores closed early at 1 p.m. and those still open have got nothing left except for massive storewide clearances on Hanukkah wrapping paper.
Yet for a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-Santa-suit-pants kind of guy I seem to have acquired over the years an enormous number of books on how to have the perfect Christmas. There's Checklist for a Perfect Christmas by Judith Blahink, and How to Have a Perfect Christmas by Helen Isolde, and The Absolutely Without a Doubt Most Fantastically Perfect Christmas Ever by Evelyn Minshull, and Creating Your Perfect Christmas: Stylish Ideas and Step-By-Step Projects for the Festive Season by Antonia Swingson and Sania Pell, because there's nothing you need around this time of year more than a multi-step project. The more steps the merrier, I always say. One stands agape before those folks who not only have their own seasonal celebrations under scheduled-to-the-second control but also find time to write a bestseller with a faintly hectoring title like It's Beginning To Look A Lot Less Like Christmas Than It Should Considering It's Already The Second Week Of September.
For the most part, these authors seem to have no existence beyond the holiday season. The two-female co-author combo is a particular favourite, both of them on the back in cozy sweaters looking like extras from The Andy Williams Christmas Show. Is there really an "Antonia Swingson" or "Sania Pell"? Their names sound alarmingly like their homemaking tips: "For fun on Christmas morning, why not cut up the gift tags and randomly assemble them into holiday-advice-book author-pseudonyms?" "Judith Blahink"? Isn't the blahinks what Scrooge has when they find him face down in the mulled cider? Christmas? Blah - hink - humbug.
I don't want to give the wrong impression. A lot of the stuff in these tomes is very intriguing. Each year, for example, I dig out my old pal Martha Stewart's entry in the field - Martha Stewart's Christmas - and find myself strangely drawn to the phrase "coxcomb topiary." It's huge. It starts out as a misshapen lump like a hobbit that's fallen into a trash compactor, but that's before Martha's got to work "studding" it with - to pluck at random - "tiny pomegranates dusted with clear glitter." Who would have thought the English language would ever have need for those words assembled in that order? Every third week of December, I read them and marvel. And then I drive to Wal-Mart.
"Coxcomb" is the perfect Perfect Christmas Book word. Not all perfect Christmas authors are hip to that. Some think you can eschew "coxcomb" and get away with "potpourri," which your run-of-the-mill generic mediocre Most Fantastically Perfect Christmas Ever book throws around the joint like, well, potpourri. But what is it the Fool tells King Lear? "If thou follow him, thou must needs wear my coxcomb." Or am I thinking of his codpiece? I always did get them mixed up at school. Codpiece topiary would also add a distinctive touch to one's holiday, though perhaps a livelier talking point than one might want in a Christmas centrepiece. But the point is, if thou followest Martha, thou must needs wear her coxcomb. Also her persimmon, another great Perfect Christmas Book word. If I were ever to write my own seasonal advice book, I would do so under the nom de plume (or, indeed, nom de plume pudding) of Persimmon Coxcomb.
In Old-Fashioned Country Christmas by Vickie and JoAnn of the Gooseberry Patch, Joan Schaeffer is more offhand: "Snip herbs and tie in small bundles to dry. During the winter when the fireplace is in use, toss a bundle of herbs into the crackling fire for a wonderful scent." I like the insouciance of that "toss." But it's a very useful tip. A blazing hearth of oregano helps tone down the overpowering stench of cinnamon that can otherwise so easily predominate at this time of year. Still, the truly perfect preparing-for-Christmas book eschews Schaefferesque nonchalance, preferring an artful balance of massive effort and minimal reward. Nothing sums up the genre more succinctly than two words: "Non-alcoholic wassail," for which cup of cheerlessness one can find a recipe in Christmas 101 by Rick Rodgers.
As the title suggests, Mr. Rodgers, the author of Thanksgiving 101, sticks with the basics. "Organization is a skill I developed as a caterer," he begins. Without organization, you're screwed. You're Baghdad beyond the Green Zone. But, with organization, you'll be your very own Red-and-Green Zone, and Mr. Rodgers is the go-to guy. Before you can organize your Christmas it's important to organize the organization of your Christmas, and a useful aid to organization is something called a "list." That's why, like many seasonal advice-givers, he has a section called - wait for it! - "Making A List And Checking It Twice." This isn't his line. He got it from Haven Gillespie's lyric for a song called Santa Claus Is Coming To Town. Did you know that seasonal music can often add an appealingly seasonal touch to the seasonal atmosphere at this seasonal time of the seasonal season? Why not teach yourself vocal arranging and work up your own a cappella multi-part medley of In the Bleak Midwinter and I Wonder as I Wander for cousin Mabel's kids to distract Gran'pa with on Christmas morning as you're putting the final touches of clear glitter on the tiny pomegranates?
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before you can organize anything, you have to organize your list. As Rick Rodgers says, "A series of lists will help you breeze through the process." And don't worry, it's not boring! As Rick Rodgers also says, "Every time you mark a chore off the list, you will get a rewarding sense of accomplishment."
But what if your list is simply too extensive? As Rick Rodgers further counsels, "If you look at a list and feel overwhelmed, pick up the phone and get a friend to give you a hand!"
But, by this stage, Rodgers knows he may be pushing the joys of list-making a tad too far and that it's time to get on to the actual lists. "Here," he writes, "are the lists that I use again and again."
And the first one is . . . "Guest List"! "If you are having a large holiday season party, send out invitations as early as possible." But when should one have a holiday season party? A good tip is to hold it during the holiday season. "We usually give our holiday party the week between Christmas and New Year's," reveals Mr. Rodgers.
Ha! What a piker! The true secret of successful Christmas planning is not to schedule it in December. As Vickie and JoAnn recommend in Old-Fashioned Country Christmas: "Rather than having your annual party in December when you're too overwhelmed to enjoy it, host a cookout in July with a Christmas theme, everything red and green!" Bright red watermelon, green salad, but with Christmas decorations! "White twinkling lights, Christmas napkins and a small artificial tree decorated with take-home ornaments make for a very festive atmosphere." And in Canada in July we may even have real snow!
Christmas in summer, huh? That doesn't sound much like an "old-fashioned country Christmas," unless the country in question in Australia. Yet it makes perfect sense, and not just because nothing says "dreary convention-bound loser" like holding your Christmas party at Christmas. After all, if you schedule your holiday season for July, it'll free up a lot of time in late December to work on your coxcomb topiary.
The other day, George Jonas passed on to his readers a characteristically shrewd observation gleaned from the late poet George Faludy: “No one likes to think of himself as a coward,” wrote Jonas. “People prefer to think they end up yielding to what the terrorists demand, not because it’s safer or more convenient, but because it’s the right thing . . . Successful terrorism persuades the terrorized that if they do terror’s bidding, it’s not because they’re terrified but because they’re socially concerned.”
This is true. Resisting terror is exhausting. It’s easier to appease it, but, for the sake of your self-esteem, you have to tell yourself you’re appeasing it in the cause of some or other variant of “social justice.” Obviously, it’s unfortunate if “Canadians” get arrested for plotting to murder the artists and publishers of the Danish Muhammad cartoons, but that’s all the more reason to be even more accommodating of the various “sensitivities” arising from the pervasive Islamophobia throughout Western society. Etc.
Yet this psychology also applies to broader challenges. By way of example, take a fluffy feature from a recent edition of Britain’s Daily Mail: “It’s Barbie in a Burka,” read the headline. Yes, as part of her 50th anniversary celebrations, “one of the world’s most famous children’s toys, Barbie, has been given a makeover.” And, in an attractive photo shoot, there was Barbie in “traditional Islamic dress,” wearing full head-to-toe lime-green and red burkas. At least, I’m assuming it was Barbie. It could have been G.I. Joe back there for all one can tell from the letterbox slot of eyeball meshing.
But Britain’s biggest Barbie fan, Angela Ellis, was thrilled. “Bring it on, Burka Barbie,” she said. “I think this is a great idea. I think this is really important for girls, wherever they are from, they should have the opportunity to play with a Barbie that they feel represents them.”
Well, Barbie is 50. And at an age when Katie Cougar—er, Couric—America’s all-time champion network news-ratings limbo-dancer, is being photographed ill-advisedly doing the lambada at the Christmas office party, there is perhaps something to be said for belatedly mothballing your 76-inch plastic bust. Or as the Canadian blogger Closet Conservative put it: “Great news: that bitch Barbie has finally reverted.” “And there’s no need for expensive accessories like books or cars or a life,” added Tim Blair of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, “because Barbie in a Bag isn’t allowed to leave her home unless accompanied by a male relative (Mullah Ken, sold separately).”
Mullah Ken? I’m not so sure about that. Given the long-time rumours, Ken’ll be lucky not to find himself crushed under one of those walls the Taliban put up for their sodomite-rehabilitation program. You’ll be glad to know the dolls are anatomically accurate: Burka Barbie has no clitoris, and, just like Mohamed Atta on the morning of Sept. 11, Ken’s genital area is fully depilated.
But we mean-spirited types are in the minority. The other day, I was watching, as one does, a German lingerie ad, for Liaison Dangereuse. It began with a naked woman—bit blurry and soft-focus, but you could see she had her hair in a towel and everything else in nothing at all, and there were definite glimpses of shapely bottom, the swell of her bosom and whatnot. All very Continental.
She applies her lipstick, sashays into her dressing room wiggling aforementioned posterior, hooks her brassiere, rolls up her seamed stockings, slips into her stilettos, and then—with one final toss of her glossy luxuriant hair—pulls on her burka and steps out the door. Tag line: “Sexiness for Everyone. Everywhere.”
Very clever. The agency is Glow of Berlin. Might win them an award. Yet the superficial cool and the O. Henry switcheroo at the tail seem less cutting-edge state-of-the-art than sad and desperate wishful thinking. For one thing, if the comely young lady were truly a believer as opposed to a jobbing infidel thespian, her underdressed gig would earn her death threats, if she were lucky, and, if she weren’t, actual death.
Still, Burka Barbie and Fatima’s Secret are minor and peripheral. What about the so-called most powerful man in the world? “The U.S. government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it,” President Obama told his audience in Cairo earlier this year. “I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal.”
My oh my, he’s a profile in courage, isn’t he? It’s true that there have been occasional frictions over, say, the refusal of Muslim women to reveal their faces for their driver’s licences—Sultaana Freeman, for example, sued the state of Florida over that “right.” But the real issue in the Western world is “the right of women and girls” not “to wear the hijab.” A couple of weeks ago in Arizona, a young woman called Noor Almaleki was fatally run over by her father in his Jeep Cherokee for becoming “too Westernized.” If there were a Matthew Shepard-style gay crucifixion every few months, liberal columnists would be going bananas about the “climate of hate” in America. But you can run over your daughter, decapitate your wife, drown three teenage girls and a polygamous spouse (to cite merely the most lurid recent examples of North American “honour killings”), and nobody cares. Certainly, there’s no danger of Barack Obama ever standing up for the likes of poor Miss Almaleki to a roomful of A-list imams. When it comes to real hate crimes, as opposed to his entirely imaginary epidemic, the president of the United States has smaller cojones than Ken.
If you eschew the Grand Cherokee in favour of the Toronto subway, you may have noticed that the poster girl for the latest “social justice” campaign is a Muslim woman. “Drop Fees for a Poverty-Free Ontario” is the ringing cry, and next to it is a hijab-clad lady speaking up and speaking out. It’s something to do with the cost of post-secondary education, which, like everything else in Canada, is supposed to be “free.” The image is a curious choice as an emblem for educational access: after all, one of the most easily discernible features of societies that adopt Islamic dress is how ignorant they are. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, girls were forbidden by law to attend school—i.e., not just fritter-away-half-a-decade-on-Ontario-taxpayers “post-secondary” education, but kindergarten and Grade 1. In Pakistan, 60 per cent of women are illiterate.
According to the UN’s 2002 Arab Development Report, half of all women in the Arab world cannot read. And even in Canada, the ability of the woman on the subway poster to access that post-secondary education depends not on the “fees” but on her father or, if she’s already been married off to her 16-year-old cousin back in Mirpur, her husband. The Saskatchewan Internet maestro Kate McMillan summed up the poster thus:
“Subjugation of women—it’s the new normal.”
“Traditional Islamic dress” is not so “traditional.” Talk to any educated Muslim woman who attended university in the fifties, sixties or seventies—back when they assumed history was moving their way and a covered woman was merely a local variant of the Russian babushka, something old and wizened you saw in upcountry villages. Now you see them in the heart of the metropolis—and I don’t mean Beirut or Abu Dhabi so much as Paris and Brussels. It’s very strange to be able to walk around, say, Zarqa, hometown of the late “insurgent” Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and look 90 per cent of the women in the eye, and even be rewarded with a friendly smile every so often, and then to fly on to London and be confronted by one masked face after another while strolling down Whitechapel Road in the East End. The burka, the niqab and the hijab are not fashion statements but explicitly political ones, and what they symbolize in a Western context is self-segregation.
That “Drop Fees” campaign would never dream of dressing up its poster gal as June Cleaver, Donna Reed or any other outmoded sitcom mom in twin-set and pearls. Golly, that would send all sorts of disturbing signals to today’s liberated females, wouldn’t it? What signal is Barbie’s burka sending? That, in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, women were forbidden by law from ever feeling sunlight on their faces? Hey, there’s a positive message for young girls.
Phillip Longman is a demographer who is widely regarded as the antithesis of the Muzzies-are-coming alarmists like me. Yet his most famous essay on the world currently taking shape is titled “The Return of Patriarchy.” Don’t worry, it’s not the bad kind of patriarchy of 1950s sitcom dads. It’s the groovy multiculti kind—which presumably is why white liberal progressives are so eager to mainstream it. Perhaps they figure it can just be contained to the likes of Noor Almaleki, but I doubt it. I’ve mentioned previously a Euro-pal of mine, non-Muslim, who’s taken to covering herself in certain quartiers of an evening in order to avoid harassment by “youths.” She does exactly what that German lingerie lass does—and with the merest correction to the sign-off:
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