The Undocumented Mark Steyn (2 page)

The old artistic trade-off—“Do you want it good or do you want it Friday?”—doesn’t really apply to jobbing columnists: Your editors want it Friday. Good is an extra. But if you’re lucky, a few of them hold up over the decades—not because you were aiming to say anything profound, but because in that snapshot of whatever was happening that particular Friday you alighted upon a small close-up that illuminates the big picture: The story of Deena Gilbey’s post-9/11 torments by the federal bureaucracy that facilitated the murder of her husband is still a perfect encapsulation of the near suicidal stupidity of America’s immigration regime. The coverage of the Million Mom March is a textbook case of the U.S. media’s willingness to serve as the court eunuchs of the Democratic Party. The new federally-mandated street signs in Barre, Vermont, explain why this country is the Brokest Nation in History. Over the years, I’ve written on a lot of different subjects: I was “Musical Theatre Correspondent” for
The Independent
in London, and obituarist for
The Atlantic
over here. And I’ve included a bit of movie criticism, literary disquisition, musical analysis, showbiz arcana, mostly, as above, for the larger truths they exemplify.

There are politicians here, of course, although both Clinton, staggering pantless through American feminists’ defense of him, and Obama, running on biography but one full of entirely invented friends and family, seem more interesting to me as cultural phenomena. Sadly, there’s still no “John Kerry election diary,” although not because I didn’t enjoy valuable “face time” with the great man during his campaign for the White House. In 2003, I was at a campaign event in Haverhill, New Hampshire (for more on Haverhill, see this book’s postscript), chatting with two plaid-clad old-timers:

         
The Senator approached and stopped in front of us. The etiquette in primary season is that the candidate defers to the cranky Granite Staters’ churlish indifference to status and initiates the conversation: “Hi, I’m John Kerry. Good to see ya. Cold enough for ya? How ’bout them Sox?” Etc. Instead, Senator Kerry just stood there nose to nose, staring at us with an inscrutable Botoxicated semi-glare on his face. After an eternity, an aide stepped out from behind him and said, “The Senator needs you to move.”

               
“Well, why couldn’t he have said that?” muttered one of the old coots.

Why indeed? But then again—from another campaign stop, a year later, at the popular burger emporium Wendy’s:

         
Teresa Heinz Kerry pointed to the picture of the bowl of chili above the clerk’s head: “What’s that?” she asked. He explained that it was something called “chili,” and she said she’d like to try a bowl. The Senator also ordered a Frosty, a chocolate dessert. They toyed with them after a fashion and then got back on the bus. . . . He may not enjoy eating at Wendy’s, but his faux lunch order captures the essence of his crowd-working style: chili and Frosty. If I were the Wendy’s marketing director, I’d make it the John Kerry Special from now through Election Day.

Nothing wrong with that. But I feel like Bob Hope must have felt flipping through his best Coolidge jokes during the Dukakis campaign. As I write, people keep asking me whom I favor for the nomination in 2016. Well, as a resident of a New Hampshire township with more than thirty-seven people, I don’t have to seek out presidential candidates; they’re there at the inn and the general store and the diner and the Grange. And, over the period covered by this book, I’ve seen enough next-presidents-of-the-United-States for several lifetimes: Phil Gramm, Pete Wilson, Bob Dornan, Bob Dole, Elizabeth Dole,
Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer, Lamar Alexander, Tom Tancredo, Tommy Thompson, Alan Keyes. . . .

Would it have made any difference to the country had any of these fine upstanding fellows prevailed? Or would we be pretty much where we are anyway? Aside from a trade agreement here, a federal regulation there, I’d plump for the latter. You can’t have conservative government in a liberal culture, and that’s the position the Republican Party is in. After the last election, I said that the billion dollars spent by the Romney campaign on robocalls and TV ads and all the rest had been entirely wasted, and the Electoral College breakdown would have been pretty much what it was if they’d just tossed the dough into the Potomac and let it float out to sea. But imagine the use all that money and time could have been put to out there in the wider world.

Liberals expend tremendous effort changing the culture. Conservatives expend tremendous effort changing elected officials every other November—and then are surprised that it doesn’t make much difference. Culture trumps politics—which is why, once the question’s been settled culturally, conservatives are reduced to playing catch-up, twisting themselves into pretzels to explain why gay marriage is really conservative after all, or why thirty million unskilled immigrants with a majority of births out of wedlock are “natural allies” of the Republican Party.

We’re told that the presidency is important because the head guy gets to appoint, if he’s lucky, a couple of Supreme Court judges. But they’re playing catch-up to the culture, too. In 1986, in a concurrence to a majority opinion, the Chief Justice of the United States declared that “there is no such thing as a fundamental right to commit homosexual sodomy.” A blink of an eye, and his successors are discovering fundamental rights to commit homosexual marriage. What happened in between? Jurisprudentially, nothing: Everything Chief Justice Burger said back in the Eighties—about Common Law, Blackstone’s “crime against nature,” “the legislative authority of the State”—still applies. Except it doesn’t. Because the culture—from school guidance counselors to sitcom characters to Oscar hosts—moved on, and so even America’s Regency of Jurists was obliged to get with the beat. Because to say
today what the Chief Justice of the United States said twenty-eight years ago would be to render oneself unfit for public office—not merely as Chief Justice but as CEO of a private company, or host of a cable home-remodeling show, or dog-catcher in Dead Moose Junction.

What politician of left or right championed gay marriage? Bill Clinton? No, he signed the now notoriously “homophobic” Defense of Marriage Act. Barack Obama? Gay-wise, he took longer to come out than Ricky Martin. The only major politician to elbow his way to the front of the gay bandwagon was Britain’s David Cameron, who used same-sex marriage as a Sister-Souljah-on-steroids moment to signal to London’s chattering classes that, notwithstanding his membership of the unfortunately named “Conservative Party,” on everything that mattered he was one of them.

But, in Britain as in America, the political class was simply playing catch-up to the culture. Even in the squishiest Continental “social democracy,” once every four or five years you can persuade the electorate to go out and vote for a conservative party. But if you want them to vote for conservative
government
you have to do the hard work of shifting the culture every day, seven days a week, in the four-and-a-half years between elections. If the culture’s liberal, if the schools are liberal, if the churches are liberal, if the hip, groovy business elite is liberal, if the guys who make the movies and the pop songs are liberal, then electing a guy with an “R” after his name isn’t going to make a lot of difference. Nor should it. In free societies, politics is the art of the possible. In the 729 days between elections, the left is very good at making its causes so possible that in American politics almost anything of consequence is now impossible, from enforcing immigration law to controlling spending.

What will we be playing catch-up to in another twenty-eight years? Not so long ago, I might have suggested transsexual rights. But, barely pausing to celebrate their victory on gay marriage, the identity-group enforcers have gone full steam ahead on transgender issues. Once upon a time there were but two sexes. Now Facebook offers its 1.2 billion patrons the opportunity to select their preference from dozens of “genders”: “male” and “female” are still on the drop-down menu, just about, but lost amid fifty shades of gay—“androgynous,”
“bi-gender,” “intersex,” “cisfemale,” “trans*man,” “gender fluid”. . . .

Oh, you can laugh. But none of the people who matter in American culture are laughing. They take it all perfectly seriously. Supreme Intergalactic Arbiter Anthony Kennedy wields more power over Americans than George III did, but in a year or three he’ll be playing catch-up and striking down laws because of their “improper animus” and wish to “demean” and “humiliate” persons of gender fluidity. Having done an impressive job of demolishing the basic societal building block of the family, the ambitious liberal is now moving on to demolishing the basic biological building block of the sexes. Indeed, taken in tandem with the ever greater dominance of women at America’s least worst colleges and, at the other end of the social scale, the bleak, dispiriting permanence of the “he-cession,” in twenty-eight years’ time we may be fairly well advanced toward the de facto abolition of man, at least in the manly sense. That seems to me at least as interesting a question as whether the Republicans can take the Senate with a pick-up in this or that swing state. Culture is the long view; politics is the here and now. Yet in America vast cultural changes occur in nothing flat, while, under our sclerotic political institutions, men elected to two-year terms of office announce ambitious plans to balance the budget a decade after their terms end. Here, again, liberals show a greater understanding of where the action is.

So, if the most hawkish of GOP deficit hawks has no plans to trim spending until well in the 2020s, why not look at what kind of country you’ll be budgeting for by then? What will American obesity and heart-disease and childhood diabetes rates be by then? What about rural heroin and meth addiction? How much of the country will, with or without “comprehensive immigration reform,” be socioeconomically Latin-American? And what is the likelihood of such a nation voting for small-government conservatism?

There’s a useful umbrella for most of the above: The most consequential act of state ownership in the twentieth-century western world was not the nationalization of airlines or the nationalization of railways or the nationalization of health care, but the nationalization of the family. I owe that phrase to
Professor R Vaidyanathan at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. He’s a bit of a chippy post-imperialist, and he’s nobody’s idea of a right-winger, but he’s absolutely right about this. It’s the defining fact about the decline of the west: Once upon a time, in Canada, Britain, Europe, and beyond, ambitious leftists nationalized industries—steel, coal, planes, cars, banks—but it was such a self-evident disaster that it’s been more or less abandoned, at least by those who wish to remain electorally viable. On the other hand, the nationalization of the family proceeds apace, and America is as well advanced on that path as anywhere else. “The west has nationalized families over the last 60 years,” writes Vaidyanathan. “Old age, ill health, single motherhood—everything is the responsibility of the state.”

When I was a kid and watched sci-fi movies set in a futuristic dystopia where individuals are mere chattels of an unseen all-powerful government and enduring human relationships are banned and the progeny of transient sexual encounters are the property of the state, I always found the caper less interesting than the unseen backstory: How did they get there from here? From free western societies to a bunch of glassy-eyed drones wandering around in identikit variety-show catsuits in a land where technology has advanced but liberty has retreated: how’d that happen?

I’d say “the nationalization of the family” is how it happens.
That’s
how you get there from here.

But I see I’ve worked my way back to all that apocalyptic gloom I came in with at that long-ago publisher’s lunch. So you’ll be relieved to hear there’s some lighter stuff along the way—Viagra, potpourri, Marilyn Monroe, Soviet national anthem rewrites. . . .

Finally, a note on what Daffy Duck, in a livelier context, called “pronoun trouble”: I wound up living in New Hampshire through the classic disastrous real estate transaction. I walked into the realtor intending to buy a little ski place I could use for a couple of winter weekends and a week at Christmas, and walked out with a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse needing two hundred years of work on it. In those days, I wrote mainly on music and film and other showbizzy subjects, and gradually my editors in London and elsewhere
became aware that I was doing all this showbizzy stuff from some obscure corner of America. And so they started to ask me to write on this or that political story. Most foreign correspondents in America are based in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles, so I like to think I came at the subject from a different angle (again, see this book’s postscript for more on my whereabouts).

But, as I said, it can lead to Daffy-style pronoun trouble. Writing for publications in Britain, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, I used to be very careful about my pronouns. Then I discovered that for the previous six months some malicious Fleet Street sub-editor at
The Daily Telegraph
, in my more contemptuously hectoring surveys of the London scene, had been taking out every dismissive “you snotty Brits” and replacing it with “we.” A while later, I got a barrage of emails from Canadians sneering at me as a wannabe American along with even more emails from aggrieved Americans huffing at my impertinence at claiming to speak on behalf of their country. It turned out some jackanapes of a whippersnapper at
The New York Sun
had been removing all my “you crazy Yanks” and replacing it with “we.” The same thing happened to my compatriot Michael Ignatieff, who returned to Canada from a lucrative gig at Harvard intending to become Prime Minister only to find that his opponents dredged up every
New York Times
column of his in which he’d used the word “we” as shorthand for “we Americans.” Mr. Ignatieff led the Canadian Liberal Party to their worst defeat in history and is now back at Harvard.