After America

by Mark Steyn

  During the 2010 World Cup, the eminent Egyptian imam Mus’id Anwar gave a sermon in Cairo attacking young men who follow soccer instead of memorizing the Koran:Ask one of those young men who are so crazy about soccer to name the names of twenty of the Prophet’s companions. Only 20! The Prophet Muhammad’s companions numbered over 100,000. All I’m asking for is the name of 20 companions.... But if you ask the same guy to give you the names of 20 soccer players, 6

  Who’s to blame for this? Well, the imam looked into it and quickly discovered who’s seducing the Muslims away from their Korans:As you know, the Jews have The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Over 100 years ago, they formulated a plan to rule the world, and they are implementing this plan.

  One of the protocols says: “Keep the [non-Jews] preoccupied with songs, soccer, and movies.” Is it or isn’t it happening? It is.

  Don’t some of them die in the course of a soccer match? At an important match in Egypt, a man was standing in the stadium, and when his team scored a goal, he screamed “Gooooaaal!” got a heart attack, and died.... The Zionists manage to generate animosity among Muslims, and even between Muslim countries, by means of soccer. Whose interests does this serve? The Jews.

  Oh, it’s easy to be skeptical. After all, if soccer is part of the international Jewish Conspiracy, how come Israel has only managed to qualify for the World Cup on one occasion (1970) and got knocked out in Round One?7 Ah, but that just shows how cunning these Jews are. At the time the distinguished cleric was advancing his theory, I happened to be in Bordeaux and found myself outside the Virgin Megastore, which brands itself in France as “La culture du plaisir”—The Culture of Pleasure. As far as I know, the chain doesn’t operate in the Middle East. If you’re a Muslim, you have to wait till you self-detonate to hit the Virgin Megastore, big time and with our entire inventory priced to clear. But it struck me that the western world’s self-evaluation isn’t so very different from Imam Anwar’s diagnosis: we promote ourselves as “the Culture of Pleasure”—preoccupied, as the imam says, with songs, sports, movies, and other sensual delights.

  Or as H. G. Wells put it: “This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.”

  Because even the “culture” part of “la culture du plaisir” eventually becomes too much effort. Our age does not produce great symphonies or operas but merely electronic delivery systems, new toys for enjoying old strains. The “artistic impetus would at last die away,” wrote Wells of the Eloi. “To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more. Even that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity.”

  Odd how many philosophical singalongs of the Sixties that one sentence anticipates: “If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair”; “All we need is music... and dancin’ in the streets”; “We’ll sing in the sunshine, we’ll laugh every day....”

  A culture of pleasure can be very convenient for the government class. In Huxley’s Brave New World, the World State Controller, to whom the author gave the oddly prescient name of Mustapha Mond, understands that people prefer happiness to truth, “happiness” being defined as round-theclock sensory gratification—food, drugs, sex, consumer toys. Given that he was writing in the late Twenties, Huxley’s parody pop songs anticipate very well the sensual torpor of our own culture du plaisir:Hug me till you drug me, honey;

  Kiss me till I’m in a coma;

  Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;

  Love’s as good as soma.

  “Soma,” a word Huxley took from Sanskrit, is a drug that both intoxicates and tranquilizes. In his brave new world, we’re seduced into passivity. And in such a society, as Charles Murray wrote of Europe, “ideas of greatness become an irritant.”8 Go to the heart of western civilization—Rome, the capital of Christendom; Madrid, Lisbon, and Paris, the seats of mighty empires that sent their men and ships to every corner of the world and

  Is that the fate the United States is destined for? It’s what a lot of Americans would like. In 2008 many people were just exhausted by the “war on terror.” Not because it demanded anything of them—quite the opposite: it was entirely outsourced to a small professional soldiery the twenty-first-century Eloi rarely encounter. But so what? They still had to hear about the war, and they were bored by it. Having to be at Code Orange in perpetuity was just kind of a downer. So they voted for “change”—by which they meant a quiet life: I don’t want to have to think about wacky foreigners trying to blow us up; I don’t need that in my life right now.

  As for the Eloi’s mostly inactive “activism,” professions of generalized concerns about “world poverty” or “saving the planet” do not testify to your idealism so much as what Adam Bellow calls “a certain blithe assurance about the permanence of freedom”:9 you worry about lofty and distant problems because you assume there are none closer to home. Our Eloi are smugly self-satisfied. I cite at random four stickers from the cars parked outside a children’s “holiday” concert in small-town Vermont:I THINK, THEREFORE I’M A DEMOCRAT

  What kind of sentient being boasts on a bumper sticker about his giant brain? And cites as evidence thereof his unyielding loyalty to a political machine? Talk about putting Descartes before the whores. What that translates to is: “I’M A DEMOCRAT. THEREFORE, I HAVE NO NEED TO THINK.”

  QUESTION EVERYTHING

  Including the need to question everything? Doubting everything gets kinda exhausting. In practice, questioning “everything” boils down to questioning

  IMAGINE PEACE

  That’s a total failure of imagination—a failure, under the guise of universalist multiculturalism, to imagine that outside your fluffy cocoon there is a truly many-cultured world full of people so “diverse” they do not view things as you do. Underneath the “IMAGINE” sticker was another:PEACE THROUGH MUSIC

  That’s true if you’ve got in mind someone like Scotland’s Bill Millin, personal bagpiper to Lord Lovat, commander of 1st Special Service Brigade, who piped the men ashore on D-Day as he strolled up and down the beach amid the gunfire playing “Hieland Laddie” and “The Road to the Isles” and other highland favorites.10 Bill Millin was a musician and a truly heroic one. But I would doubt our myopic Vermonter has even heard of him. I wonder if he’s aware that, under the Taliban, music is banned. For all the much vaunted “empathy” of the caring class and their insistence on “celebrating diversity,” they seem blissfully ignorant of the great diversity out there in the world, and of how hostile much of it is to their preoccupations. “Peace through Music” is inertia masquerading as a mission: hey, I’ll just sit on the porch, smoke a little dope, strum my guitar, and tell myself that it’s a great contribution to humanity.

  Because anything other than striking self-flattering, mock-dissident poses is too much like hard work.

  Adam Bellow may be understating the problem: even as they take their own freedoms for granted, it’s not clear the Eloi care much about freedom per se. And even the lofty and distant causes are merely a pretext for a Poems Against the War under the misapprehension that the poems might address the, you know, war. Kim Addonizio’s “Cranes in August” is about her daughter making cranes out of paper while “outside/the gray doves/bring their one vowel to the air,” ominously. Don’t care for gray doves in August? No problem. The very next poem is about geese in October:Geese, October 2002.

  The poet, Lucy Adkins, notes that even as “our country’s leaders/are voting for war,” outside her home in Nebraska “the geese fly over/the old wisdom in their feathers.” Not into geese or doves? How about insects? Like Kim Addonizio, for Kelli Russell Agodon war poetry starts with your daughter’s play activities, but in this case the young Miss Agodon is endeavoring to help fire ants and potato bugs in their “small seaside community outside of Seattle”:She tries to help them

  before the patterns of tides

  reach their lives.

&nbs
p; As Ms. Agodon writes:Here war is only newsprint.

  How easy it is not to think about it

  As we sleep beneath our quiet sky.

  You don’t say! But enough about war, let’s talk about me, and my daughter, and whatever happens to be flying or crawling by the window. Would it kill you to include one lousy detail about Iraq—you know, the ostensible subject? Maybe you could have the geese and gray doves fly over and take a look at what Saddam did to the Iraqi marshlands. As Bruce Bawer wrote in his 11 Yes, indeed. If only geopolitics were like a pledge drive on Vermont Public Radio: tedious and disruptive, but only for a few days, and if you give them $50 to leave you alone you get an organic tote bag.

  Campaigning for the Democrats in 2004, Ben Affleck offered a pearl of wisdom to John Kerry and his consultants: “You have to enervate the base,” the Hollywood heartthrob advised solemnly.12 As it happens, if it’s enervating the base you’re after, Senator Kerry was doing a grand job. It would be easy to mock Mr. Affleck as a celebrity airhead, but these days even the airheads are expensively credentialed: Ben is an alumnus of one of the same colleges as President Obama (Occidental). And liberal progressivism has done a grand job of enervating its base. A self-absorbed passivity is now the default mode of the enlightened worldview. Behind those “IMAGINE PEACE” stickers lies a terrible failure to imagine.

  CELEBRATE YOURSELF

  Appearing at the University of Denver in 2010, the talk-show host Dennis Prager was asked to identify the single greatest threat to the future of America.13 Several enthusiastic members of the audience bayed “Obama!” and Mr. Prager found himself obliged to correct them: “No, it’s not Obama,” he said. “It’s not. If, God forbid, President Obama came down with an illness nothing would change. Nothing.”

  This is correct. Barack Obama is a symptom rather than the problem. He didn’t declare himself president; America chose him. That’s what should worry you, not whether he was born in Mombasa and had his minions fake a Hawaiian birth certificate. That just gets you off the hook: aw, gee, we were duped. No, you duped yourself, America. That’s the problem. Mr. Prager explained that the single greatest threat facing the nation was that “we have not passed on what it means to be American to this generation.... A society We give far more to charity per capita than Europeans do. Why? Are we born better? No. The bigger the government the worse the citizen. They are preoccupied in Europe with how much time off: Where will they vacation? When will they retire? These are selfish questions, these are not altruistic questions. So the goodness that America created is jeopardized by our not knowing what we stand for. That’s our greatest threat. We are our problem.

  Instead of teaching “what it means to be American,” we teach anything but. We are obsessed with identity, but any identity other than “American”—female, gay, African-American, Muslim-American, Undocumented-American. At American universities, women take Women’s Studies, Latinos take Latino Studies, queers take Queer Studies. For many Americans, the preferred academic discipline is navel-gazing, sometimes literally: people of girth take Fat Studies. The best way to celebrate diversity is by celebrating yourself, and the best way to celebrate yourself is without anyone else getting in the way. And why wait till college? In New York, gay, lesbian, and transgendered schoolchildren can attend Harvey Milk High.14 Are there many transgendered 13-year-olds, even in Manhattan? Well, it’s about every student’s right to a “non-threatening learning environment,” and, if he doesn’t actually learn anything in the non-threatening learning environment, he’s still better off than if he’d been in the non-learning threatening environment of most New York high schools.

  In all its shallow obsession with sexual and racial politics, the ever more leisurely vacuity of education also puts a question mark over identity in a more fundamental sense. In January 2009, Canada’s Globe and Mail (which is like the New York Times but without the jokes) chose to contrast the incoming U.S. president with, er, me. “He belongs to a demographic—it 15

  Crumbs. I wasn’t aware I was an entirely different “demographic” from Barack Obama. We’re more or less the same generation, but plainly the president stands for hope and the future and I represent the past and fear. As for “not getting the problem,” a lot of those black voters who turned out in huge numbers for Obama in California stayed in the polling booth to vote down gay marriage:16 the rainbow coalition shimmers beguilingly but dissolves on close contact—and that’s before you ask the shy Muslim girl in the corner of the classroom if she wouldn’t be happier at Lesbo High. Still, in a broad sense Rick Salutin is correct: the demographic that is the change it’s been waiting for doesn’t want to be seen “clutching old identifications.” What a yawneroo that’d be.

  For decades, western elites have been bored by their own traditions and fetishized the exotic. Obama was both the beneficiary of this syndrome and its apotheosis. He was living his own COEXIST sticker: his parents were Kansan and Kenyan, as if paired by an alphabetically minded dating agency; he was Hawaiian, and Indonesian; for white liberals he offered absolution from racial guilt, but he wasn’t one of those in-your-face types like the Reverend Al and the Reverend Jesse yelling grievance jingles all day long; he was a community organizer from the mean streets of Chicago, yet he was also by some happy if vague process an alumnus of half the schools in the Ivy League, and he had the great good fortune not to live in any of the “communities” he “organized” but instead in the more salubrious Hyde Park, a community organized by John D. Rockefeller’s money; he embodied “change,” but he peddled the same reassuringly shopworn bromides (“America, this is our moment”) whose woozy evasions liberals chose to

  After the inauguration, my old pal Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, tweeted ecstatically: “What a speech!! Speaking as citizen of the world that was exac what I wanted to hear from an Amer Pres’t.”17

  What that seems to boil down to is an Amer Pres’t who isn’t hung up on being Pres’t of Amer: that Obama can do. “People of the world,”18 he droned to his audience for his famous Berlin speech, sounding as if his spacecraft had just landed from Planet Hopechangula and you earthlings had no choice but to submit to his awesome power. In postmodern terms, he’s not as far gone as Michael Ignatieff, leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ottawa. Previously a professor at Harvard and a BBC late-night intellectual telly host, Mr. Ignatieff returned to Canada in order to become Prime Minister, and to that end got himself elected as leader of the Liberal Party. And, as is the fashion nowadays, he cranked out a quickie tome laying out his political “vision.” Having spent his entire adult life abroad, he was aware that some of the natives were uncertain about his commitment to the land of his birth. So he was careful to issue a sort of pledge of a kind of allegiance, explaining that writing a book about Canada had “deepened my attachment to the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.”19

  My, that’s awfully big of you. As John Robson commented in The Ottawa Citizen, “I’m worried that a man so postmodern he doesn’t need a home wants to lead my country. Why? Is it quaint? An interesting sociological experiment?”20

  Indeed. But there’s a lot of it about. Many Americans quickly began to pick up the strange vibe that for Barack Obama governing America was “an interesting sociological experiment,” too. He would doubtless agree that the United States is “the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home.” 21 In his own book on the president, Dinesh D’Souza argues that Obama is defined by his father’s anti-colonialism.22 Speaking as an old-school imperialist, I find him exactly the opposite: in his attitude to America, Obama comes across as a snooty viceregal grandee passing through some tedious colonial outpost. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job—that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along. When he lectures America on the Ground Zero mosque or immigration, he does not speak to his people as one of them. When he addresses the
monde, he speaks as a citoyen du for whom the United States has no greater or lesser purchase on him than Papua or Peru. There is an absence of feeling for America—as in his offhand remark to Bob Woodward that the United States can “absorb” another 9/11.23 During the long Northern Irish “Troubles,” cynical British officials used to talk off-the-record about holding casualties down to “an acceptable level of violence,” but it’s eerie to hear the head of state take the same view—and about a far higher number of fatalities.24 Ask the 3,000 families who had a huge gaping hole blown in their lives whether another 9/11 is something you want to “absorb” rather than prevent.

  But why be surprised at the thin line between Obama’s cool and his coldness? Jeremiah Wright (his race-baiting pastor), Van Jones (his Communist “green jobs” czar), William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn (his hippie-terrorist patrons) are not exactly stirred by love of country, either. Nor, to be honest, are America’s desiccated media—although they know enough to understand that you have to genuflect in that direction once in a while: Would it kill you to wear the stupid flag pin? The rubes’ll lap it up. Hence, the commentariat’s subsequent panic at Obama’s indifference even to faking feeling.

  With hindsight, this is what drove both the birthers and the countering cries of racism. Detractors and supporters alike were trying to explain something that was at first vaguely palpable and then became embarrassingly obvious: it’s not so much that he’s foreign to America, but that America is foreign to him. Outside the cloisters of Hyde Park and a few other enclaves, he doesn’t seem to get America. Not because he was born in Kenya or wherever, but because he’s the first president to be marinated his entire life in a post-modern, post-American cultural relativism. What’s worrying about Obama is not that he’s weird but that he’s so typical of much of the Eloi; in that sense, his post-Americanness is all too American.