After America

by Mark Steyn

  Paul Berman, a lifelong liberal, says that the doctrine of relativism makes “everything the equal of everything else.”78 As a result, our ruling class—political, academic, cultural—have “lost the ability to make the most elementary distinctions.” This is almost right. In fact, the cult of absolutist relativism is a kind of affirmative action against their own civilization: In any dispute between the boundlessly tolerant West and a highly intolerant Islam, it must be the fault of the former for being insufficiently tolerant of the latter’s intolerance. A society led by men with such a self-destructive urge will get its wish, and very soon, and deservedly so.

  Not so long ago I saw a two-panel cartoon: on the left hand panel, “This is your brain”; on the right hand panel, “This is your brain on political correctness”—a small and shriveled thing, but now standard issue.

  Here’s a random selection of headlines:79Naval History Web Site Highlights Women’s History Month

  Senior Navy Leader Receives Black Engineer of the Year Award

  Davede Alexander Receives Diversity Leadership Award

  Navy Women in Aviation Show Diversity Is Rising

  Top Pentagon Official Discovers Model of Diversity at Corona

  Warfare Center, Says Navy’s Doing Diversity Right

  CNRH Seminar Teaches Lessons of Hope and Empowerment

  The above were all plucked from the United States Navy newsletter. When the first newsletter showed up in my in-box, I thought it might contain under-reported tales of derring-do off the Horn of Africa battling Somali pirates. But instead it’s one diversity-awareness story after another: “Senior Navy Leader Receives Most Diverse Engineer of the Year Award”; “Appointment of First Somali Pirate to Joint Chiefs Of Staff Shows Diversity Is Rising, Says Top Pentagon Official.”

  Fred Astaire in Follow the Fleet, 1935, words and music by Irving Berlin:We joined the Navy to see the world

  And what did we see?

  We saw the sea...

  Follow The Fleet, twenty-first century remake:We joined the Navy to see the world

  And what did we see?

  We saw the Diversity Leadership Awards.

  Well, you say, look, they’re just doing what they need to do to keep the congressional oversight crowd off their back; it’s just a bit of window dressing. 80 At the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences, he was reprimanded for trying to persuade patients to convert to Islam, and fellow pupils objected to his constant “anti-American propaganda.”81 But, as the Associated Press reported, “a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.”82

  This is your brain on political correctness.

  As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, Major Hasan was the first mass murderer in U.S. history to give a PowerPoint presentation outlining the rationale for the crime he was about to commit.83 And he gave it to a roomful of fellow Army psychiatrists and doctors—some of whom glanced queasily at their colleagues, but none of whom actually spoke up. And when the question arose of whether then Captain Hasan was, in fact, “psychotic,” the policy committee at Walter Reed Army Medical Center worried, “How would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents.”84

  This is your brain on political correctness.

  So instead he got promoted to major and shipped to Fort Hood. And barely had he got to Texas when he started making idle chit-chat praising the jihadist murderer of two soldiers outside a recruitment center in Little Rock. “This is what Muslims should do, stand up to the aggressors,” Major Hasan told his superior officer, Colonel Terry Lee. “People should strap bombs on themselves and go into Times Square.”85

  In less enlightened times, Colonel Lee would have concluded that, being in favor of the murder of his comrades, Major Hasan was objectively on the side of the enemy. But instead he merely cautioned the major against saying things that might give people the wrong impression. Which is to say, the right impression.

  This is your brain on political correctness.

  “You need to lock it up, major,” advised the colonel.86

  But, of course, he didn’t. He could say what he wanted—infidels should have their throats cut, for example. Meanwhile, the only ones who felt any need to “lock it up” were his fellow psychiatrists, his patients, his teachers at the Uniformed Services University, officials at Walter Reed, and the brass at Fort Hood. So they locked it up for years, and fourteen people died.

  And even when the slaughter had happened, much of the media found it easier to slander both the United States military and the general populace than to confront the evidence. Like Nanny Bloomberg, the Homeland Security Secretary Janet Incompetano professed to be most worried about an “anti-Muslim backlash” from the bozo citizenry she had the forlorn task of attempting to hold in check.87

  As for the Army, well, obviously, they’re a bunch of Bush-scarred psychos who could snap at any moment. Newsweek called the mass murder “A Symptom of a Military on the Brink.”88 “A psychiatrist who was set to deploy to Iraq at the end of the month, Hasan reportedly opened fire around the Fort Hood Readiness Center,” wrote Andrew Bast. “It comes at a time when the stress of combat has affected so many soldiers individually that it makes it increasingly difficult for the military as a whole to deploy for wars abroad.”

  No mention of the words “Islam” or “Muslim,” but Mr. Bast was concerned to “get at the root causes of soldier stresses.” As in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Operative word “post”: you get it after you’ve been in combat. Major Hasan had never been in combat.

  But, just as they effortlessly extended the subprime mortgage crisis to explain the Times Square bomber, the same conformicrat “experts” redefined “post-traumatic stress disorder” to apply to a psychiatrist who’d never been anywhere near a war zone. Until November 5, 2009, PTSD was something you got when you returned from battle overseas and manifested itself in sleeplessness, nightmares, or, in extreme circumstances, suicide. After November 5, PTSD was apparently spread by shaking hands and manifested itself in gunning down large numbers of people while yelling “Allahu

  This is your brain on political correctness.

  Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year before that Major Hasan was in regular e-mail contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as spiritual advisor to three of the 9/11 hijackers and an imam so radical he’s banned from Britain, a land with an otherwise all but boundless tolerance for radical imams. Al-Awlaki advocates all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that there was no need to worry because this lively correspondence was consistent with Major Hasan’s “research interests.”89 Which is one way of putting it.

  Groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (with its Potemkin membership but lots of Saudi funding) and the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (the biggest voting bloc at the UN) want a world where Islam is beyond discussion—where “red flags” are ignored because to do anything about them would risk career-ruining accusations of “Islamophobia,” or six months of “sensitivity training” to spay you into a docile eunuch of the PC state.90 How’s that project coming along? After Major Hasan’s pre-Post-Traumatic Stress breakdown, General George W. Casey Jr., the Army’s chief of staff, assured us that, despite the slaughter, it could have been a whole lot worse: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”91

  Celebrate diversity, yea unto death. The fact that a grown man not employed by a U.S educational institution or media outlet used the word “diversity” in a non-parodic sense should be deeply disturbing. “Diversity” is not a virtue; it’s morally neutral. A group of five white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women is non-diverse; a group of four white upper-middle-class liberal NPR-listening women plus Sudan’s leading clitoridectomy practitioner is more diverse but not necessarily the b
etter for it.

  Nevertheless, asked “Who ya gonna believe—the Celebrate Diversity Handbook or your lyin’ eyes?” more and more of us plump for the former, if only for a quiet life. Nine months after Major Hasan’s killing spree, the Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered “a series of procedural and policy changes that focus on identifying, responding to and preventing potential workplace violence.”92

  “Workplace violence”? Yes, it’s the new official euphemism: “The changes include plans to educate military commanders on signs of potential workplace violence....”

  Say what you like, but at least the Army’s workplace violence is “diverse.”

  The brain-addled “diversity” of General Casey will get some of us killed, and keep all of us cowed. Old watchword: Better dead than red. Updated version: Better screwed than rude. In the days after the slaughter, the news coverage read like a satirical novel that the author’s not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch-22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: if you muse openly on pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put that down as mere confirmation of your longestablished “research interests.” If you’re psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there’s no terrorism angle, because, in a micro-regulated, credential-obsessed society, it doesn’t count unless you’re found to be carrying Permit #57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.

  And “Allahu akbar?” That’s Arabic for “Nothing to see here.”

  Pace General Casey, what happened was not a “tragedy” but a national scandal.

  Anwar al-Awlaki and his comrades have bet that such a society is too sick to survive. Watch the nothing-to-see-here media driveling on about “combat stress” and the Pentagon diversicrats issuing memos on “workplace violence” like gibbering lunatics in a padded cell, and then think whether you’d really want to take that bet. The craven submission to political correctness, the willingness to leave your marbles with the Diversity Café hatcheck

  ... WE ARE THE CHILDREN

  Political correctness is the authoritarian end of a broader infantilization. Hardly a week goes by where you don’t read a lifestyle feature such as this, from New York magazine:He owns eleven pairs of sneakers, hasn’t worn anything but jeans in a year, and won’t shut up about the latest Death Cab for Cutie CD. But he is no kid. He is among the ascendant breed of grown-up who has redefined adulthood as we once knew it and killed off the generation gap.93

  Death Cab for Cutie, the band, took its name from “Death Cab for Cutie,” the song. The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band sang it back in the Sixties, a parody of Top 40 death anthems (“Teen Angel,”“Leader of the Pack”) with Vivian Stanshall Elvising up the refrain as the taxi runs a red light and meets its rendezvous with destiny: “Someone’s going to make you pay your fare.”

  One wouldn’t want to place too great a metaphorical burden on an obscure novelty number, but to the jaundiced eye America’s Eloi can easily seem like infantilized cuties unaware they’re riding in a death cab. In the old days, there were, broadly, two phases of human existence: You were a child until thirteen. Then you were a working adult. Then you died. Now there are four phases: You’re a child until twelve, eleven, nine—or whenever enlightened jurisdictions think you’re entitled to go on the pill without

  Let Barack Obama explain things: “I see some young people in the audience,” began the president at one of his “town hall meetings” in Ohio.94

  Not that young. For he assured them that, under ObamaCare, they’d be eligible to remain on their parents’ health coverage until they were twenty-six.

  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 on adulthood but well into it. Not someone who remains a dependent of his parents, but someone who would be expected to have parental responsibilities himself. But not anymore. Sure, come your twenty-seventh birthday, it’ll be time to move out of your parents’ insurance agency—at least until Obama’s next piece of child-friendly legislation. But till then, here’s looking at you, kid.

  This ought to be deeply insulting to any self-respecting 26-and-a-halfyear-old. As for the rest of us, the kind of society in which 26-year-olds are considered children is a society in decline—in economic decline, cultural decline, spiritual decline, in demographic decline (as Europe already is), in terminal decline. The western world lives increasingly in a state of deferred adulthood. We enter adolescence earlier and earlier and we leave it later and later, if at all.

  As everyone knows, our bodies “mature” earlier so it would be unreasonable to expect our grade-schoolers not to be rogering anything that moves, and the most we can hope to do is ensure there’s a government-funded

  And, come to think of it, isn’t it unreasonable to expect 30-year-olds who’ve been sexually active since sixth grade to assume responsibility for their sexual activity? As the Washington Post reported:High school students and college-age adults have been complaining to District officials that the free condoms the city has been offering are not of good enough quality and are too small and that getting them from school nurses is “just like asking grandma or auntie.”

  So DC officials have decided to stock up on Trojan condoms, including the company’s super-size Magnum variety, and they have begun to authorize teachers or counselors, preferably male, to distribute condoms to students if the teachers complete a 30-minute online training course called “WrapMC”—for Master of Condoms.

  “If people get what they don’t want, they are just going to trash them,” said T. Squalls, 30, who attends the University of the District of Columbia. “So why not spend a few extra dollars and get what people want?”95

  That last paragraph deserves to be chiseled on the tombstone of the Republic. As April Gavaza, the blogger Hyacinth Girl, responded: “Hey, T., why don’t you spend a few extra dollars and buy your own, jackass?”96

  Fair enough. Why should T. Squalls, thirty, bill D.C. taxpayers for his sex life? Thirty is so old you’re not even eligible for Obama’s child health-care coverage. Thirty is what less evolved societies used to call “early middle age.” Why is Washington Post chairman Donald Graham (to pluck a D.C. householder at random) buying condoms for 30-year-old men he doesn’t know?

  Because that’s Big Government for you: you start a free-condom program for sexually active fourth graders, and next thing you know elderly swingers in the twelfth year of Social Construct Studies want in. The D.C. condompalooza is a perfect example of progressive thinking’s malign paradox: it both destroys childhood and infantilizes adulthood, leaving a big chunk of the populace as eternal teenagers.

  What was it the hippies said? Never trust anybody over thirty? Advice to D.C. women: Never trust anybody over thirty who expects the government to buy his condoms.

  As the recession hit, the Los Angeles Times ran a profile on a hip new social phenomenon: “funemployment.”97 They had good jobs, great pay, and then they lost them. But if you’re not married and your parents have kept your old bedroom open, what’s the diff? Two of the funemployed, Andy Deemer, thirty-six, and Amanda Rounsaville, thirty-four, connected through Facebook and took off in search of Asian mystics. They visited a fortuneteller in Burma, a tarot card reader in Thailand, some Saffron Revolution monks on the border, and, after spending ten days tracking her down, a reindeer-herding shaman in Mongolia.

  Only the last advised them to “go back to work.”

  Whoa! Heavy, man! But maybe they went off to Bhutan to get a second opinion from a shaman-herding reindeer.

  In the Sixties, privileged youth used to go off to find themselves in the year before college. Now they go off to find themselves when they�
�re pushing forty. They seek the company of reindeer-herders at the age previous generations sought the company of Elks Lodgers.

  “They are a generation or two of affluent, urban adults who are now happily sailing through their thirties and forties, and even fifties, clad in beat-up sneakers and cashmere hoodies,” writes Adam Sternbergh in New York. “It’s about a brave new world whose citizens are radically rethinking what it means to be a grown-up and whether being a grown-up still requires, you know, actually growing up.”

  I think we know the answer to that.

  BOY MEETS GIRL

  For H. G. Wells’ late Victorian traveler, what was most striking about the Eloi was how they had evolved beyond sex:I perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb.... In all the differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each other, these people of the future were alike.... Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are mere militant necessities of an age of physical force; where population is balanced and abundant, much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure, there is less necessity—indeed there is no necessity—for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children’s needs disappears.

  Victor Davis Hanson had a similar experience, some 800,000 years ahead of Wells’ time-traveler. He noticed that “the generic American male accent” has all but died out, to be replaced by something affectedly “metrosexual” with “a particular nasal stress, a much higher tone than one heard 40 years ago...a precious voice often nearly indistinguishable from the female.”98 As for the old-school males, wrote Professor Hanson, “I watched the movie Twelve O’Clock High the other day, and Gregory Peck and Dean Jagger sounded like they were from another planet.” (To be fair, the feminization of men is complemented by the masculinization of women. One recent Miss America winner, lantern-jawed, hipless, concrete implants, looks in