October 17, 2005
MASTER CRAFTSMAN
Wit is his weapon (Barbara Kay, National Post, October 17th, 2005)
As a subject for serious inquiry, Canada tends to fall off the radar screen of nominally Canadian public intellectuals, such as The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell and the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, who made their careers outside our borders. Mark Steyn is atypical in this respect, and although he would probably shudder at being lumped in with our era's general run of left-wing academic intellectuals, is uniquely deserving of the title, "most influential Canadian public intellectual."The 1998 debut of the National Post introduced me to Steyn's writing. I was instantly gobsmacked by his quicksilver intelligence and merry iconcoclasm gushing forth in firehose-strength torrents of coruscating prose. I remember dashing off an e-mail to the editor, "Whatever you are paying Mark Steyn, it isn't enough."
Although he is now an international mandarin of contemporary journalism, his editorial colleagues treat Mark Steyn almost as a creature of myth or legend. Nobody, for example, is sure where he now lives -- Canada, the United States or Britain. Former boss Barbara Amiel quips, "We believe he lives in an SUV that operates between New Hampshire and Quebec, but your best chance of sighting him is in Washington or London, where the list of people trying to see him ranges from Cabinet ministers to film stars."
He's here, he's there, he's everywhere: in newspapers and magazines, on the Web and the airwaves, boosting the morale of lonely conservative and libertarian Canadians, heaping mockery and derision on myopic anti-war protesters, flaying terrorist apologists the world over. Steyn is the Lancelot of the West's virtual Round Table in the battle against political correctness.
IN HIS WORDS:
- On Canadian Medicare: "Unlike Britain but like North Korea, in her Majesty's northern Dominion, the public health system is such an article of faith that no private hospitals are permitted. Canada's private health care system is called "America";
-On a proposed Declaration of Reconciliation to find areas of compromise between Muslim and Western nations: "Maybe the Grand Congress of Reconciliation would thrash out a compromise whereby we lightly pebble-dash adulteresses, merely castrate sodomites and kill only some of the Jews";
- On multiculturalism: "Multiculturalism is really a suicide cult conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own. And that's particularly unworthy of the British, whose language, culture and law have been the single greatest force for good in this world";
- On America: "For everyone but America, the free world is mostly a free ride."
You are invited to share your favourite “Steynism” with us.
On American troops in Europe:
"Defending allies who are no longer allies from
enemies who are no longer enemies."
Just a couple from "The Slyer Virus":
"Similarly, at airports across the continent, eighty-seven-year-old grannies waited patiently as their hairpins were confiscated and their bloomers emptied out on the conveyor belt, implicitly accepting this as a ritual of the multicultural society: to demonstrate that we eschew “racial profiling,” we go out of our way to look for people who don’t look anything like the people we’re looking for.
This is what we’re fighting for—the right not to tolerate any intolerance of our tolerance."
"Reverend Jesse Jackson, President-for-Life of the People’s Republic of Himself."
Posted by: Benjamin at October 17, 2005 8:55 AMA society whose political class elevates "a woman's right to choose" above "go forth and multiply" is a society with a death wish.
Posted by: oj at October 17, 2005 8:58 AMToo many to chose, but this is my latest favorite. It's from Mr. Steyn's review of the recently released science-fiction movie 'Serenity':
"Having won the war, the Alliance begins mind-washing its citizens to make them more content and placid. Unfortunately, as a side-effect, folks also lose the desire to go to work, to breed, and ultimately to live — except for a very small minority whom the mind-washing backfires on and turns into feral predators who destroy everything they come near. Hmm. Aside from anything else, Serenity is also an excellent allegory for the next ten years of the European Union."
Posted by: Pat Phillips at October 17, 2005 9:15 AMOkay, let's get all the "of courses" out of the way - of course, the overwhelming majority of Muslims aren't terrorists; of course, we all know "Islam" means "peace" and "jihad" means "healthy-lifestyle lo-carb granola bar"; etc, etc.
Posted by: Matt C at October 17, 2005 9:38 AM...Speaking of Hawaii, why is it a state rather than a colony? It's nowhere near the rest of America. Its flag even has the Union flag in it, just like the ensigns of all those other dots in the Pacific, such as Fiji and the Cook Islands...
...His default position is the conventional wisdom of the Massachusetts Left: on foreign policy, foreigners know best; on trade, the labour unions know best; on government bureaucrats know best; on defence, graying ponytailed nuclear-freeze reflex anti-militarists know best; on the wine list, he knows best...
...As usual, the media did their best to string along with the Democrats' alternative reality. For the most part, the press now fulfill the same function for the party that kindly nurses do at the madhouse; if the guy thinks he's Napoleon, just smile affably and ask him how Waterloo's going...
Posted by: John Weidner at October 17, 2005 11:58 AMThis one is way, way too long but it's still my personal favorite out of all the things Steyn has ever written:
What have we learnt since 11 September? We’ve learnt that poverty breeds despair, despair breeds instability, instability breeds resentment, and resentment breeds extremism. Yes, folks, these are what we in the trade call ‘root causes’. Which cause do you root for? ‘Poverty breeds instability’ (the Detroit News)? Or ‘poverty breeds fanaticism’ (Carolyn Lochhead in the San Francisco Chronicle)?
Bear in mind that ‘instability breeds zealots’ (John Ibbitson in the Toronto Globe and Mail), but that ‘fanaticism breeds hatred’ (Mauve MacCormack of New South Wales) and ‘hatred breeds extremism’ (Mircea Geoana, Romanian Foreign Minister).
Above all, let’s not forget that ‘desperation breeds resentment’ (Howard Zinn in the Los Angeles Times) and ‘resentment breeds terrorism’ (Eugene G. Wollaston of Naperville, Illinois), but sometimes ‘desperation breeds terrorism’ (a poster in Lower Manhattan) as surely as ‘despair breeds terrorism’ (Ian Lawson in the San Diego Union-Tribune), though occasionally ‘despair breeds pestilence’ (James Robertson of Ashland, Oregon).
Moreover, ‘injustice breeds hopelessness’ (Stephen Bachhuber of Portland, Oregon) and ‘hopelessness breeds fanaticism’ (Mark McCulloch of Forest Hills, Pennsylvania) and ‘injustice breeds rage’ (the National Council of Churches).
Also, ‘ignorance breeds hate’ (Wasima Alikhan of the Islamic Academy of Las Vegas), just as ‘hostility breeds violence’ (Alexa McDonough, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party), and ‘suffering breeds violence’ (David Pricco of San Francisco) and ‘war breeds hate and hate breeds terrorism’ (Julia Watts of Berkeley, California) and ‘intolerance breeds hate, hate breeds violence and violence breeds death, destruction and heartache’ (David Coleman of the University of Oklahoma).
‘Injustice breeds injustice’ (Dr L.B. Quesnel of Manchester) and ‘suffering breeds suffering’ (Gabor Mate, author of Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder) and ‘instability breeds instability’ (Congressman Alcee Hastings) and ‘hate breeds hate’ (a sign at the University of Maryland) and ‘hatred breeds hatred’ (the Reverend Charles A. Summers of the First Presbyterian Church of Richmond, Virginia) and ‘anger breeds anger. Hostility breeds hostility. And attacks are going to breed other attacks’ (Dania Dandashly of the Governor Bent Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico), all of which only further confirms that — all together now — ‘violence breeds violence’. [...]
[A] large swath of the Left has settled into an endless dopey roundelay, a vast Schnitzlerian carousel where every abstract noun is carrying on like Anthony Quinn on Viagra. Instability breeds resentment, resentment breeds inertia, inertia breeds generalities, generalities breed clichés, clichés breed lame metaphors, until we reach the pitiful state of the peacenik opinion columns where, to modify the old evening news motto, if it breeds it leads. If I were to say ‘Mr Scroggins breeds racing pigeons’, it would be reasonable to assume that I’d been round to the Scroggins house or at least made a phone call. But the ‘injustice breeds anger’ routine requires no such mooring to humdrum reality, though it’s generally offered as a uniquely shrewd insight, reflecting a vastly superior understanding of the complexities of the situation than we nuke-crazy warmongers have. ‘What you have to look at is the underlying reasons,’ a Dartmouth College student said to me the other day. ‘Poverty breeds resentment and resentment breeds anger.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘And what’s the capital of Saudi Arabia?’
Posted by: Matt Murphy at October 17, 2005 8:35 PMMy favoutire isn't so funny. I've never seen a better one sentence skewering of the leftist mindset that this, a few days after 9/11:
"Why do some people experience the full horror of the secretary incinerated by the photocopy machine, while others feel nothing more than a vindication of their thesis on Kyoto?"
Posted by: Peter B at October 18, 2005 6:43 PM