by Mark Steyn
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.
When the Internet took off, someone commented that my colleague David Frum wrote for Americans as an American and for Canadians as a Canadian. And someone else responded that I’d taken it to the next level: Steyn wrote for Americans as an American, Canadians as a Canadian, and Britons as a Briton. And then a third person chipped in that, no, it was subtler than that: Steyn wrote for Britons as a Canadian, for Canadians as an American, and for Americans as a Briton. . . . Well, I don’t know about that, but throughout my time writing for The Chicago Sun-Times and Canada’s National Post and Britain’s Spectator and The Australian and The Irish Times, I do think it helps sometimes to view one society through the lens of another: Two pieces here on welfare as viewed from Britain’s “housing estates” and Canada’s Indian reservations offer lessons for Americans too.
And, whatever Michael Ignatieff feels about it, for my own part I generally use “we” to mean “western civilization,” which could use a few more friends on the pronoun front. Left to my own devices, I’d probably write just about music. But the Taliban banned music. And Sayyid Qutb was so disgusted by hearing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” at a church dance in Greeley, Colorado, that he went back to Egypt and became the intellectual driving force behind the Muslim Brotherhood.
Which is to say that even the smallest pleasures have to be earned, and defended. So ultimately, if you like “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” or even the Monkees, you need to pitch in on this clash-of-civilizations thing, too.
I
UP, DOWN, OVER AND OUT
VIAGRA NATION
Pfizer’s chemists at their research facility in Sandwich, England, originally synthesized sildenafil to help with angina. In clinical trials, it did little for patients’ chest pain, but along the way someone noticed that it caused a pronounced reaction somewhat lower down. On March 27, 1998, the FDA approved it as a treatment for erectile dysfunction, and in the weeks thereafter America talked of little else.
The Wall Street Journal, May 12, 1998
“HI, I’M WALTER, your waiter, and today’s special is Linguine Viagra.”
“Mmmm,” said my date appreciatively. “That’s what I call al dente.”
I’m beginning to feel like the guy who was out of town the day the coup happened. You spend a quiet month ice fishing in Queen Maud Gulf and return to find the country changed beyond all recognition. Everywhere you turn, the Viagrafication of America proceeds apace. Even in the tiny portion of the news that isn’t devoted to Viagra, it seems implicitly present—the surging Dow, El Niño, the rush to megamergers. I quote from memory: “The First National Bank of Little Snake, Nevada, announced today that it is merging with New Mexico’s Banco Flaccido to form ViagraBank, the world’s biggest financial institution ever. In other news, Hurricane Viagra swept through a Florida trailer park, leaving 53 double-wides up-ended.”
Forget Microsoft; Viagra now commands 98 percent of the metaphor market—and Congress isn’t doing a thing about it. Frank Luntz has polling data showing that 83 percent of soccer moms want Republicans to use more Viagra imagery (“education vouchers will be the Viagra of our nation’s SAT scores”). Al Gore’s minders are already working up self-deprecating Viagra jokes: “Okay, Mr. Vice President, all you have to say is, ‘Recently. I was. Proud. To take. Viagra.’ Then you simply stand there, completely stiff from head to toe, same as always, and just say in your usual monotone, ‘Whoops. Guess I. Took one. Too Many.’”
As the only guy in the country not taking the tablets, I wasn’t sure I knew enough about the subject. So my pal Earl and I repaired to Starbucks after lunch, where I told him I was writing a column on Viagra.
“Viagraccino,” said Kelli. “One cup and you’ll be up all night.”
Earl is, of course, not his real name. His real name is Chuck. He just called to make sure I mention it. Chuck Malmquist, 57 Elm Street, Apartment B. Second left after the Citgo station. Chuck says it saves a whole lot of time if the chicks already know you’re on Viagra.
Presumably that’s why every medical correspondent on every American magazine has no problem lining up on-the-record testimonials from “Tom Cannata, a 43-year-old accountant from Springfield, Mass” and “Ronald Marrocco, a 55-year-old diabetic from St. Petersburg, Fla,” both eager to disclose their prodigious intake to any passing reporter. My favorite to date—I mean my favorite so far, not my favorite to go to dinner and a movie with—is Irving Mesher, described as “a 73-year-old retired New York City firefighter, who currently lives at a family-owned nudist resort in Pennsylvania’s Pocono mountains.” Mr. Mesher, according to Time, has sex “three or four times a week with several girlfriends in their twenties.” He is planning “a Viagra party.”
I suppose it was too much to expect American men to take an impotence pill without advertising the fact. After all, the U.S. not only has more women with breast implants than any other country on the planet, but also more women happy to tell you they have breast implants—see Pamela Lee, Jenny McCarthy, Jane Fonda. This is in the same fine tradition of full disclosure as the cereal packet: “Grandma’s Country Kitchen Old-Time Vermont Maple Oatmeal. Made in Wisconsin entirely from artificial ingredients.” But, contemplating a society in which artificially aroused men pursue ever more artificially enhanced women, I wonder if we aren’t in danger of unnecessarily complicating the whole business.
Does America need more seventy-three-year-old nude firemen? It’s bad enough with the old coot down the street standing under our window with his ukulele every night serenading the missus with “Viagra Con Dios.” After my month away, my lovely bride was looking forward to my return, but I couldn’t help noticing on my first evening back that she seemed vaguely. . . dissatisfied.
“Well, it was okay,” she said after some prompting, “but why can’t you be more like Bob Dole?”
“Bob Dole?” I scoffed. I was laughing so much I rolled off the bearskin rug, and got rather a nasty splinter. It was only later that I discovered that the test group for the new impotence pill had included the Republican presidential candidate—ex officio, one assumes. Doubtless the congressional leadership made up the rest of the group. But Bob Dole’s endorsement does make you wonder about other possible side effects—a sudden urge to dive off the stage, a tendency to refer to yourself in the third person. I asked my pal Earl—sorry, Chuck—if he was worried.
“Chuck Malmquist’s not worried,” he said. “Chuck Malmquist’s gonna pop a couple of Viagras, head downtown. It’s about America, leadership, babes, whatever.”
As I understand it, although Viagra dramatically improves sexual performance, it can also cause headaches, impaired vision, rashes, and diarrhea. Chuck was unperturbed. “Sure, the first time was a problem,” he conceded. “I was in the bar putting the moves on Tina when I suddenly had to rush for the men’s room. By the time I got back, the impaired vision had kicked in, so I went to the wrong table and put my arms around Norm from accounting. He wouldn’t have minded, but my face was breaking out, so he fled screaming.”
“Good grief, that’s terrible,” I said.
“Not really. By then I had a jackhammer of a headache, so I just wanted to go home anyway. But I’m on top of it now. First, I take two Viagra, then one Arret for the diarrhea plus another Viagra to counter the side effects of the Arret, then half a dozen Children’s Motrin, followed by Vagisil for the rash plus a couple of Rogaine. . . .”
“But Rogaine’s for baldness. . . .”
“Hey, don’t knock it. My new back hair covers the rash. Then I take another Viagra to counter the potential libido-depressing effect of the Rogaine, followed by two Lipitor to lessen my risk of heart attack.”
“But you’re not at risk of heart attack. . . .”
“You try doing the mambo with thirty pounds of tablets in your pocket.”
As Chuck roared off in his new Chevy Agra—the sport-utility vehicle with the world’s largest cup holder—I reflected on how far we’ve come in just a few weeks. I can dimly recall hearing something about Viagra on the radio a month or so back, but assumed it was just an obscure African dictatorship, the latest stop on the Clinton Apology Tour:
“The President today apologized to the people of Viagra. ‘The United States has not always done the right thing,’ said Mr. Clinton. ‘We discriminated against the Viagran people for no other reason than that their skin was different—slightly flushed, with a bead of sweat on the upper lip and an agitated look in the eyes. As President, I would be calling for a national conversation on Viagra, if we weren’t already talking about nothing else.’”
Last week, it was announced that Viagra will soon be available in wafer form, bringing our social evolution full circle. A century and a half ago, Sylvester Graham, nutritionist, reformer and author of The Young Man’s Guide to Chastity, invented the Graham Cracker as an aid to diminishing the male sex drive. Today, the Graham cracker must yield to the Viagra wafer, an idea whose time has come. The Clinton presidency has at last stumbled on its rendezvous with history: While Ronald Reagan and George Bush presided over the fall of Communism, Mr. Clinton presides over the rise of Viagra. It may not be true that any young boy can grow up to be president. But at least, thanks to Viagra, any young boy can grow up to be this president.
Graham Cracker, anyone?
DECAFFEINATED
National Review, July 4, 2011
THIS FALL MARKS the centenary of William Mitchell. You may not have heard of him, but in his day he was a big cheese. Indeed, he was a big processed cheese, with what’s now Kraft Foods. Mitchell invented Cool Whip and quickset Jell-O and powdered egg whites for cake mix. He was in the grand tradition of American entrepreneurial energy: Henry Ford made travel faster, Alexander Graham Bell made communication faster, Bill Mitchell made Jell-O even faster. When he died, I wrote an appreciation and noted his one great miscalculation, late in life. He noticed the dahlias growing on his daughter’s land, came up with the idea of roasting their tubers, and created a brown substance with a coffee-like taste that he called Dacopa.
It flopped. The fearless pioneer of convenience foods had failed to foresee that in his final years coffee would become the ultimate inconvenience food. Where once you’d say, “Gimme a cuppa joe, Darlene,” and the waitress would slide it across the counter, now you stand around for twenty minutes as the “barista” juices the espresso, froths up the milk, lathers on the foam, gives it a shot of caramel flavoring, sprinkles it with cinnamon, adds a slice of pepperoni and a soupçon of aubergine coulis, and instead of two bits charges you $5.95.
It’s getting on for two decades since I first did a world’s-slowest-coffee routine on the BBC with the great Bonnie Langford, West End child star and Doctor Who’s perkiest sidekick. Jackie Mason was also on the show, and asked me who our writer was. I felt it would make me look like a loser to say I’d written it myself, so I promised to pass on any message. “Tell him he may be on to something,” growled Mason. A few years later, I opened up The American Spectator to find the comic genius had worked up a Starbucks routine all his own.
At the time, I thought the ever more protracted java jive was an anomaly—th
e exception that proved the rule. Now I can see it was a profound insight: America’s first slow-food chain was an idea whose time had come. Who knew you could make people stand in line (long long lines at city outlets in rush hour) for a cup of coffee? Don’t tell me it’s a Continental thing. I like my café au lait in Quebec, and it takes a third of the time of all the whooshing and frothing south of the border. Same in a Viennese Kaffeehaus. But I was at a “fair trade” Vermont coffee joint the other day, and there was no line at all, and it still took forever. And, as I began to get a little twitchy and pace up and down, I became aware of the handful of mellow patrons scattered about the easy chairs looking up from their tweets as if to scold: “What’s with the restless energy, dude?”
I felt like the fellow in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Everybody else in town had fallen asleep. . . and then stayed asleep. This is a paradox for our times: the somnolent coffee house. I had a strange urge to yell, “Wake up, we’re trillions of dollars in debt! The powder keg’s about to blow!,” but I could feel the soporific indie-pop drifting over the counter, so I took my espresso to go, and worked off my torporphobic rage by shooting iPods off the tailgate of a rusting pick-up in the back field for the rest of the day.
“You just don’t get coffee culture,” sighed a friend. What “culture”? The coffee houses of seventeenth-century England were hives of business: They spawned the Stock Exchange and Lloyd’s of London. The coffee houses of eighteenth-century Paris were hives of ideas: At Café Procope, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the gang met to thrash out the Enlightenment. The coffee houses of twenty-first-century America have spawned the gingerbread eggnog macchiato and an accompanying CD compilation. Unless, that is, there’s something else going on: One is mindful of Number Two’s briefing (in Austin Powers) to the recently defrosted Dr. Evil on what he’s been up to while the evil mastermind bent on world domination has been in orbital cryostasis. “I seized upon the opportunity to invest in a small Seattle-based coffee company several years ago,” he informs the doctor. “I believe if we shift our resources away from world domination and focus on providing premium-quality coffee drinks, we can increase our gross profits fivefold.”