The Undocumented Mark Steyn

by Mark Steyn

  Let’s see—CBP, FDA, CPSC. I’m impressed it takes a mere three agencies from the vast alphabet soup of federal regulation to keep us safe from the menace of confectionery products with non-nutritive embeds. As Janet Napolitano would say, the system worked. I hope America’s chocolate soldiers are enjoying their seized eggs this Easter.

  Bonus prediction: What’s the betting that the first jihadist to weaponize a Kinder Egg makes it on to the plane?

  P.S.: My kids asked the CBP seizure squad if they could eat the chocolate in front of the border guards while the border guards held on to the toys to prevent any choking hazard—and then, having safely consumed the chocolate, take the toys home as a separate item. This request was denied, and, indeed, my ten-year-old was informed that by proposing it he was obstructing a federal official in the course of his duties.

  Could have been worse. Could have been a three-hundred-dollar fine, plus a $250 fee for seized-egg storage.

  P.P.S.: The real choking hazard is the vise-like grip of government.

  In the years since, the Kinder Egg Orange Alert has become an Easter tradition in my family. In 2014, heading back from Montreal late one night a couple of days before Good Friday, I pulled up in front of the guard on the U.S. side of the Quebec/Vermont border. He asked the usual questions, and then said, “Are you bringing anything back from Canada?”

  “Oh, just some Easter eggs,” I said, breezily—and instantly regretted it.

  The hitherto somewhat lethargic agent sprang visibly alert. “Easter eggs?” he said, with a palpable menace in his voice.

  “Not Kinder Eggs,” I replied, trying very hard not to roll my eyes. “Just regular home-made Québécois Easter chocolate.”

  He de-bristled, and waved us through. “Close call, Dad,” said my daughter.

  Indeed. I’d smuggle in a dirty nuke before I’d risk another Kinder Egg in the car. My children are older now, and can take or leave them. But, precisely because of that CBP guard, they make a point of always eating some whenever we’re north of the border. I’m worried that, by making Kinder Eggs cool and transgressive, the Department of Homeland Security has increased the exposure of my children to this “choking hazard.” Maybe I can get in on a class-action law suit against DHS. . . .

  THE ALL-SEEING NANNY

  Maclean’s, September 3, 2009

  TO PASSING TOURISTS, catching yet another government poster apprising you of electronic surveillance looming in the distance, the initials “CCTV” can be oddly reminiscent of “CCCP,” the Cyrillicized abbreviation for the USSR. In fact, CCTV is the United Kingdom’s ubiquitous acronym. Nobody needs to be told what it stands for. It accompanies you as you make your way to work, whether by car, bus, train, or taxi. And it’s there waiting for you at the end of your shift, as you go to buy your groceries or head to the movies. Last year, when David Davis resigned from the shadow cabinet because of the remarkably bipartisan insouciance about the “erosion of fundamental British freedoms,” he claimed there was “a CCTV camera for every fourteen citizens.” The British, according to another well-retailed line, are apparently the most video-monitored people in the world other than the North Koreans. In an aside in his new novel The Defector, the American author Daniel Silva lays out the background:

  “So how are the British so certain about what happened?”

  “Their little electronic helpers were watching.”

  Navot was referring to CCTV, the ubiquitous network of 10,000 closed-circuit television cameras that gave London’s Metropolitan Police the ability to monitor activity, criminal or otherwise, on virtually every street in the British capital. A recent government study had concluded that the system had failed in its primary objective: deterring crime and apprehending criminals. Only three per cent of street robberies were solved using CCTV technology, and crime rates in London were soaring.

  Embarrassed police officials explained away the failure by pointing out that the criminals had accounted for the cameras by adjusting their tactics, such as wearing masks and hats to conceal their identities.

  Apparently, no one in charge had considered that possibility before spending hundreds of millions of pounds and invading the public’s privacy on an unprecedented scale. The subjects of the United Kingdom, birthplace of Western democracy, now resided in an Orwellian world where their every movement was watched over by the eyes of the state.

  All true, except for the “10,000” cameras, which is certainly an underestimate. By some calculations, they’re now approaching five million (public and private) across the country. On this side of the Atlantic, closed-circuit television is mostly confined to banks and a select few other locations, and they still look like cameras. Not on the streets of London, where ever smaller boxes mounted ever more discreetly to the clutter of curbside signage betray no clue as to their purpose. Not that the authorities are embarrassed by them. Quite the contrary. Jolly promotional placards advertising that you’re in their reassuring presence are almost as frequent as the cameras. Strolling down Piccadilly the other day, I lost count of the number of signs emblazoned “WESTMINSTER CCTV: KEEPING OUR STREETS SAFE,” complete with a cute little CCTV logo that they paid some marketing firm to hire a graphic artist to cook up. Any day now the government will surely unveil some lovable anthropomorphized cartoon figure—Carlton Camera or some such—who’ll appear in public service announcements saying he’s just popped up to keep an eye on you.

  But perhaps I overestimate the modern security state’s need to soft-soap its purposes. A couple of years back, London Transport unveiled a poster called “SECURE BENEATH THE WATCHFUL EYES” showing the iconic red double-decker bus making its way across a Thames bridge protected by a sky filled with giant all-seeing eyes. “CCTV & Metropolitan Police on buses,” explained the caption, “are just two ways we’re making your journey home more secure.” The draftsmanship was beautiful, the image a strange conflation of classic London Underground poster art and ’tween-wars Continental Fascist propaganda. You would have thought that anyone who had. . . well, not even read but was just dimly aware of the vague gist of Orwell’s 1984 could not possibly have approved such a campaign. But London Transport did, and Londoners more or less accepted it.

  If you’re a novelist, it’s impossible to write a story set in Britain without taking CCTV into account. In his new book The Ghosts of Belfast, Stuart Neville writes of his protagonist: “The truth was he’d slept very little the previous night. It took him an hour and a half to work his way through the streets, avoiding CCTV cameras on his way home.”

  Easier said than done. Daniel Silva captures the scale of the enterprise:

  “Were you able to trace the car’s movements with CCTV?”

  “It turned left into Edgware Road, then made a right at St. John’s Wood Road. Eventually, it entered an underground parking garage in Primrose Hill, where it remained for 57 minutes. . . . After leaving the garage, it headed northeast to Brentwood, a suburb just outside the M25. At which point, it slipped out of CCTV range and disappeared from sight.”

  Did you tell your wife you were kept late at the office but you were in fact parked outside your mistress’s flat at 27b Lucknow Gardens? There’s an electronic record of that somewhere in a government database. Maybe that’s nothing to worry about, maybe no one will ever have cause to dig it out. But it’s in there.

  So now the country with the most CCTV cameras in the “civilized” world also has the most hooded youths. On a dismal ride back up to London on a CCTV-fitted train through the Oxfordshire countryside the other Sunday afternoon, I was joined, in an otherwise empty carriage, by three persons in large feature-concealing hooded sweatshirts. In an idle moment while the train was stalled outside a tunnel, I found myself reflecting that, even after an hour in their company, I’d have a job picking them out of a police lineup.

  “Er, well, he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, officer.”

  “Did the shadow on his upper chest indicate any other features, such as the length of his no
se, or an unusually hirsute mole?”

  “It might have, but I couldn’t tell, as the sweatshirt was black.”

  “Hmm. A black sweatshirt. Well, that narrows it down a bit.”

  Happily, the lads graciously declined to stab me. Not all hooded youths are criminal, but the larger percentage who aren’t favor the garb in part because it flips the finger at the surveillance state. It is, thus, a CCTV-generated fashion statement, and now so widespread that, in the twilight of his premiership, with his usual control-freak instincts, Tony Blair mused on the possibility of banning hooded sweatshirts in order to prevent “anti-social behavior” and restore “respect on our streets.”

  But “respect” is a two-way street. And on Britain’s two-way streets, where the government cameras whir 24-7, the security state signals its contempt for the citizen. And, needless to say, if the Big Blairite Brother had banned “hoodies,” British youth could easily have adopted the burqa as the uniform of alienated youth, and Her Majesty’s Government wouldn’t have done a thing about it. Mr. Blair’s one-time deputy, an Old Labour bruiser called John Prescott, was once approached at a motorway caff by a gang of hooded yoofs anxious to beat him up and (in a touch of artistic symmetry) videotape the encounter: in a sense, they were proposing to demonstrate their “respect” for CCTV Britain by shooting their own CCTV footage.

  So CCTV isn’t simply a new “technique,” as, say, fingerprinting once was. It makes a larger statement about what’s happened to a land that was once, as Daniel Silva acknowledges, the crucible of liberty. Henry Porter’s new novel The Dying Light is set mainly in an English market town in Shropshire that feels as claustrophobic as Communist East Germany, a land in which rural coppers badger you for such amorphous offenses as “failing to account for your intentions in a designated area.” Returning to her native sod from a job in New York, the heroine can’t help noticing that there’s “more surveillance than I thought possible in a free country,” and yet the citizenry are quiescent. The Prime Minister is struck by Oliver Cromwell’s choice of job description, “Great Lord Protector”: “That is exactly what you feel leading the country: an acute desire to protect the people”—for the best of motives.

  Earlier this year, Greater Manchester Police introduced “Smart Cars”—little bubble vehicles equipped with rotating cameras on twelve-foot poles poking through their roofs. As the BBC reported, “Anyone seen driving while distracted—eating at the wheel, playing with the radio or applying makeup for instance—is filmed by the cameras.” Shortly thereafter, they get a letter and a fine.

  Henry Porter’s political thriller nudges that on just a wee bit: unmanned four-camera mini-drones sail the skies, tracking the wayward “citizen” even in the remotest thickets of the country. What next? CCTV in private homes? Ah, but we’re already there. This month the “Secretary of State for Children” (another Orwellian touch) announced that twenty thousand “problem families” would be put under twenty-four-hour CCTV supervision in their homes. As The Daily Express reported, “They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.”

  Orwell’s government “telescreen” in every home is close to being a reality, although even he might have dismissed as too obviously absurd a nanny state that literally polices your bedtime.

  THE PARAMILITARIZED BUREAUCRACY

  National Review, August 28, 2012

  I FLEW IN to Montreal from an overseas trip the other day and was met by a lady from my office, who had kindly agreed to drive me back home to New Hampshire. At the airport she seemed a little rattled, and it emerged that on her journey from the Granite State she had encountered a “security check” on the Vermont-Quebec border. U.S. officials had decided to impose temporary exit controls on I-91 and had backed up northbound traffic so that agents could ascertain from each driver whether he or she was carrying “monetary instruments” in excess of ten thousand dollars. My assistant was quizzed by an agent dressed in the full Robocop and carrying an automatic weapon, while another with a sniffer dog examined the vehicle. Which seems an unlikely method of finding travelers’ checks for twelve thousand dollars.

  Being a legal immigrant, I am inured to the indignities imposed by the United States Government. (You can’t ask an illegal immigrant for ID, even at the voting booth or after commission of a crime, but a legal immigrant has to have his Green Card on him even when he’s strolling in the woods behind his house.) And indeed, for anyone familiar with the curious priorities of officialdom, there is a certain logic in an agency that has failed to prevent millions of illegal aliens from entering the country evolving smoothly into an agency that obstructs law-abiding persons from exiting the country.

  But my assistant felt differently. A couple of days later, I was zipping through a DVD of The Great Escape, trying to locate a moment from that terrific wartime caper that I wished to refer to in a movie essay. While zapping back and forth, I chanced on a scene after the eponymous escape in which Richard Attenborough and Gordon Jackson are trying to board a small-town bus while Gestapo agents demand “Your papers, mein Herr.” My assistant walked in in the middle, and we exchanged some mordant cracks about life under the Nazis. “It’s almost as bad as driving from Lyndonville to Lac Brome for lunch.” Etc. Her family have lived blameless and respectable lives in my North Country town for a quarter-millennium, and she didn’t like the idea of having to clear an armed checkpoint on a U.S. highway in order to make a day trip to Canada.

  But, if you don’t care for the Third Reich comparisons, consider more recent European ones: The capital flight from Greece, Spain, Italy, and elsewhere as the euro zone approaches breaking point. Greek bank deposits dropped 16 percent in the year to this April; according to a Credit Suisse analysis, capital outflows from Spain are currently running at about 50 percent of GDP. Most of these Mediterranean euros have found safe haven in German banks. You can do that on the Continent, not just because of the common currency but because of the free movement of people within the so-called Schengen area. So, if a Greek figures that now’s the time to load up the trunk with “monetary instruments” and drive them to a bank in Munich before the whole powder keg goes up, there’s no gauntlet of machine guns and sniffer dogs to run. My friend’s experience suggests that, come the collapse of the U.S. dollar, Washington is going to be far less sanguine about your tootling what’s left of your 401(k) up to the Royal Bank of Canada.

  In fact, it already is. On January 1, 2013, the FATCAT Act (technically, it’s FATCA, but we all get the acronymic message) imposes a whole new bunch of burdensome regulations and punitive fines on Americans with non-U.S. bank accounts. Not just Mitt and his chums with the numbered accounts in Zurich, but ordinary Americans teaching abroad at, say, the International School in Accra, or doing regular business in Ireland, or with an old family hunting camp in Quebec for which they’ve always had a small checking account just to pay grocery and fuel bills when they’re up there. Americans now enjoy less financial freedom than Canadians, Swedes, and Italians. When I mentioned this on National Review Online recently, I received a fair few emails from readers saying they have no plans to work abroad or buy a second home, so why should they care?

  Here’s why: Because Washington is telling you something important about how things are likely to go when things get even worse. Which is the way to bet. American government is not noted for its sense of proportion. This is a bureaucracy whose Fish and Wildlife agents fine an eleven-year-old Virginia schoolgirl $535 for the crime of rescuing a woodpecker from a cat and nursing him back to health; whose National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration agents threaten a marine biologist with twenty years in jail over whistling at a whale; whose Food and Drug Administration agents want a hundred grand in fines from some onanistic weirdo in Fremont who gives away his sperm to infertile couples. If you’re wondering which of the Food and Drug Administration’s twin responsibilities semen counts as, don’t waste your time: Whether your deposit belongs at a Swiss bank or a sp
erm bank, it’s all federally regulated.

  By the way, I use the word “agents” rather than “officials” because, in the developed world, the paramilitarized bureaucracy is uniquely American. This is the only G7 government whose education minister has his own SWAT team—for policing student-loan compliance. The other day, the Gibson guitar company settled with the feds over an arcane infraction of a law on rare-wood importation—after their factories were twice raided by “agents” bearing automatic weapons. Like the man said, don’t bring a knife to a guitar fight. Do musical-instrument manufacturers have a particular reputation for violence? Akin to that of female marine biologists and sixth-grade schoolgirls?

  As American insolvency grows and the dollar dies and the real value of household wealth shrinks, is it likely that Washington will share Athens’, Madrid’s, and Rome’s insouciant attitude to capital mobility? Or will exit controls on I-91 become as familiar a sight as TSA pat-downs? The United States has the most powerful government, with the longest reach, of any nation in history. It is also the Brokest Nation in History. Resolving that contradiction is unlikely to be pretty.

  VI

  THE STORIES WE TELL

  MEETING MR. BOND

  Maclean’s, December 1, 2006

  HIS FIRST DRAFT would have been good enough for most of us:

  Scent and smoke and sweat hit the taste buds with an acid thwack at three o’clock in the morning.