The Undocumented Mark Steyn

by Mark Steyn

  The Observer seems to have approached the subject in the same belief as P. D. James’s government porn stores—that it’s nothing that a little more sexual adventurism can’t cure. So Miss Haworth’s lead was devoted to the views of a “sex and relationship counselor” and former dominatrix who specialized in dripping hot wax on her clients’ nipples and was once invited to North Korea to squeeze the testicles of one of Kim Jong-il’s top generals. So, as The Observer puts it, “she doesn’t judge.” Except, that is, when it comes to “the pressure to conform to Japan’s anachronistic family model,” which she blames for the young folks checking out of the sex biz altogether.

  But, if the pressure to conform were that great, wouldn’t there be a lot more conforming? Instead, 49 percent of women under thirty-four are not in any kind of romantic relationship, and nor are 61 percent of single men. A third of Japanese adults under thirty have never dated. Anyone. Ever. It’s not that they’ve stopped “having sex”—or are disinclined to have hot wax poured on their nipples. It’s bigger than that: It’s a flight from human intimacy.

  They’re not alone in that, of course. A while back, I flew from a speaking engagement on one side of the Atlantic to a TV booking on the other. And backstage at both events an attractive thirtysomething woman made the same complaint to me. They’d both tried computer dating but were alarmed by the number of chaps who found human contact too much effort: Instead of meeting and kissing and making out and all that other stuff that involves being in the same room, they’d rather you just sexted them and twitpicced a Weineresque selfie or two. As in other areas, the Japanese seem merely to have reached the end point of western ennui a little earlier.

  By 2020, in the Land of the Rising Sun, adult diapers will outsell baby diapers: The sun also sets. In The Children of Men, the barrenness is a medical condition; in real life, in some of the oldest nations on earth, from Madrid to Tokyo, it’s a voluntary societal self-extinction. In Europe, the demographic death spiral is obscured by high Muslim immigration; in Japan, which retains a cultural aversion to immigration of any kind, there are no foreigners to be the children you couldn’t be bothered having yourself. In welfare states, the future is premised on social solidarity: The young will pay for the costs of the old. But as the west ages, social solidarity frays, and in Japan young men aren’t even interested in solidarity with young women, and young women can’t afford solidarity with bonnie bairns. So an elderly population in need of warm bodies to man the hospital wards and senior centers is already turning to robot technology. If manga and anime are any indication, the post-human nurses and waitresses will be cute enough to make passable sex partners—for anyone who can still be bothered.

  A STROLL AT TWILIGHT

  From a speech in Boston,1 October 10, 2010

  A COUPLE OF months ago, I happened to be in Tangiers, in a fairly decrepit salon de thé off the rue de la Liberté in Tangiers, enjoying a coffee and a stale croissant grilled and flattened into a panini. What could be more authentically Moroccan? For some reason, the napkins were emblazoned with “Gracias por su visita.”

  And, while enjoying all this vibrant diversity, I chanced to remember yet another example of it—a recent headline from Canada’s Shalom Life: “No Danger to the Jewish Cemeteries in Tangiers.”

  Apparently, the old Jewish hospital in this ancient port city had been torn down a couple of months back, and the Moroccan Jewish diaspora back in Toronto worried that the old Jewish cemetery might be next on the list. There are a lot of old Jewish cemeteries around the world, not a lot of new ones. Not to worry, Abraham Azancot assured Shalom Life readers: The Jewish cemetery on the rue du Portugal is perfectly safe. “Its sanctity has consistently been respected by the local government that is actually providing the community with resources to assist in its current grooming.”

  Sounds great. Being in the neighborhood, I thought I’d swing by and check out the “current grooming.” It’s kind of hard to spot unless you’re consciously looking for it: two solid black metal gates off a steep, narrow street where the rue du Portugal crosses the rue Salah Dine, and only the smallest of signs to indicate what lies behind. On pushing open the gate and squeezing through, I was greeted by a pair of long underwear, flapping in the breeze. In Haiti, this would be some voodoo ritual, alerting one to go no further. But in Tangiers it was merely wash day, and laundry lines dangled over the nearest graves. If you happen to be Ysaac Benzaquen (died 1921) or Samuel Maman (died 1925), it is your lot to spend eternity with the groundskeeper’s long johns. Pace Mr. Azancot, there is no sense of “sanctity” or “community”: as the underwear advertises, this is no longer a public place, merely a backyard that happens to have a ton of gravestones in it. I use the term “groundskeeper,” but keeping the grounds doesn’t seem to be a priority: another row of graves was propping up piles of logs he was busy chopping out of hefty tree trunks. Beyond that, chickens roamed amidst burial plots strewn with garbage bags, dozens of old shoes, and hundreds of broken bottles.

  It’s prime real estate, with a magnificent view of the Mediterranean, if you don’t mind the trash and the stench and the chicken crap, and you tiptoe cautiously round the broken glass. I wandered past the graves: Jacob Cohen, Samuel J. Cohen, Samuel M. Cohen. . . . Lot of Cohens here over the years. Not anymore. In one isolated corner, six young men—des musulmans, naturellement—watched a seventh lightly scrub a tombstone, as part of a make-work project “providing the community with resources to assist in its current grooming.”

  What “community”? By 2005, there were fewer than 150 Jews in Tangiers, almost all of them very old. By 2015, it is estimated that there will be precisely none. Whenever I mention such statistics to people, the reaction is a shrug: why would Jews live in Morocco anyway? But in 1945 there were some three hundred thousand in this country. Today some three thousand Jews remain—i.e., about 1 percent of what was once a large and significant population. That would be an unusual demographic reconfiguration in most countries: imagine if America’s black population or Canada’s francophone population were today 1 percent of what it was in 1945. But it’s not unusual for Jews. There are cemeteries like that on the rue du Portugal all over the world, places where once were Jews and now are none. In the Twenties Baghdad was 40 percent Jewish, and Tripoli. But you could just as easily cite Czernowitz in the Bukovina, now part of Ukraine. “There is not a shop that has not a Jewish name painted above its windows,” wrote Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, visiting the city in 1937. Not today. As in Tangiers, the “community” resides in the cemetery.

  You can sense the same process already under way in, say, London, the thirteenth-biggest Jewish city in the world, but one with an aging population; and in Odense, Denmark, where last year superintendent Olav Nielsen announced he would no longer admit Jewish children to the local school; and in Malmö, Sweden, where a surge in anti-Semitism from, ahem, certain quarters has led Jewish residents to abandon the city for Stockholm and beyond. Soon Malmö will be just another town with an abandoned and decaying “old Jewish cemetery.”

  I was there a couple of weeks ago—sat and had a coffee in a nice little place in a beautiful medieval square, and fell into conversation with a couple of cute Swedish blondes. Fine-looking ladies. I shall miss Scandinavian blondes when they’re extinct.

  At dusk, and against their advice, I took a twenty-minute walk to Rosengård. As you stroll the sidewalk, the gaps between blondes grow longer, and the gaps between young bearded Muslim men coming toward you grow shorter. And eventually the last blonde recedes into the distance behind you, and there are nothing but fierce bearded men and the occasional covered woman. And then you’re in the housing projects, and all the young boys kicking a soccer ball around are Muslim, and every single woman is covered—including many who came from “moderate” Muslim countries and did not adopt the headscarf or hijab until they came to Sweden. In progressive, post-Christian, swingin’ Sweden, the veil is de rigueur for Muslim women. Increasingly, ambulances and fire trucks do not res
pond to emergency calls in Rosengård without police escort. The writ of the Swedish state does not really run.

  Sweden is about as far as you can get from Israel, but, as in the Jewish state, they’re trading “land for peace,” even if they’re not yet quite aware of it—and will likely wind up with neither. As I said, it’s about a twenty-minute walk between downtown and Rosengård, as the Nordic blondes thin out and yield to the beards and hijabs. That’s Europe’s future walking towards you.

  1At a meeting of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

  XVI

  AGAINST THE GRAIN

  DUTCH COURAGE

  The Irish Times, June 7, 2004

  ALL WEEKEND LONG, across the networks, media grandees who’d voted for Carter and Mondale, just like all their friends did, tried to explain the appeal of Ronald Reagan. He was “the Great Communicator,” he had a wonderful sense of humor, he had a charming smile. . . self-deprecating. . . the tilt of his head. . . .

  All true, but not what matters. Even politics attracts its share of optimistic, likeable men, and most of them leave no trace—like Britain’s “Sunny Jim” Callaghan, a perfect example of the defeatism of western leadership in the 1970s. It was the era of “détente,” a word barely remembered now, which is just as well, as it reflects poorly on us: the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the free world had decided that the unfree world was not a prison ruled by a murderous ideology that had to be defeated but merely an alternative lifestyle that had to be accommodated. Under cover of “détente,” the Soviets gobbled up more and more real estate across the planet, from Ethiopia to Grenada. Nonetheless, it wasn’t just the usual suspects who subscribed to this feeble evasion—Helmut Schmidt, Pierre Trudeau, François Mitterrand—but most of the so-called “conservatives,” too—Ted Heath, Giscard d’Estaing, Gerald Ford.

  Unlike these men, unlike most other senior Republicans, Ronald Reagan saw Soviet Communism for what it was: a great evil. Millions of Europeans across half a continent from Poland to Bulgaria, Slovenia to Latvia, live in freedom today because he acknowledged that simple truth when the rest of the political class was tying itself in knots trying to pretend otherwise. That’s what counts. He brought down the “evil empire,” and all the rest is details.

  At the time, the charm and the smile got less credit from the intelligentsia, confirming their belief that he was a dunce who’d plunge us into Armageddon. Everything you need to know about the establishment’s view of Ronald Reagan can be found on page 624 of Dutch, Edmund Morris’s weird post-modern biography. The place is Berlin, the time June 12, 1987:

  “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” declaims Dutch, trying hard to look infuriated, but succeeding only in an expression of mild petulance. . . . One braces for a flash of prompt lights to either side of him: APPLAUSE.

  What a rhetorical opportunity missed. He could have read Robert Frost’s poem on the subject, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” to simple and shattering effect. Or even Edna St. Vincent Millay’s lines, which he surely holds in memory . . .

  Only now for the first time I see

  This wall is actually a wall, a thing

  Come up between us, shutting me away

  From you . . . I do not know you any more.

  Poor old Morris, the plodding, conventional, scholarly writer driven mad by fourteen years spent trying to get a grip on Ronald Reagan. Most world leaders would have taken his advice: you’re at the Berlin Wall, so you have to say something about it, something profound but oblique, maybe there’s a poem on the subject. . . . Who cares if Frost’s is over-quoted, and a tad hard to follow for a crowd of foreigners? Who cares that it is, to the casual (never mind English-as-a-second-language) hearer, largely pro-wall, save for a few tentative questions toward the end?

  Edmund Morris has described his subject as an “airhead” and concluded that it’s “like dropping a pebble in a well and hearing no splash.” Morris may not have heard the splash, but he’s still all wet: the elites were stupid about Reagan in a way that only clever people can be. Take that cheap crack: if you drop a pebble in a well and you don’t hear a splash, it may be because the well is dry but it’s just as likely it’s because the well is of surprising depth. I went out to my own well and dropped a pebble: I heard no splash, yet the well supplies exquisite translucent water to my home.

  But then I suspect it’s a long while since Morris dropped an actual pebble in an actual well: As with walls, his taste runs instinctively to the metaphorical. Reagan looked at the Berlin Wall and saw not a poem-quoting opportunity but prison bars.

  I once discussed Irving Berlin, composer of “God Bless America,” with his friend and fellow songwriter Jule Styne, and Jule put it best: “It’s easy to be clever. But the really clever thing is to be simple.” At the Berlin Wall that day, it would have been easy to be clever, as all those Seventies détente sophisticates would have been. And who would have remembered a word they said? Like Irving Berlin with “God Bless America,” only Reagan could have stood there and declared without embarrassment: “Tear down this wall!”

  And two years later the wall was, indeed, torn down. Ronald Reagan was straightforward and true and said it for everybody—which is why his “rhetorical opportunity missed” is remembered by millions of grateful Eastern Europeans. The really clever thing is to have the confidence to say it in four monosyllables.

  Ronald Reagan was an American archetype, and just the bare bones of his curriculum vitae capture the possibilities of his country: in the Twenties, a lifeguard at a local swimming hole who saved over seventy lives; in the Thirties, a radio sports announcer; in the Forties, a Warner Brothers leading man. . . and finally one of the two most significant presidents of the American century. Unusually for the commander in chief, Reagan’s was a full, varied American life, of which the presidency was the mere culmination.

  “The Great Communicator” was effective because what he was communicating was self-evident to all but our decayed elites: “We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around,” he said in his inaugural address. And at the end of a grim, grey decade—Vietnam, Watergate, energy crises, Iranian hostages—Americans decided they wanted a President who looked like the nation, not like its failed government. Thanks to his clarity, around the world governments that had nations have been replaced by nations that have governments. Most of the Warsaw Pact countries are now members of NATO, with free markets and freely elected parliaments.

  One man who understood was Yakob Ravin, a Ukrainian émigré who in the summer of 1997 happened to be strolling with his grandson in Armand Hammer Park near Reagan’s California home. They chanced to see the former President, out taking a walk. Mr. Ravin went over and asked if he could take a picture of the boy and the President. When they got back home to Ohio, it appeared in the local newspaper, The Toledo Blade.

  Ronald Reagan was three years into the decade-long twilight of his illness, and unable to recognize most of his colleagues from the Washington days. But Mr. Ravin wanted to express his appreciation. “Mr. President,” he said, “thank you for everything you did for the Jewish people, for Soviet people, to destroy the Communist empire.”

  And somewhere deep within there was a flicker of recognition. “Yes,” said the old man, “that is my job.”

  Yes, that was his job.

  THE UNCOWARDLY LIONESS

  Syndicated column, April 12, 2013

  A FEW HOURS after Margaret Thatcher’s death on Monday, the snarling deadbeats of the British underclass were gleefully rampaging through the streets of Brixton in South London, scaling the marquee of the local fleapit and hanging a banner announcing “THE BITCH IS DEAD.” Amazingly, they managed to spell all four words correctly. By Friday, “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead,” from The Wizard of Oz, was the Number One download at Amazon UK.

  Mrs. Thatcher would have enjoyed all this. Her former speechwriter John O’Sullivan recalls how, some years after leaving office, she a
rrived to address a small group at an English seaside resort to be greeted by enraged lefties chanting “Thatcher Thatcher Thatcher! Fascist fascist fascist!” She turned to her aide and cooed, “Oh, doesn’t it make you feel nostalgic?” She was said to be delighted to hear that a concession stand at last year’s Trades Union Congress was doing a brisk business in “Thatcher Death Party Packs”—almost a quarter-century after her departure from office.

  Of course, it would have been asking too much of Britain’s torpid left to rouse themselves to do anything more than sing a few songs and smash a few windows. In The Wizard of Oz, the witch is struck down at the height of her powers by Dorothy’s shack descending from Kansas to relieve the Munchkins of their torments. By comparison, Britain’s Moochkins were unable to bring the house down: Mrs. Thatcher died in her bed at the Ritz at a grand old age. Useless as they are, British socialists were at one point capable of writing their own anti-Thatcher singalongs rather than lazily appropriating Judy Garland blockbusters from MGM’s back catalogue. I recall in the late Eighties being at the National Theatre in London and watching the crowd go wild over Adrian Mitchell’s showstopper, “F**k-Off Friday,” a song about union workers getting their redundancy notices at the end of the week, culminating with the lines:

  I can’t wait for

  That great day when

  F**k-Off Friday

  Comes to Number Ten.

  You should have heard the cheers.

  Sadly, when F**k-Off Friday did come to 10 Downing Street, it was not the Labour Party’s tribunes of the masses who evicted her but the duplicitous scheming twerps of her own cabinet, who rose up against her in an act of matricide from which the Tory party has yet to recover. In the preferred euphemism of the American press, Mrs. Thatcher was a “divisive” figure, but that hardly does her justice. She was “divided” not only from the opposition party but from most of her own, and from almost the entire British establishment, including the publicly funded arts panjandrums who ran the likes of the National Theatre and cheerfully commissioned one anti-Thatcher diatribe after another at taxpayer expense. And she was profoundly “divided” from millions and millions of the British people, perhaps a majority.