by Mark Steyn
But Ghazi’s not just a comedian, he’s also a poet. He wrote an ode to Ayat Akhras, a Palestinian teenybomber who detonated herself in a Jerusalem supermarket and took a couple of hated Jews with her. The ambassador was evidently smitten by “Ayat, the bride of loftiness.” “She embraced death with a smile,” he cooed.
“How come he’s never written an ode to me?” I brooded bitterly. “Who do I have to blow up to get in an Algosaibi anthology?” The Foreign Office rapped him over the knuckles, but Ghazi stuck to his guns—or, rather, her plastic explosives. He insisted that he personally would be honored to be a suicide bomber if he weren’t so old and out of shape.
This struck me as a pretty feeble excuse. I mean, how fit do you have to be to strap on a Semtex belt and waddle into a pizza parlor? The talk in the diplomatic corps is that that’s why Ghazi was recalled. Alternatively, he was doing so much shtick in The Spectator, Crown Prince Abdullah has finally twigged he’s Jewish.
After that hilarious interview with Boris, I suggested to Dan Colson, the Telegraph Group’s executive supremo, that we hire Dr. Algosaibi and alternate him as a columnist with me—one of those Point-Counterpoint deals, Infidel & Believer, Whacko & Wahhabi, that kind of set-up. But a couple of days later it was announced that King Fahd had appointed him Minister of Water—which, on closer inspection, turns out mostly to involve being Minister of Sewage. It’s a sad day when an offer of a Telegraph column isn’t competitive with manning the Sewage Department in Riyadh. Ghazi issued a statement saying he accepted his new gig “with humility and a deep sense of responsibility.” Like his incendiary heroine “the bride of loftiness,” he embraced the sewage portfolio with a smile.
I don’t know whether Boris has yet introduced the lash to the Speccie office but, judging from Thursday’s Telegraph column, he’s pretty much signed on to the Algosaibi line on Iraq. Who says ambassadors have no impact? As for me, I’ll miss the old suicide-bomber groupie, but I’m keeping his name in the Rolodex. Of all the A-list Saudis I know, he’s the one with the most effluents in government circles.
A couple of days later The Telegraph published the following letter:
Sir—Mark Steyn was kind enough to greet my appointment at what he calls the Ministry of Sewerage in his usual, charming manure of speaking (Comment, Sep 28). I would like to inform him that our treatment plants will always be ready to receive the literary outpourings emanating from his most humane soil.
Ghazi Algosaibi
Minister of Water and Electricity
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Ghazi’s replacement as ambassador in London was the deeply sinister Prince Turki, a classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown and former head of Saudi intelligence. And His Highness was no barrel of laughs. “The arrogance of Mark Steyn knows no bounds,” he huffed after one column. “With his imperialist pen he would like to wipe my country off the map.” I read it and re-read it, but I couldn’t spot any wit or wordplay, and I felt an odd sense of loss.
Not long afterwards, Sheikh Algosaibi sent me a book—a slim, rather limpid novel he’d written called A Love Story. On the inside was written:
To Mark,
Ambivalently,
Ghazi
That’s my all-time favorite book inscription. He wrote many novels, and a memoir of his time in government, Yes, (Saudi) Minister!, which is a lot funnier than The Audacity of Hope or It Takes a Village. Most of his books were at one time or another banned in his native land: The House of Saud found Ghazi an indispensable diplomat and technocrat, but the playfully subversive themes of his literary side were less welcome. He died of cancer in 2010, and for me a little bit of the fun went out of our civilizational death-match. I wish he were around for me to send this book to:
To Ghazi,
Ambivalently,
Mark
1Boris Johnson, now the Mayor of London, had just “inherited a safe seat” at Henley-on- Thames from Michael Heseltine, and been elected to the House of Commons.
2Miss Amiel had hosted a party at which the French Ambassador, M. Daniel Bernard, had opined that “all the current troubles of the world are because of that shitty little country Israel.”
OF ALL THE GIN JOINTS IN ALL THE TOWNS IN ALL THE WORLD . . .
The Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle wrote of the piece that follows:
“Can we build a special museum just to put this Mark Steyn post in?
Stick it in a fancy gold frame and surround it with red velvet ropes?
Almost too amazing to be real.”
Well, nobody offered the money for the museum and the velvet ropes, so I’d thought I’d stick it in a book. And yes, it’s amazing but it’s true. I believe there are just shy of twenty thousand municipal entities in the United States. How hard can it be to pick three random all-American towns that one effete Canadian writer would never have set foot in? Harder than you’d think. . . .
The Corner, September 20, 2011
OVER AT The Hill, the daily newspaper covering Congress, Bernie Quigley notes a spate of similarly-titled apocalyptic tomes:
Several recent books see the end coming. John Birmingham’s After America: Fighter bombers rushing at us on the cover. You get the picture. Paul Starobin’s After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age: Planet of the Apes with nerds instead of apes. Be afraid. But not that afraid. Mark Steyn’s After America: Get Ready for Armageddon: Self-explanatory. Andrew Breitbart said, “May puke I’m so happy.” Meaning he liked it.
These books see America as an idea rather than a place because the authors don’t understand place and have probably never been to an American place they were inclined to stay in. They would get a rash in real places like Tobaccoville, N.C., Haverhill, N.H., or Luckenbach, Texas, where Waylon, Willie and the boys hang.
There are arguments to be made against my book, but that’s probably not the one to hang your hat on. As it happens, the Steyn global corporate headquarters are located in Woodsville, which is a quartier of the town of. . . Haverhill, New Hampshire. My Corner posts are filed from Haverhill. My National Review columns are filed from Haverhill. My fabulous hair for tonight’s O’Reilly Factor was coiffed by Amanda, my Haverhill hairdresser. I’ll be guest-hosting The Rush Limbaugh Show live from Haverhill this Friday, and, if Mr. Quigley cares to swing by the studio, I promise to do the show naked so he can observe that I have no rash.
Better luck next time, genius.
Bernie Quigley never took me up on my offer. As to his other rash-inducing “real places,” Luckenbach, Texas, is a ghost town (population: 3) and Waylon, Willie and the boys don’t hang there, because Waylon Jennings is dead and, even when he wasn’t, never set foot in the joint. But, if all it takes to be authentically American is to record a song about a place you’ve never been to, I’m happy to do “Luckenbach, Texas” on my next album.
LAYING IT ON THE LINE
In 2000, a few weeks before that year’s presidential election, running out of cheap Alec Baldwin jokes (he’d promised to leave the country if Bush won) and in need of a bit of filler to pad out the page, I wound up accidentally inaugurating what became a quadrennial tradition. Here’s how I ended that column.
The National Post, September 21, 2000
ONE OF THE peripheral reasons Dubya will triumph on November 7 is that he has no interest in Hollywood celebrities. Still, on the matter of his self-removal, I think Alec Baldwin shows great courage. Following last week’s prediction that Bush would win with around 380 of the 538 electoral college votes, I see that several readers have written in to query my sanity. So, while I’m at it, let me make another prediction: Bush will win the debates—at least in the political sense of improving his position as a result of his performance. Go ahead, scoffers, scoff your scoffiest. “Al Gore will win,” wrote Alan Rutkowski on Monday’s letters page. “When he does, will Mr. Steyn turn in his political pundit’s badge?”
I’ll do better than that, man. If Bush loses, I hereby pledge that I will kill myself live on the Internet.
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Er, okay, maybe not. Being a corpse would severely impact on my earning potential, though apparently it’s no obstacle to holding down a columnar gig at The Globe and Mail. But I think Mr. Rutkowski makes a good point—that the sage whose wisdom is unheeded ought, like Alec Baldwin, to depart the scene. It would be ridiculous to continue posturing as an incisive analyst of U.S. affairs once I have been exposed as a complete buffoon. So I’m happy to assure readers that, if my prediction of a Bush victory is wrong, I will refrain from writing on U.S. politics in The National Post for the entire duration of a Gore presidency.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get on with my application for National Post ballet critic.
A few weeks later, we were plunged into the hell of dimpled chads, recounts, and Supreme Court decisions—none of which I’d had an inkling of when I breezily put my job on the line. Notwithstanding that that was a closer shave than I’d anticipated, four years later I did it all over again—this time across the Atlantic:
The Irish Times, October 11, 2004
IT WAS SOBERING, on reading the recent flurry of letters in this newspaper under the heading “Balancing the U.S. Debate,” to discover that it was this column that had single-handedly unbalanced it. “If Steyn represents the American right, where is the spokesperson for the American left?” demands Conor McCarthy of Dun Laoghaire. The hitherto perfectly poised seesaw of press coverage of the United States is apparently all out of whack because my corpulent column is weighing down one end while on the other up in the air are the massed ranks of Irish Times correspondents, RTE, the BBC and 97 percent of the European media class, plus Anthony O’Halloran, who opined in these pages a few days ago that “anyone who cares to visit a small town in the Midwest will encounter what can only be described as ultra-right-wing thinking.” Prof. O’Halloran didn’t cite any examples of this “ultra-right-wing thinking,” secure in his assumption that most readers would know the sort of thing he had in mind.
As the ne plus ultra of unbalanced right-wing thinkers, it’s not for me to suggest how the U.S. debate might be balanced in these pages. I have only one theory on column-writing, which is this: at a certain basic level, a columnist has to be right more often than not, otherwise the reader (I use the singular advisedly) is just wasting his time. If I were Robert Fisk, the famed foreign correspondent with decades of experience in the Muslim world, I’d be ashamed to leave the house. Sample Fisk headlines on the Afghan War: “Bush Is Walking into a Trap,” “It Could Become More Costly than Vietnam.” Sample insight on the Iraq War: when the Yanks announced they’d taken Baghdad International Airport, Fisky insisted they hadn’t and suggested they’d seized an abandoned RAF airfield from the Fifties by mistake. It’s this kind of unique expertise that has made him so admired around the world, not least in Ireland.
By contrast, readers of this column may have gained the impression that George W. Bush will win the presidential election on November 2. If he doesn’t, I shall trouble readers of this newspaper no further. It would be ridiculous to continue passing myself off as an incisive analyst of U.S. affairs after I’ve been exposed as a deluded fool who completely misread the entire situation. In the bright new dawn of the Kerry Administration, you’d deserve better. If that’s not an incentive for Irish citizens to smuggle a few illegal campaign contributions the Senator’s way, I don’t know what is.
But, if, on the other hand, Bush is re-elected, I make one small request of the Irish and European media: you need to re-think your approach to this Presidency. . . .
If Kerry wins, I’m outta here. If Bush wins, eschewing lazy European condescension for the next four years would be the best way of “balancing the U.S. debate.”
The rapturous reception from Dublin readers rejoicing at the impending demise of my career was so heart-warming that I thought I might as well do it in London, too:
The Spectator, October 30, 2004
USUALLY AFTER MAKING wild predictions I confidently toss my job on the line and say, if they don’t pan out, I’m outta here. I’ve done that a couple of times this campaign season—over Wes Clark (remember him?)—but it almost goes without saying in these circumstances. Were America to elect John Kerry president, it would be seen around the world as a repudiation not just of Bush and of Iraq but of the broader war. It would be a declaration by the people of American unexceptionalism—that they are a slightly butcher Belgium; they would be signing on to the wisdom of conventional transnationalism. Having failed to read correctly the mood of my own backyard, I could hardly continue to pass myself off as a plausible interpreter of the great geopolitical forces at play. Obviously that doesn’t bother a lot of chaps in this line of work—Sir Simon Jenkins, Robert “Mister Robert” Fisk, etc.,—and no doubt I could breeze through the next four years doing ketchup riffs on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I feel a period of sober reflection far from the scene would be appropriate. My faith in the persuasive powers of journalism would be shattered; maybe it would be time to try something else—organizing coups in Africa, like the alleged Sir Mark Thatcher1 is alleged to have allegedly done; maybe abseiling down the walls of the presidential palace and garroting the guards personally.
But I don’t think it will come to that. This is the 9/11 election, a choice between pushing on or retreating to the polite fictions of September 10. I bet on reality.
Reality isn’t the sure bet it once was. Do you remember the afternoon of the 2004 election? A flurry of leaked “exit polls” showed John Kerry cruising to victory. Across the pond, it was late evening and the traditional election night party at the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square was in full swing when news of the impending Kerry presidency came through. My Fleet Street comrade Peter Oborne contemplated the implications of this bright new dawn:
Not long before midnight on Tuesday, a mood of dogmatic certitude overcame the throng of British MPs, ministers and journalists assembled at the traditional election-night party at the American embassy in Grosvenor Square. We knew that John Kerry had won, and dismissed with knowing contempt the warnings of our hosts—whose election, after all, it was—that it was far too early to tell.
A delicious report went round that shares in Halliburton, the construction company associated with Vice-President Dick Cheney, had crashed on Wall Street shortly after 4 p.m. local time, in reaction to the first unofficial exit polls. One lonely Foreign Office official, along with Bruce Anderson, the political columnist, challenged the prevailing mood. . . .
The rest of us spent two or three carefree hours, while we imagined the consequences of a Kerry victory: rapprochement between America and the rest of the world; reconciliation between Tony Blair and the Labour Party; the resignation of Mark Steyn.
But, like Houdini, I escaped yet again. I’m less optimistic than I used to be, and offering to resign if my prediction of total civilizational collapse doesn’t come to pass doesn’t have quite the same ring. And on most of the big questions these days I’d be very happy to be proved wrong.
1Sir Mark, the son of Margaret Thatcher and brother of my old pal Carol Thatcher, had been arrested in South Africa for his role in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. He was subsequently convicted, fined three million rand, and received a four-year suspended sentence.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THESE COLUMNS ORIGINALLY appeared in the following publications: The American Spectator, The Atlantic Monthly, The Chicago Sun-Times, Britain’s Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, and The Independent, The Irish Times, Maclean’s, Canada’s National Post, America’s National Review, The Spectator in the United Kingdom and Australia, The Wall Street Journal, and Canada’s Western Standard.
I would like to thank the editors at the respective titles: R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., Wlady Pleszczynski, and Marc Carnegie at The American Spectator; Cullen Murphy at The Atlantic; Steve Huntley at The Chicago Sun-Times; Charles Moore, Dominic Lawson, Sarah Sands, Martin Newland, Sarah Crompton, Mark Law, and Anna Murphy at The Telegraph; Tom Sutcliffe at The Independent; Peter Mur
tagh at The Irish Times; Ken Whyte and Dianne de Gayardon de Fenoyl at Maclean’s; Natasha Hassan, John O’Sullivan, and Ruth-Ann MacKinnon at The National Post; Rich Lowry and Jay Nordlinger at National Review; Boris Johnson, Liz Anderson, Stuart Reid, Tom Switzer, and the late Frank Johnson at The Spectator; Max Boot, James Taranto, and Tunku Varadarajan at The Wall Street Journal; and Ezra Levant and Kevin Libin at The Western Standard.
I would also like to thank Conrad Black and Dan Colson who ran the newspaper group that operated several of the above titles and many others in which I had the honor to appear. A large number of the pieces here appeared in multiple publications on multiple continents, from The Ottawa Citizen to The Jerusalem Post, The Australian, and all the way to Hawkes Bay Today in New Zealand, with a tweak here and a tweak there en route. So I’ve picked the version I like best and occasionally, no disrespect, put back a line or two that the fine ladies and gentlemen listed above in their wisdom chose to excise.
I am also indebted to readers in America, Canada, Britain, Australia, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere whose comments, questions, historical tidbits, and occasional insults prompted many of the columns.
I would like to thank Marji Ross, Harry Crocker, and their colleagues at Regnery for their enthusiasm and encouragement. And I’d be completely lost without my trusty sidekicks over the years—Chantal Benoît, Tiffany Cole, Katherine Ernst, and Moni Haworth—who’ve put up with a lot of pacing the floor an hour before deadline and all the usual hair-tearing.
I thank my beloved daughter Ceci for permission to include her Memorial Day poem. On the day she was born, I got a bit bored during a somewhat protracted labor and started writing a column for The Telegraph. So literally her first sight of this world was me typing away. If what goes around comes around, I’ll look up from my deathbed and see her live tweeting it.