Twilight of the West:
The Eurovision Song Contest doesn’t get a lot of attention in the United States, but on the Continent it’s long been seen as the perfect Euro-metaphor. Years before the euro came along, it was the prototype pan-European institution, and predicated on the same assumptions. Eurovision took the national cultures that produced Mozart, Vivaldi, and Debussy, and in return gave us “Boom-Bang-a-Bang” (winner, 1969), “Ding-Ding-a-Dong” (winner, 1975), and “Diggi-Loo-Diggi-Ley” (winner, 1984). The euro took the mark, the lira, and the franc, and merged them to create the “Boom-Bang-a-Bang” of currencies.
How will it all end? One recalls the 1990 Eurovision finals in Zagreb: “Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra,” cooed the hostess, Helga Vlahović. “The string section and the wood section all sit together.” Shortly thereafter, the wood section began ethnically cleansing the dressing rooms, while the string section rampaged through the brass section pillaging their instruments and severing their genitals. Indeed, the charming Miss Vlahović herself was forced into a sudden career shift and spent the next few years as Croatian TV’s head of “war information” programming.
Fortunately, no one remembers Yugoslavia. So today Europe itself is very much like an orchestra. The Greek fiddlers and the Italian wind players all sit together, playing cards in the dressing room, waiting for the German guy to show up with their checks. Just before last week’s Eurovision finale in Azerbaijan, the Daily Mail in London reported that the Spanish entrant, Pastora Soler, had been told to throw the competition “because the cash-strapped country can’t afford to host the lavish event next year,” as the winning nation is obliged to do. In a land where the youth unemployment rate is over 50 percent, and two-thirds of the country’s airports are under threat of closure, and whose neighbors (Britain) are drawing up plans for military intervention to evacuate their nationals in the event of total civic collapse, the pressing need to avoid winning the Eurovision Song Contest is still a poignant symbol of how total is Spain’s implosion. Ask not for whom “Ding-Ding-a-Dong” dings, it dings for thee.
#ad#One of the bizarre aspects of media coverage since 2008 is the complacent assumption that what’s happening is “cyclical” -- a downturn that will eventually correct itself -- rather than profoundly structural. Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, found herself skewered like souvlaki on a Thessaloniki grill for suggesting the other day that the Greeks are a race of tax evaders. She’s right. Compared to Germans, your average Athenian has a noticeable aversion to declaring income. But that’s easy for her to say: Mme. Lagarde’s half-million-dollar remuneration from the IMF is tax-free, just a routine perk of the new transnational governing class. And, in the end, whether your broke European state has reasonably efficient tax collectors like the French or incompetent ones like the Greeks is relatively peripheral.
Likewise, on this side of the Atlantic: Quebec university students, who pay the lowest tuition rates in North America, are currently striking over a proposed increase of $1,625. Spread out over seven years. Or about 232 bucks per annum. Or about the cost of one fair-trade macchiato a week. Which has, since the strike, been reduced further, to a couple of sips: If you’re wondering how guys who don’t do any work can withdraw their labor, well, “strike” is a euphemism for riot. The other week, Vanessa L’Écuyer, a sexology student at the Université du Québec à Montréal, was among those arrested for smoke-bombing the subway system and bringing the city’s morning commute to a halt. But, as in Europe, in the end, whether you fund your half-decade bachelor’s in sexology through a six-figure personal debt or whether you do it through the largesse of the state is relatively peripheral.
#page#In the twilight of the West, America and Europe are still different but only to this extent: They’ve wound up taking separate paths to the same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common currency for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative easing and the global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your final years in the care of Medicare or the National Health Service death panels, whether higher education is just another stage of cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion dollars’ worth of personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec.
That’s to say, the unsustainable “bubble” is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world. Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been chewed away at both ends. We invented something called “adolescence” that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a desultory half decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till you’re 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents’ health-insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced something called “retirement” that, in the space of two generations, has led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend the last couple of decades, or one-third of their adult lives, as a long holiday weekend.
#ad#The bit in between adolescence and retirement is your working life, and it’s been getting shorter and shorter. Which is unfortunate, as it has to pay for everything else. This structural deformity in the life cycle of Western man is at the root of most of our problems. Staying ever longer in “school” (I use the term loosely) leads to ever later workplace entry, and ever later (if at all) family formation. Which means that our generation is running up debt that will have to be repaid by our shrunken progeny. One hundred Greek grandparents have 42 Greek grandchildren. Is it likely that 42 Greeks can repay the debts run up by 100 Greeks? No wonder they’d rather stick it to the Germans. But the thriftier Germans have the same deathbed demographics. If 100 Germans resent having to pick up the check for an entire continent, is it likely 42 Germans will be able to do it?
Look around you. The late-20th-century Western lifestyle isn’t going to be around much longer. In a few years’ time, our children will look at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that came from. In turn, their children will be amazed to discover that in the early 21st century the Western world thought it entirely normal that vast swathes of the citizenry should while away their youth enjoying what, a mere hundred years earlier, would have been the leisurely varsity of the younger son of a Mitteleuropean Grand Duke.
I was sad to learn that Helga Vlahović died a few weeks ago, but her central metaphor all those years ago wasn’t wrong. Any functioning society is like an orchestra. When the parts don’t fit together, it’s always the other fellow who’s out of tune. So the Greeks will blame the Germans, and vice versa. But the developed world is all playing the same recessional. In the world after Western prosperity, we will work till we’re older and we will start younger -- and we will despise those who thought they could defy not just the rules of economic gravity but the basic human life cycle.
--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn
6.02.2012
5.30.2012
5.21.2012
Three Views on Same Sex Marriage
Three Views on Same Sex Marriage: A lot of cultural commentators are confused these days. They believe that people’s views on same sex marriage are solely a reflection of their...
5.19.2012
Breaking! The House of Windsor is One of the Five Tribes
Breaking! The House of Windsor is One of the Five Tribes:
My weekend column mentions en passant Teepee Party candidate Elizabeth Warren's contributions to the cookbook Pow Wow Chow, a “compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families”:
No. But, as Broadway's first Native American composer, Cole Porter wrote about his Indian blood in his famous song, "I've Got Sioux Under My Skin".
Actually, that last line quoted above briefly made me wonder if writing about American liberalism isn't a threat to one's sanity. Some societies are racist, some societies work hard to be anti-racist, but only in America does the nation's most prestigious law school hire a 100 per cent white female as its first "woman of color" on the basis that she once mailed in the Duke of Windsor's favorite crab recipe to a tribal cookbook.
Before he ascended to the throne, the Duke inspired a hit song of reflected celebrity: "I Danced With A Man Who Danced With A Girl Who Danced With The Prince Of Wales". That seems to be how Harvard Law's identity-group quota-filling works. I'm confident Elizabeth Warren will eventually be able to prove she danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with someone who once changed planes at a municipal airport accidentally built on a Cherokee burial ground.
My weekend column mentions en passant Teepee Party candidate Elizabeth Warren's contributions to the cookbook Pow Wow Chow, a “compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families”:
The recipes from “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee” include a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren’s fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It’s in the state song: “Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin’ down the plain . . . ” But then the white man came and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren’s traditional Five Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie.Shortly after my column was filed yesterday afternoon, our Noah Glyn reported that Mrs Warren's crab dish passed down from her Cherokee ancestors actually came from an upscale Manhattan eatery on 55th Street across from the St Regis:
Two of the possibly plagiarized recipes, said in the Pow Wow Chow cookbook to have been passed down through generations of Oklahoma Native American members of the Cherokee tribe, are described in a New York Times News Service story as originating at Le Pavilion, a fabulously expensive French restaurant in Manhattan. The dishes were said to be particular favorites of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Cole Porter.The Pundette wonders: "Were they Cherokee, too?"
No. But, as Broadway's first Native American composer, Cole Porter wrote about his Indian blood in his famous song, "I've Got Sioux Under My Skin".
Actually, that last line quoted above briefly made me wonder if writing about American liberalism isn't a threat to one's sanity. Some societies are racist, some societies work hard to be anti-racist, but only in America does the nation's most prestigious law school hire a 100 per cent white female as its first "woman of color" on the basis that she once mailed in the Duke of Windsor's favorite crab recipe to a tribal cookbook.
Before he ascended to the throne, the Duke inspired a hit song of reflected celebrity: "I Danced With A Man Who Danced With A Girl Who Danced With The Prince Of Wales". That seems to be how Harvard Law's identity-group quota-filling works. I'm confident Elizabeth Warren will eventually be able to prove she danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with someone who once changed planes at a municipal airport accidentally built on a Cherokee burial ground.
From Democracy to Sharia
From Democracy to Sharia:
A few weeks ago, amid the “Arab Spring” giddiness, a Shiite mosque opened in Cairo. This was big news. Among Egypt’s 80 million people, there are only a few thousand Shiites. It’s a 90 percent Sunni country, with even Christians vastly outnumbering the Shia. So, in their euphoria over the mosque’s inauguration, Shiite clerics heralded this Husseiniya (as Shiite mosques are known) as a symbol of rapprochement. The mosque would bridge the sectarian divide: a Shia center in this bustling Sunni city, yet a house of worship, thus emphasizing what unites rather than divides Muslims in one of Islam’s most important nations.
Such stories were once the hallmark of the Arab Spring narrative. “Democracy” was in the air. The corrupt, cancerous, pro-American dictator was gone. With their yearning hearts now sated by freedom, Egyptians would pull together, the light of liberty guiding them to prosperity.
The stories are different now. The Husseiniya was shut down last week. Yesterday’s euphoria is melting into today’s harsh reality. In Cairo, home to the Muslim Brotherhood and the sharia jurists of ancient Al-Azhar University, “democracy” has meant the rise of Sunni supremacists. Turns out they don’t do bridge-building. Their tightening grip has translated into brutalizing dhimmitude for Christians and increasing intolerance of Shiism -- which the Sunni leaders perceive less as Islam than as apostasy, an offense that sharia counts as more grievous than treason.
#ad#News of the mosque’s demise arrived shortly after a report entitled “Neocons vs. Islamophobes” by the leftist e-magazine Salon. Foreign-policy correspondent Jordan Michael Smith was good enough to appoint me leader of “what might be called the ‘to-hell-with-democracy’ strain of thought” in “the American conservative movement.” And if anything needs an Arab Spring, it must be the American conservative movement. We Islamophobes haven’t even had an election yet, much less gotten one of those mellifluous sharia-constitutions the State Department likes to write for its emerging “democracies,” and yet here I am the leader! And a “relentless” leader, too -- scalding the Muslim Brotherhood on behalf of a cadre that allegedly includes such luminaries as John Bolton, Michele Bachmann, and Frank Gaffney.
In our struggle “to define the Republican response to the increased power of political Islam,” we are said to be “vying” with “another faction among the right-wing that is equally powerful . . . the neoconservatives.” Counting among their number such heavyweights as GOP senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, they are portrayed as “rather admirably insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood be given a chance.” After the tumultuous Bush years, my friends Norman Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bill Kristol must be having a good laugh: It may have taken a motley crew of despicable Islamophobes, but the Left has suddenly decided that neocons may not be the root of all evil after all.
For all its pretensions to sober analysis, the Salon hit piece usefully demonstrates how nonsensical policy debates about the Arab Spring have become. There is no common understanding of basic terms. “Islamophobia” was coined by the Muslim Brotherhood and seamlessly adopted by its Western confederates. Taken literally, the word would mean “irrational fear of Islam” -- and thus it would rarely need to be spoken, Islamic supremacists having given us much to fear quite rationally. But in common parlance, to sneer “Islamophobe” is like what sneering “neocon” has hitherto been: lefty demagoguery -- in this case, the belittling of anyone who is critical of Islam and its sharia framework, regardless of how colorable the critique.
Most people know an insult when they hear one. When it is rank character assassination posing as argument, people of good will tune it out. More consequential, though, is the degrading of the term “democracy.”
As applied to the “Islamophobes,” Mr. Smith’s invocation of “democracy” -- as in, to hell with it -- is an outright perversion. Like the giants of neoconservatism, critics of Islamic supremacism (what Salon gently calls “political Islam”) are lovers of democracy. We believe the world would be a better place if every country adopted it. We agree the United States ought to be its promotional beacon. But that is mainly because when we speak of “democracy,” we mean American democracy. That is a culture of liberty so deeply rooted in the United States that it predated by a couple of centuries the American Revolution, the U.S. Constitution, and the first federal elections.
#page#Salon quotes the superb Jamie Fly, director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, as explaining that the key to the course of the upheaval in Egypt is whether its eventual government “respects the democratic process and doesn’t try to subvert the system.” This does get to the nub of what divides conservatives. Much as I admire Mr. Fly, democracy is not a “process,” it is a culture. It cannot be installed by a “system.” Processes like popular elections and constitution-writing are democratic only when democracy’s principles have become ingrained in a society.
That is an evolution that can and should be promoted, but it cannot be rushed. And the less democratic tradition there is in a country -- or, for that matter, a civilization -- the longer the evolution will take. If you try to hasten it by having the processes and the system drag a resistant society along, you don’t get democracy. You get the Muslim Brotherhood.
In the Brotherhood’s way of thinking, as best articulated by Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “democracy is just the train we board to reach our destination.” It’s a process, a conveyance, not a culture. In the case of Turkey, it was popular elections that enabled Erdogan to seize power and gradually transition a society away from democracy. In the case of Egypt, it is popular elections that have installed the Brotherhood and other Sunni supremacists, enabling them to orchestrate the much less challenging transition from an Islamic culture to a sharia state.
#ad#To critics of Islam as we find it in the Middle East, democracy promotion is highly desirable, but it is best achieved by pressuring Islamic societies to adopt the culture of liberty. It involves large rations of humility about what it will be possible to achieve -- and how quickly. It accepts that just as the Left is wrong to blame America for every problem, so are others wrong to expect from America the solution to every problem. It calls for the steeliness to tell Islamic societies, “Sure, we’d like to be friends, but we’re not desperate to be friends. We are more than willing to cut you off if you prefer not to civilize. We are more than able to punish you if you threaten us. And we are not of the mind that punishing you somehow obligates us to move in for a thankless decade or two, spending lives that are too precious and money we don’t have to fix your dysfunctional country.”
The alternative view says we have interests in this part of the world and it is far better to be on the ground trying to influence the outcome, however imperfectly. Maybe democratic processes cannot instantly democratize culture, but they can steer it in the right direction. This is an honorable position, and admirably American in its optimism.
Nevertheless, it ignores the significant downsides. When democracy promotion becomes more about processes than principles, it clothes anti-democrats like Erdogan in the raiment of democratic legitimacy. This is self-defeating. It empowers pretenders to obstruct or reverse the progress of liberty.
Moreover, the notion that democracy is procedural, not substantive, and therefore that sharia needn’t be repealed for liberty to flourish, is not changing Islamic society for the better; it is changing our society for the worse. Islam is not budging on sharia-based suppression of speech it deems offensive -- particularly speech that examines or challenges Muslim strictures. But we are forfeiting free expression in craven appeasement of Islamic supremacism. When we send our troops overseas, for example, it is to defend our way of life. Consequently, when Senator Graham suggests that free speech -- our way of life -- should be curtailed so that dubious Islamic nation-building projects are not derailed by mercurial Muslim violence, it is not democracy promotion. It is democracy destruction.
It is the sort of thing that happens in the Arab Spring, when Egyptian Shiites buy the rhetoric but the Muslim Brotherhood wins the elections.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
A few weeks ago, amid the “Arab Spring” giddiness, a Shiite mosque opened in Cairo. This was big news. Among Egypt’s 80 million people, there are only a few thousand Shiites. It’s a 90 percent Sunni country, with even Christians vastly outnumbering the Shia. So, in their euphoria over the mosque’s inauguration, Shiite clerics heralded this Husseiniya (as Shiite mosques are known) as a symbol of rapprochement. The mosque would bridge the sectarian divide: a Shia center in this bustling Sunni city, yet a house of worship, thus emphasizing what unites rather than divides Muslims in one of Islam’s most important nations.
Such stories were once the hallmark of the Arab Spring narrative. “Democracy” was in the air. The corrupt, cancerous, pro-American dictator was gone. With their yearning hearts now sated by freedom, Egyptians would pull together, the light of liberty guiding them to prosperity.
The stories are different now. The Husseiniya was shut down last week. Yesterday’s euphoria is melting into today’s harsh reality. In Cairo, home to the Muslim Brotherhood and the sharia jurists of ancient Al-Azhar University, “democracy” has meant the rise of Sunni supremacists. Turns out they don’t do bridge-building. Their tightening grip has translated into brutalizing dhimmitude for Christians and increasing intolerance of Shiism -- which the Sunni leaders perceive less as Islam than as apostasy, an offense that sharia counts as more grievous than treason.
#ad#News of the mosque’s demise arrived shortly after a report entitled “Neocons vs. Islamophobes” by the leftist e-magazine Salon. Foreign-policy correspondent Jordan Michael Smith was good enough to appoint me leader of “what might be called the ‘to-hell-with-democracy’ strain of thought” in “the American conservative movement.” And if anything needs an Arab Spring, it must be the American conservative movement. We Islamophobes haven’t even had an election yet, much less gotten one of those mellifluous sharia-constitutions the State Department likes to write for its emerging “democracies,” and yet here I am the leader! And a “relentless” leader, too -- scalding the Muslim Brotherhood on behalf of a cadre that allegedly includes such luminaries as John Bolton, Michele Bachmann, and Frank Gaffney.
In our struggle “to define the Republican response to the increased power of political Islam,” we are said to be “vying” with “another faction among the right-wing that is equally powerful . . . the neoconservatives.” Counting among their number such heavyweights as GOP senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, they are portrayed as “rather admirably insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood be given a chance.” After the tumultuous Bush years, my friends Norman Podhoretz, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bill Kristol must be having a good laugh: It may have taken a motley crew of despicable Islamophobes, but the Left has suddenly decided that neocons may not be the root of all evil after all.
For all its pretensions to sober analysis, the Salon hit piece usefully demonstrates how nonsensical policy debates about the Arab Spring have become. There is no common understanding of basic terms. “Islamophobia” was coined by the Muslim Brotherhood and seamlessly adopted by its Western confederates. Taken literally, the word would mean “irrational fear of Islam” -- and thus it would rarely need to be spoken, Islamic supremacists having given us much to fear quite rationally. But in common parlance, to sneer “Islamophobe” is like what sneering “neocon” has hitherto been: lefty demagoguery -- in this case, the belittling of anyone who is critical of Islam and its sharia framework, regardless of how colorable the critique.
Most people know an insult when they hear one. When it is rank character assassination posing as argument, people of good will tune it out. More consequential, though, is the degrading of the term “democracy.”
As applied to the “Islamophobes,” Mr. Smith’s invocation of “democracy” -- as in, to hell with it -- is an outright perversion. Like the giants of neoconservatism, critics of Islamic supremacism (what Salon gently calls “political Islam”) are lovers of democracy. We believe the world would be a better place if every country adopted it. We agree the United States ought to be its promotional beacon. But that is mainly because when we speak of “democracy,” we mean American democracy. That is a culture of liberty so deeply rooted in the United States that it predated by a couple of centuries the American Revolution, the U.S. Constitution, and the first federal elections.
#page#Salon quotes the superb Jamie Fly, director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, as explaining that the key to the course of the upheaval in Egypt is whether its eventual government “respects the democratic process and doesn’t try to subvert the system.” This does get to the nub of what divides conservatives. Much as I admire Mr. Fly, democracy is not a “process,” it is a culture. It cannot be installed by a “system.” Processes like popular elections and constitution-writing are democratic only when democracy’s principles have become ingrained in a society.
That is an evolution that can and should be promoted, but it cannot be rushed. And the less democratic tradition there is in a country -- or, for that matter, a civilization -- the longer the evolution will take. If you try to hasten it by having the processes and the system drag a resistant society along, you don’t get democracy. You get the Muslim Brotherhood.
In the Brotherhood’s way of thinking, as best articulated by Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, “democracy is just the train we board to reach our destination.” It’s a process, a conveyance, not a culture. In the case of Turkey, it was popular elections that enabled Erdogan to seize power and gradually transition a society away from democracy. In the case of Egypt, it is popular elections that have installed the Brotherhood and other Sunni supremacists, enabling them to orchestrate the much less challenging transition from an Islamic culture to a sharia state.
#ad#To critics of Islam as we find it in the Middle East, democracy promotion is highly desirable, but it is best achieved by pressuring Islamic societies to adopt the culture of liberty. It involves large rations of humility about what it will be possible to achieve -- and how quickly. It accepts that just as the Left is wrong to blame America for every problem, so are others wrong to expect from America the solution to every problem. It calls for the steeliness to tell Islamic societies, “Sure, we’d like to be friends, but we’re not desperate to be friends. We are more than willing to cut you off if you prefer not to civilize. We are more than able to punish you if you threaten us. And we are not of the mind that punishing you somehow obligates us to move in for a thankless decade or two, spending lives that are too precious and money we don’t have to fix your dysfunctional country.”
The alternative view says we have interests in this part of the world and it is far better to be on the ground trying to influence the outcome, however imperfectly. Maybe democratic processes cannot instantly democratize culture, but they can steer it in the right direction. This is an honorable position, and admirably American in its optimism.
Nevertheless, it ignores the significant downsides. When democracy promotion becomes more about processes than principles, it clothes anti-democrats like Erdogan in the raiment of democratic legitimacy. This is self-defeating. It empowers pretenders to obstruct or reverse the progress of liberty.
Moreover, the notion that democracy is procedural, not substantive, and therefore that sharia needn’t be repealed for liberty to flourish, is not changing Islamic society for the better; it is changing our society for the worse. Islam is not budging on sharia-based suppression of speech it deems offensive -- particularly speech that examines or challenges Muslim strictures. But we are forfeiting free expression in craven appeasement of Islamic supremacism. When we send our troops overseas, for example, it is to defend our way of life. Consequently, when Senator Graham suggests that free speech -- our way of life -- should be curtailed so that dubious Islamic nation-building projects are not derailed by mercurial Muslim violence, it is not democracy promotion. It is democracy destruction.
It is the sort of thing that happens in the Arab Spring, when Egyptian Shiites buy the rhetoric but the Muslim Brotherhood wins the elections.
— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
The Great Barry
The Great Barry:
It used to be a lot simpler. As E. C. Bentley deftly summarized it in 1905:
Whoa, that sounds like crazy Birther talk; don’t go there! But Breitbart News did, and it turns out that the earliest recorded example of Birtherism is from the president’s own literary agent, way back in 1991, in the official bio of her exciting new author: “Barack Obama, the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”
So the lunatic theory that Barack Obama doesn’t meet the minimum eligibility requirements to be president of the United States was first advanced by Barack Obama’s official representative. Where did she get that wacky idea from? “This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me,” says Obama’s literary agent Miriam Goderich, a “fact” that went so un-“checked” that it stayed up on her agency’s website in the official biography of her by-then-famous client up until 2007: “He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister.”
#ad#And then in April 2007, someone belatedly decided to “check” the 16-year-old “fact” and revised the biography, a few weeks into the now non-Kenyan’s campaign for the presidency. Fancy that!
When it comes to conspiracies, I’m an Occam’s Razor man. The more obvious explanation of the variable first line in the eternally shifting sands of Obama’s biography is that, rather than pretending to have been born in Hawaii, he’s spent much of his life pretending to have been born in Kenya. After all, if your first book is an exploration of racial identity and has the working title “Journeys in Black and White,” being born in Hawaii doesn’t really help. It’s entirely irrelevant to the twin pillars of contemporary black grievance -- American slavery and European imperialism. To 99.99 percent of people, Hawaii is a luxury-vacation destination and nothing else. Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against the white man’s rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary agents.
And where’s the harm in it? Everybody does it -- at least in the circles in which Obama hangs. At Harvard Law School, where young Barack was “the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review,” there’s no end of famous firsts: As The Fordham Law Review reported, “Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.” There is no evidence that Mrs. Warren, now the Democrats’ Senate candidate, is anything other than 100 percent white. She walks like a white, quacks like a white, looks whiter than white. She’s the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out. But she “self-identified” as Cherokee, so that makes her a “woman of color.” Why, back in 1984 she submitted some of her favorite dishes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook, a “compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families.”
The recipes from “Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee” include a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren’s fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It’s in the state song: “Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin’ down the plain#...#” But then the white man came and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren’s traditional Five Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie.
#page#A delegation of college students visited the White House last week, and Vice President Biden told them: “You’re an incredible generation. And that’s not hyperbole either. Your generation and the 9/11 generation before you are the most incredible group of Americans we have ever, ever, ever produced.” Ever ever ever ever! Even in a world where everyone’s incredible, some things ought to be truly incredible. Yet Harvard Law School touted Elizabeth “Dances with Crabs” Warren as their “first woman of color” -- and nobody laughed. Because, if you laugh, chances are you’ll be tied up in sensitivity-training hell for the next six weeks. Because in an ever more incredible America being an all-white “woman of color” is entirely credible.
Entering these murky waters, swimming through it like a crab in Mrs. Warren’s tomato mayo, Barack Obama refined his own identity with a finesse Harvard Law’s first cigar-store Indian lacked. In 1984, when “Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee” was cooking up a storm, the young Obama was still trying to figure out his name: He’d been “Barry” up till then. According to his recently discovered New York girlfriend, back when she dated him he was “BAR-ack,” emphasis on the first syllable, as in barracks, which is how his dad was known back in Kenya. Later in the Eighties, he decided “BAR-ack” was too British, and modified it to “Ba-RACK.” Some years ago, on Fox News, Bob Beckel criticized me for mispronouncing Barack Obama’s name. My mistake. All I did was say it the way they’ve always said it back in Kenya. But Obama himself didn’t finally decide what his name was or how to say it until he was pushing 30. In the shifting sands of identity, he picked his crabs carefully.
#ad#“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then,” says Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people -- his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.#...# So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
In a postmodern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake -- an elite schooling -- Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure -- the impoverished roots -- merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His “shiftless and unsuccessful” relatives -- the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi -- are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don’t seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows. Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: Let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is in his way the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life. But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about “the unreality of reality.”
--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn
It used to be a lot simpler. As E. C. Bentley deftly summarized it in 1905:
Geography is about mapsBut that was then, and now Biography is also about maps. For example, have you ever thought it would be way cooler to have been born in colonial Kenya?
But Biography is about chaps.
Whoa, that sounds like crazy Birther talk; don’t go there! But Breitbart News did, and it turns out that the earliest recorded example of Birtherism is from the president’s own literary agent, way back in 1991, in the official bio of her exciting new author: “Barack Obama, the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”
So the lunatic theory that Barack Obama doesn’t meet the minimum eligibility requirements to be president of the United States was first advanced by Barack Obama’s official representative. Where did she get that wacky idea from? “This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me,” says Obama’s literary agent Miriam Goderich, a “fact” that went so un-“checked” that it stayed up on her agency’s website in the official biography of her by-then-famous client up until 2007: “He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister.”
#ad#And then in April 2007, someone belatedly decided to “check” the 16-year-old “fact” and revised the biography, a few weeks into the now non-Kenyan’s campaign for the presidency. Fancy that!
When it comes to conspiracies, I’m an Occam’s Razor man. The more obvious explanation of the variable first line in the eternally shifting sands of Obama’s biography is that, rather than pretending to have been born in Hawaii, he’s spent much of his life pretending to have been born in Kenya. After all, if your first book is an exploration of racial identity and has the working title “Journeys in Black and White,” being born in Hawaii doesn’t really help. It’s entirely irrelevant to the twin pillars of contemporary black grievance -- American slavery and European imperialism. To 99.99 percent of people, Hawaii is a luxury-vacation destination and nothing else. Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against the white man’s rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary agents.
And where’s the harm in it? Everybody does it -- at least in the circles in which Obama hangs. At Harvard Law School, where young Barack was “the first African-American president of The Harvard Law Review,” there’s no end of famous firsts: As The Fordham Law Review reported, “Harvard Law School hired its first woman of color, Elizabeth Warren, in 1995.” There is no evidence that Mrs. Warren, now the Democrats’ Senate candidate, is anything other than 100 percent white. She walks like a white, quacks like a white, looks whiter than white. She’s the whitest white since Frosty the Snowman fell in a vat of Wite-Out. But she “self-identified” as Cherokee, so that makes her a “woman of color.” Why, back in 1984 she submitted some of her favorite dishes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook, a “compilation of recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families.”
The recipes from “Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee” include a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren’s fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It’s in the state song: “Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin’ down the plain#...#” But then the white man came and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren’s traditional Five Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie.
#page#A delegation of college students visited the White House last week, and Vice President Biden told them: “You’re an incredible generation. And that’s not hyperbole either. Your generation and the 9/11 generation before you are the most incredible group of Americans we have ever, ever, ever produced.” Ever ever ever ever! Even in a world where everyone’s incredible, some things ought to be truly incredible. Yet Harvard Law School touted Elizabeth “Dances with Crabs” Warren as their “first woman of color” -- and nobody laughed. Because, if you laugh, chances are you’ll be tied up in sensitivity-training hell for the next six weeks. Because in an ever more incredible America being an all-white “woman of color” is entirely credible.
Entering these murky waters, swimming through it like a crab in Mrs. Warren’s tomato mayo, Barack Obama refined his own identity with a finesse Harvard Law’s first cigar-store Indian lacked. In 1984, when “Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee” was cooking up a storm, the young Obama was still trying to figure out his name: He’d been “Barry” up till then. According to his recently discovered New York girlfriend, back when she dated him he was “BAR-ack,” emphasis on the first syllable, as in barracks, which is how his dad was known back in Kenya. Later in the Eighties, he decided “BAR-ack” was too British, and modified it to “Ba-RACK.” Some years ago, on Fox News, Bob Beckel criticized me for mispronouncing Barack Obama’s name. My mistake. All I did was say it the way they’ve always said it back in Kenya. But Obama himself didn’t finally decide what his name was or how to say it until he was pushing 30. In the shifting sands of identity, he picked his crabs carefully.
#ad#“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then,” says Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people -- his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.#...# So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”
In a postmodern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake -- an elite schooling -- Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure -- the impoverished roots -- merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His “shiftless and unsuccessful” relatives -- the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi -- are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don’t seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows. Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: Let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is in his way the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life. But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about “the unreality of reality.”
--- Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2012 Mark Steyn
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