Mark Steyn - After America

But I would doubt our myopic Vermonter has even heard of him. I wonder if he’s aware that, under the Taliban, music is banned. For all the much vaunted “empathy” of the caring class and their insistence on “celebrating diversity,” they seem blissfully ignorant of the great diversity out there in the world, and of how hostile much of it is to their preoccupations. “Peace through Music” is inertia masquerading as a mission: hey, I’ll just sit on the porch, smoke a little dope, strum my guitar, and tell myself that it’s a great contribution to humanity.

Because anything other than striking self-flattering, mock-dissident poses is too much like hard work.

Adam Bellow may be understating the problem: even as they take their own freedoms for granted, it’s not clear the Eloi care much about freedom per se. And even the lofty and distant causes are merely a pretext for a pampering overweening conformism. So don’t pick up Poems Against the War under the misapprehension that the poems might address the, you know, war . Kim Addonizio’s “Cranes in August” is about her daughter making cranes out of paper while “outside/the gray doves/bring their one vowel to the air,” ominously. Don’t care for gray doves in August? No problem.

The very next poem is about geese in October: Geese, October 2002.

The poet, Lucy Adkins, notes that even as “our country’s leaders/are voting for war,” outside her home in Nebraska “the geese fly over/the old wisdom in their feathers.” Not into geese or doves? How about insects? Like Kim Addonizio, for Kelli Russell Agodon war poetry starts with your daughter’s play activities, but in this case the young Miss Agodon is endeavoring to help fire ants and potato bugs in their “small seaside community outside of Seattle”:

You don’t say! But enough about war, let’s talk about me, and my daughter, and whatever happens to be flying or crawling by the window. Would it kill you to include one lousy detail about Iraq—you know, the ostensible subject? Maybe you could have the geese and gray doves fly over and take a look at what Saddam did to the Iraqi marshlands. As Bruce Bawer wrote in his review, “Throughout these poems, the implicit argument is: Why can’t the whole world be as peaceable as my little corner of it is?” 11Yes, indeed. If only geopolitics were like a pledge drive on Vermont Public Radio: tedious and disruptive, but only for a few days, and if you give them $50 to leave you alone you get an organic tote bag.

Campaigning for the Democrats in 2004, Ben Affleck offered a pearl of wisdom to John Kerry and his consultants: “You have to enervate the base,” the Hollywood heartthrob advised solemnly. 12As it happens, if it’s enervating the base you’re after, Senator Kerry was doing a grand job. It would be easy to mock Mr. Affleck as a celebrity airhead, but these days even the airheads are expensively credentialed: Ben is an alumnus of one of the same colleges as President Obama (Occidental). And liberal progressivism has done a grand job of enervating its base. A self-absorbed passivity is now the default mode of the enlightened worldview. Behind those “IMAGINE PEACE” stickers lies a terrible failure to imagine.

Appearing at the University of Denver in 2010, the talk-show host Dennis Prager was asked to identify the single greatest threat to the future of America. 13Several enthusiastic members of the audience bayed “Obama!” and Mr. Prager found himself obliged to correct them: “No, it’s not Obama,” he said. “It’s not. If, God forbid, President Obama came down with an illness nothing would change. Nothing.”

This is correct. Barack Obama is a symptom rather than the problem.

He didn’t declare himself president; America chose him. That’s what should worry you, not whether he was born in Mombasa and had his minions fake a Hawaiian birth certificate. That just gets you off the hook: aw, gee, we were duped. No, you duped yourself, America. That’s the problem. Mr. Prager explained that the single greatest threat facing the nation was that “we have not passed on what it means to be American to this generation…. A society does not survive if it does not have a reason to survive.” For Prager, small government is a moral question: We give far more to charity per capita than Europeans do. Why? Are we born better? No. The bigger the government the worse the citizen. They are preoccupied in Europe with how much time off: Where will they vacation? When will they retire? These are selfish questions, these are not altruistic questions. So the goodness that America created is jeopardized by our not knowing what we stand for. That’s our greatest threat. We are our problem.

Instead of teaching “what it means to be American,” we teach anything but.

We are obsessed with identity, but any identity other than “American”—female, gay, African-American, Muslim-American, Undocumented-American. At American universities, women take Women’s Studies, Latinos take Latino Studies, queers take Queer Studies. For many Americans, the preferred academic discipline is navel-gazing, sometimes literally: people of girth take Fat Studies. The best way to celebrate diversity is by celebrating yourself, and the best way to celebrate yourself is without anyone else getting in the way. And why wait till college? In New York, gay, lesbian, and transgendered schoolchildren can attend Harvey Milk High. 14Are there many transgendered 13-year-olds, even in Manhattan? Well, it’s about every student’s right to a “non-threatening learning environment,” and, if he doesn’t actually learn anything in the non-threatening learning environment, he’s still better off than if he’d been in the non-learning threatening environment of most New York high schools.

In all its shallow obsession with sexual and racial politics, the ever more leisurely vacuity of education also puts a question mark over identity in a more fundamental sense. In January 2009, Canada’s Globe and Mail (which is like the New York Times but without the jokes) chose to contrast the incoming U.S. president with, er, me. “He belongs to a demographic—it made his win possible—that doesn’t even get the problem with a black, a woman or a gay president,” wrote Rick Salutin. “They don’t clutch old identifications with race or ‘the west.’ They glory in ‘hybridity’…. For another demographic, this shift induces panic. They worry about ‘shriveled birth rates’ in the United States and its ‘enervated allies’ (Mark Steyn); they mourn the decline of ‘the last serious western nation.’” 15

Crumbs. I wasn’t aware I was an entirely different “demographic” from Barack Obama. We’re more or less the same generation, but plainly the president stands for hope and the future and I represent the past and fear.

As for “not getting the problem,” a lot of those black voters who turned out in huge numbers for Obama in California stayed in the polling booth to vote down gay marriage: 16the rainbow coalition shimmers beguilingly but dissolves on close contact—and that’s before you ask the shy Muslim girl in the corner of the classroom if she wouldn’t be happier at Lesbo High.

Still, in a broad sense Rick Salutin is correct: the demographic that is the change it’s been waiting for doesn’t want to be seen “clutching old identifications.” What a yawneroo that’d be.