Mark Steyn - After America

Otis Mathis is not only a Detroit high school graduate but a college graduate. 21His degree from Wayne State was held up for over a decade because of his repeated failure to pass the English proficiency test. Eventually, he did things the all-American way: he sued the college. So Wayne State dropped the English proficiency, and Otis Mathis got his degree. By then, he’d already been elected to the School Board.

By the way, he’s not the only beneficiary of America’s joke academic standards. In the Eighties, Chowan College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, also dropped its English proficiency requirements in hopes of attracting wealthy foreigners. It worked. As Michelle Malkin pointed out, a chap called Khalid Sheikh Mohammed enrolled, fell in with a group of hardcore Muslims, transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to study mechanical engineering, and used the knowledge he acquired to pull off the first World Trade Center attack, the African embassy bombings, the assault on the USS Cole , 9/11, and the beheading of Daniel Pearl. 22A little larnin’ is a dangerous thing—particularly for Americans on the receiving end.

Whether or not Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sees himself as a role model for American students, Otis Mathis certainly does. “Instead of telling them that they can’t write and won’t be anything, I show that that cannot stop you,” Mr. Mathis told the Detroit News . “If Detroit Public Schools can allow kids to dream, with whatever weakness they have, that’s something….” 23

The only one dreaming here is the president of the School Board. Being illiterate “cannot stop you” in Detroit, but try it in Bombay or Bangalore or almost any city in China—and then ask yourself to whom the future belongs. On present projections, at some point around the year 2025 American teachers will be earning two million per annum, and American Twelfth Graders will be unable to count their toes.

Detroit did this to itself.

Its profligate past destroyed the present, and its present will ensure there is no future, because lavishly funded civic institutions are incapable of providing the educational standards of a one-room schoolhouse of 200 years ago. This is an American city at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and one in two of its citizens are illiterate. That’s about the same rate as the Ivory Coast, and the Central African Republic, which for much of the Seventies and Eighties was ruled by a cannibal emperor. Whereas in the Seventies and Eighties Detroit was ruled by a Democrat mayor, a bureaucracy-for-life, and an ever more featherbedded union army, all of whom cannibalized the city. Say what you like about Emperor Bokassa but, dollar for dollar, his reign was a bargain compared to Mayor Coleman Young’s. Hizzoner called himself the MFIC—the Muthafucker In Charge—and, by the time it was over, Detroit was certainly fucked, and the only mothers still around were on welfare.

Return to those auto statistics: GM has one worker for every ten retirees and dependents. That math is Detroit’s math, too. The city’s population has fallen by over 50 percent since 1950. 24So who’s left? Thirty percent of the population are government workers. 25According to the Detroit News , another 29 percent are out of work, “using the broadest definition of unemployment.” 26According to Dave Bing, Mayor Young’s successor as MFIC, the real unemployment number is “closer to 50 percent.” 27

An unemployable, dysfunctional citizenry, a rapacious government, crime-ridden streets, and an education system that dignifies moronization as a self-esteem program: in Detroit, everything other than government is dead.

Decay sets in imperceptibly, but it accelerates, and, by the time you notice it, it’s hard to reverse. Somewhere like Detroit isn’t Somalia, not yet. But like other parts of the country it is en route to Latin America—a society with a wealthy corrupt elite that controls the levers of power, and beneath it a great swamp of poverty, whose inhabitants divide into two species—predators and prey. The Motor City is the Murder City, with one of the highest homicide rates on the planet—and 70 percent of them go unsolved. 28

It will not seem quite such an outlier in the future.

The end-game for statists is very obvious. If you expand the bureaucratic class and you expand the dependent class, you can put together a permanent electoral majority. In political terms, a welfare check is a twofer: you’re assuring yourself of the votes both of the welfare recipient and of the mammoth bureaucracy required to process his welfare. But extend that principle further, to the point where government intrudes into everything: a huge population is receiving more from government (in the form of health care or college subventions) than it thinks it contributes, while another huge population is managing the ever expanding regulatory regime (a federal energy-efficiency code, a transfat monitoring bureaucracy, a Bureau of Compliance for this, a Bureau of Compliance for that) and another vast population remains, nominally, in the private sector but, de facto, dependent on government patronage of one form or another—the designated “community assistance” organization for helping poor families understand what minority retraining programs they qualify for, or the private manufacturer from whom the TSA buys disposable latex gloves for enhanced patdowns. Either way, what you get from government—whether in the form of a government paycheck, a government benefit, or a government contract—is a central fact of your life.

But, if you’re not on welfare, or working in the welfare office, or working for a “green solutions” business that’s landed the government contract for printing the recycled envelopes in which the welfare checks are mailed out, or the trial lawyers behind the class action suit after the green-friendly recycled latex gloves cause mass Chlamydia outbreaks at Newark, O’Hare, and LAX, it’s not an attractive society to be in. It’s not a place to run a small business—a feed store or a plumbing company or anything innovative, all of which will be taxed and regulated into supporting the state sector. After all, what does it matter to them if your business goes under? Either you’ll join the government workforce, or you’ll go on the dole. So you too will become part of the dependent class, or the class that’s dependent upon the dependent class. Whichever it is, Big Government wins.

We’re told that America’s and the world’s economy depends on “consumption.” Hence, the efforts of the government and the Federal Reserve to stampede recalcitrant consumers back into the malls. But consumption is a manifestation of an economy, not the cause of it. In order for something to be consumed, it first has to be produced—which is why healthy societies make wealth before consuming it. Big Government prefers to “stimulate” the public into consuming because it’s easier than stimulating them into producing. But the latter is what matters.

What happens when you consume without producing? You can see it on any American Main Street, whose very inhabitants would startle a time-traveler from 1890 long before he noticed any of the technological marvels.

A time-traveler from 1950 might have a more specific reaction: back in those days, a signature image of sci-fi movies and comic books was the enlarged brain, the lightbulb cranium with which a more evolved humanity would soon be wandering around. Evolvo Lad had one in his tussles with Superboy. So did Superman’s sidekick in a futuristic fantasy called “The Super-Brain of Jimmy Olsen.” “With his super-intelligent brain, Jimmy has me at his mercy!” gasps Superman. But Clark Kent’s gal pal felt differently about her colossal noggin when it showed up in “Lois Lane’s Super-Brain.”