This American Apocalypse
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Mark Steyn
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Like me, you probably spend your time trawling the Internet for new people to get angry at. As the whole “99% vs 1%” meme has grown, I have begun compiling a list of people who will eventually have to be guillotined in the upcoming Terror. It is with regret that I must add Mark Steyn’s name to the list.
Mark Steyn is simply the most erudite, convivial conservative asshole I have yet encountered in virtual reality. I even came  close to not calling him an asshole! But eventually, I chose to place him in the same category I reserve for nearly every arch-conservative, from Malkin to Hannity to Medved, and yes, even the diplomatic Dennis Prager. After listening to hours of Steyn, I am forced to conclude that there is simply no distinction between the shrieking eels of Fox News and the more refined conservatives who pour honey in our ears. Their hearts are still as black and wormy as the rest.
What makes me lump Mark Steyn in with the rotten fruit of Glenn Beck and Michael Savage is his bigotry. You see, after a decade plus of our nation marching its boots up and down the streets of two Muslim nations, it takes a pair of watermelons between the legs–Â we’re talking State Fair quality–to bitch about a few Muslims living here in the in the West at our invitation. But bitch he does, and every chance he gets.
Muslims are Steyn’s speciality. Like most conservative chatterers, Steyn letters in one or two bumper sticker issues to distinguish himself from the herd. But don’t get him confused with talk radio’s bombastic good ol’ boys! Mark Steyn is that perfect conservative: the one completely unaware that he bears exactly the same pedigree as those Berkely poofters who wrinkle his widdle nose. He is a professor, a writer, a Broadway musicals groupie… a guy who strikes you as the sort who would refuse to drop a tip at a restaurant if his tilapia came festooned with one too many capers. In other words, he is exactly the same number of push-ups away from Navy SEAL territory as Noam Chomsky.
I scarcely need to justify myself further when I point out that Steyn is a regular guest host for Rush Limbaugh, but something about Mark’s polished, englishy voice (he is actually Canadian) made me want to give him the benefit of the doubt. And so I listened to him pimp his new book “After America: Get Ready for Armaggedon” for three hours on C-Span’s In Depth program on Book TV, and in doing so I realized that what conservatism’s famous bluster hides is a deep-seated pessimism completely at odds with their “American Exceptionalism” propaganda.
This surprised me, actually. The right always projects a kind of hopefulness about dragging the nation up from the mud and rekindling some lost revolutionary spirit. This is why Saint Reagan figures so prominently in their rhetoric, all that “shining city on a cliff” bullshit. In fact, Reagan is the pristine example of what is wrong with conservatism, which is its despondency and backward-lookingness, and  Mark Steyn is a true prophet of our yesterdays. Just take a look at his recent reflections on America:
Wow! Pour me three fingers of cyanide! Folks, don’t let anyone tell you that the “hate America” crowd is liberal. It’s Debbie Downers like Steyn who can’t wait to rush America into a coffin.
So Steyn wears his heart on his dust jackets, and it is a heart of darkness. but the question is why? We’re all familiar with slanderous books like Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Facism or Anne Coulter’s Godless: The Church of Liberalism. It’s the pablum that “culture war” conservatives feed on. But conservatism also has a new defeatist wing, epitomized by Steyn but with help from the likes of Mark Levin (Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America) and Pat Buchanan (Suicide of a Superpower). I’m used to books that suggest that America is on the ropes but ready to rise again in glory thanks to some hillbilly on a white charger, but never have such apocalyptic titles emerged from people who weren’t Hal Lindsay!
What Steyn disclosed to me–by being listenable– is that conservatives, never endowed with a trailblazing attitude, are now simply giving up and letting nostalgia curdle into despair. What good is retaliation for 9/11 when Muslims are allowed to breed as wantonly as they care to in the Netherlands? What is the purpose in passing something like Arizona’s “Paper’s Please” law into existence when another branch of the government can declare its provisions unconstitutional? Even the Tea Party can’t daub Mark’s tears. Oh sure, they look great in their breeches and tricorns, but the debt can’t be wished away with fife music!
And when does Steyn think America’s decline began? Color me shocked, but it was on New Year’s Eve, 1959! Before that, Western Civilization was cranking out never before seen wonders, like refrigerators, and curing diseases faster than you could name them!
But today? The cars are still driving on wheels, and the human genome project hasn’t erased even a single plague! Surely this inertia bespeaks extinction-level ennui. As Steyn puts it, “There has to be more to a society than inventing a slightly smaller device on which to download Justin Bieber…and I don’t think we’re making progress on that front.”
This is where a thousand educated words cannot disguise a brain full of ignorance. How the hell can any intelligent person reduce the past quarter century of technology, where every year is practically a new Millennium, to Justin Bieber? Â “The telephones have buttons instead of a dial, but basically nothing much has changed,” says Steyn, reflecting on our modern toys. Yeah, phones have buttons. Oh, and they are wireless, Â the size of a grain of rice, Â you can use them in the middle of the fucking desert and they contain the sum of all human knowledge. Do they need to turn lead into gold before they impress you, guy?
Steyn’s lament on the state of medicine is even more risable. Yes, the bugs and germs of the early 20th century were the low hanging fruit and cancer is a stickier wicket, but shit! He’s wrong there too! They only just invented a vaccine for the human papillomavirus, which causes cervical cancer, so how can …oh wait. Refusing that good news was the conservatives’ opening move in their current War on Vaginas.
Okay, forget that. How about this fellow? He just had his face rebuilt after losing most of it in a shotgun accident. Now he can be seen in public after fifteen years of looking like a Basil Wolverton cartoon! You couldn’t fix that in the roaring 50’s, although you could throw tomatoes at a black girl for wanting to attend a public school in Alabama!
There’s a reason why the perception of America’s decline is acute amongst conservatives, and that is because the conservative bubble has popped twice, once on  9/11 and again in the Crisis of ’08. Worse, the end of the delusion both of America’s untouchability and the virtue of unfettered capitalism happened on the watch of the Conservative Dream Ticket. Don’t let the right wing tell you different: Bush/Cheney was conservative Camelot. Taxes on the rich sank to near zero, Saddam had his neck stretched, the American eagle dropped her olive branch and doubled down on arrows and the President took Christ off the cross and put Darwin in his place! Together with the Rubberstamp Congress, this was THE Republican moment.
And by the end, if giant spiders had been seen rampaging through San Francisco it would have been par for the course. Even that last stronghold of Western supremacy, white supremacy, had to be surrendered.
So I don’t blame Mark Steyn or the rest of his brood for being depressed. Conservatism has fucked itself in every hole it had, and they still have another election to forfeit!
So slip a toetag on Uncle Sam if you must, Mark, and dress your garden variety xenophobia in the trappings of some Islamist plot. Daydream about a coup where reactionaries and revanchists somehow move beyond talk radio to conquer Hollywood and pop music. Masturbate over the End of Days! Everyone needs a hobby. Liberals have never prevented a war, and conservatives have never stemmed the tide of history, but they must both always pretend that they have it in them.
Obama budget deficit this March was $198bn, that $6.6bn a day. It’s double in a day of what implementing Buffet rule that Obama sells as a panacea to cure budget deficit brings in a year. It’s not math or statistics, it’s third grade arithmetic that Mark Steyn talks about. His words are backed by arguments, numbers, and intellect. Yours are empty of fact or thoughts, they are just empty partisanship and envy.
As for Europe’s low birth rate being an “achievement’, you said “I’m not sure what the takeaway is supposed to be. It appears to be this: European countries, their populations shrinking (owing to their own success and the fact that the wealthier you are, the less inclined you are to squirt out a new child every year until menopause)”
The famous Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal wrote a book, ‘An American Dilemma,’ in the 1940s anticipating and predicting the US civil rights movement of the 1960s. I only recently became aware that he also anticipated the problems that would accompany population decline in welfare states. He said roughly that welfare states contain the seeds of their own destruction. I.e., if people in the past had large families it was partly due to a desire that there be enough surviving children to care for them in their old age, given high child mortality in the past. Welfare states give people the false idea that they need not have many or even any children as the state would provide for them. Since Social Security and Medicare are not 401Ks but are funded by current workers, having too few kids obviously will create a problem. Even Germany has this problem , and was the reason that P.M. Merkel told Obama they could not have a stimulus in 2009. (Too few kids to stick the bill to)
Reality check time, JY.
RTFM – Acronym for `Read The Fucking
Manual’.
You wrote:
Okay, admittedly, Mark Steyn has funny looking hands. But you are
preaching his gospel right there. Once again, we find your Steynian
world view is stuck on pages 34-35 of his book:
You are losing traction fast, JY! We get your ethos, we’ve
heard your pathos, but your logos are soon to be long lost
and forgotten.
It disturbs me how much conservatives long for the good old days of the dark ages.
You’re wrong, schoolboy. You don’t need to work blue! You’ll never play the big rooms with that crap. Ask Redd Foxx.
Not that I mind swearing, really, and the tomatoes thing was laugh out loud funny, but it is rather telling that after excoriating Steyn for his views, the best you can do is to pick apart probably his weakest column out of the hundreds (thousands?) he has written in the past decade–one that is at most ancillary to his main theses. How about refuting the stuff that he (and most of his fans) thinks really matters? Yes, racist troglodyte, sure, but what else do you have?
And if it is impossible to survive saying a less than brilliant thing now and then, how about your comment about “taxes on the rich sank to near zero”? Should we just stamp “idiot” on your forehead and move on to the next target?
Cool—those Islamophobes like Mark Steyn are so Baaaaad ! Imagine Steyn being so stupid as to be concerned about 12th century troglodytes who behead defenseless prisoners ,stone women, bomb schools where chicks have the audacity to attend….oh, and murder 3000 Americans and others who committed the sin of being non-Muslim(except fro those who actually were!). Let the morons get their nukes …no problemo.Who wrote this piece of crap on Steyn? Jeez what a moron (which aptly characterizes the idiot’s synopsis of Steyn ,i.e.,sophomoric name-calling).
Steyn points out repeatedly that the North African immigrants in Europe (see Germany and UK, at least) are not so much “doing jobs [white] Europeans are tired of” as much as advantaging the bloated welfare state. Further, I kept looking for facts, anxious to be challenged by an amusingly-turned phrase. Alas, all I got was this lousy post.
JY: I am going to go out on a limb and presume that Steyn offers no evidence that the immigrant population of, say, England is on the dole in any greater proportion than the native born population. If that be the case, then we should then look at the sectors of the economy that the working immigrants occupy. If they are disproportionately filling low-wage positions, then I believe my point is made and Steyn’s is defeated. This is, as I say, presumption on my part, but do you want to link me to some evidence that I am incorrect?
“The CRA, for those of you who don’t know, was a law passed in the 70s to prevent banks from discriminating against QUALIFIED loan applicants who happened to live in poor neighborhoods. The myth that the subprime mortgage crisis was created by the CRA has been thoroughly debunked. The mortgages were rarely generated by institutions covered by the CRA.”
You may be right, but I suspect ‘This American Life,’ (I haven’t seen it yet) would tend to be a bit one=sided. NPR, after all is the network that fired moderate liberal Juan Williams for not being sufficiently ‘politically correct.’ I did oversimplify, as other factors like the ‘Basel rules’ reportedly did encourage banks to put too much of their assets into the same type of investments, thereby exacerbating the bank’s problems. The Federal Reserve also bears a goodly portion of blame. Its policy of keeping interest rates too low for too long helped facilitate both the dot-com and mortgage bubbles.
In addition to the Fed’s customary reluctance to raise interest rates in a timely manner, this time Obama’s mountain of debt will be a major reason they’ll likely repeat their mistake. What do I mean? Well, Steyn feels we’re heading for an economic collapse. ala the 1930’s, and he may well prove to be correct. However, when or if interest rates rise to their historical long-term average, i.e. 5%, interest alone on the 15-16 trillion national debt would be 600-800 billion. Yes. more than either Social Security, Medicare or Defense. Since this would require either massive tax increases or spending cuts, I expect there will be immense political pressure on the Fed to not raise rates. The result will make the stagflation of the 1970s look like Shangra-la (sp?) by comparison.
Damned shame that you mix in some good analysis with the standard yankee pseudo-left garbage. Yes, there is no threat whatsoever from Islam, which is why the bloody Daily Mail is attacking “Red Ken” from the _left_. Why? Because he is attacking the Tories as being gay and jew-controlled.
Care to guess which votes he’s bidding for with that one?
Oh, care to meet some comrades who have been risking their necks in the fight for free expression, women’s rights, gay rights, and against stuff like actual, bona-fide slavery?
But, hey, I’m used to dumbass pseudo-left yankee parochialism. It’s the reason your kind are marked for irrelevance and extinction.
JY: I’m sure that our Marines would be quite surprised to learn that they were in Afghanistan fighting for gay rights. When did it become taboo to say that our soldiers are fighting for their own country’s self-interest?
Yeah. Sure, JY. ‘Cause it’s only ever the US Marine Corps that’s engaged in any way with the struggle against Islamic fascism. No one else ever does anything. No one ever, say, founds a women’s shelter for immigrant women, or marches in solidarity with them, or sticks up for free speech, or raises funds for the oppressed elsewhere, or tries to push back against murderous censorship…
Christ, lay off the testosterone and mindless nationalism would you?
Wowee. REALLY hit a nerve there, Mr. Yungbluth. Well done. There are so many strawmen being lobbed around it feels like a tornado in Kansas in here.
JY: When I drill I skip the Novocain.
JY, not cool having sock-puppets to tell you how great you are. Try addressing the real issues.
JY: You are drifting into troll territory, Dagon.
Whatever. Try addressing the
JY: Warned ya.
Problem? 🙂
Damn, JY, I wanted to come tell you again how well you write (lead to gold, ha!) – but I see you have *loads* of fans here already to tell you how fantastic you are. And they’re all so erudite and witty, too!
I haven’t heard so much screeching since my dog interrupted that cat convention!
Congratulations, Jody! You’ve been called out as a sock puppet! That’s a rare honor – takes me back to my days of online fraud fighting. First they laugh at you, then they hate you, then they call you a sock puppet, then their mothers ask why they’re crying.
Anyway, JY, nice piece. Keep it up – but as I live in Indiana and thus already have enough numbskulls around me, I’ll probably give these comments a miss.
Against my better judgment, I read some of the comments. Ugh. You can have’em, JY.
I had not even seen that. Just saw the troll face and started giggling.
Priceless. 🙂
\You are losing traction fast, JY! We get your ethos, we’ve
heard your pathos, but your logos are soon to be long lost
and forgotten.\
Mind you sir, in the end, we all learn hubris. Enjoy the comic, and STFU. That is SHUT THE FUCK UP.
More pointed commentary from Mark Steyn: http://www.steynonline.com/4923/exodus
Having stood in the middle of nations that were destroyed, watching oil wells burn, houses that were collapsed by air strikes or artillery, seen the aftermath of mass executions…
People like Steyn and the others who furiously masturbate over the supposed “end of America” need a reality check.
Right now is a time where industry is changing. We’ve gone from a manufacturing nation to a… what? Our factories? Sold overseas by Republicans and those who just wanted to make a faster buck. The unions, who did protect workers even if there were other problems, were busted by Grandpa Reagan and the 80’s Republicans to get rid of the voting blocks that voted Democrat as well as at the behest of industry leaders. So, our industry is ruined, and we buy even equipment for our military from China (Under Bush, by the way, who’s administration also went a long way toward privatizing war in the form of PMC’s, who wore American military uniforms while they acted) much less lead paint toys for our children.
But I digress.
America isn’t dying. It’s changing. We’re one of the largest and *could* return to being one of the most outstanding nations on Earth. But instead of propping up the infrastructure that makes a great nation (Food, housing, medical care, education, water treatment, sewage treatments, stuff like that) we give tax breaks to the rich, declare war on women, and declare the very school system that the Republicans have spent 30 years tearing apart no longer functionable and push privatizing it.
America is not dying, it is not dead. It’s growing and changing.
My child walked 5 blocks to the store today to buy an ice cream cone made in China. She made it back safe and sound. I’ve carried a rifle and worn a uniform in places where she’d would have been dead and raped in that distance.
So America has a LONG way to go before it dies.
Although the real people strangling it to death are those who are profiting the most from playing auto-asphyxiation games with the country.
Oh, and one last small thing…
People screaming “The NRA has guns and lieberals don’t! hurrrrr!” need a reality check.
You people aren’t the only people who own firearms. I sure as hell do.
NRA members screeching about a properly elected president aren’t the only ones who can use firearms. I’m actually really good at it.
Frankly, the NRA lost all its points with me and I cancelled my membership when a star member thought it was all right to make a veiled threat against the current PotUS. I don’t want to be lumped in with hysterical idiots who don’t actually understand a bit about real politics, who don’t take a look at actual voting records of politicians they blather on about, and who use the fact that the PotUS is a black man and a Democrat to try to whip old white people into a frothing frenzy.
Which brings me right back to what’s destroying American.
It isn’t education. It isn’t atheism. It isn’t Muslims. It isn’t women.
It’s old white people.
The same white people who reaped the benefits of the strongest economy in American history, enjoyed the greatest worker’s benefits of American history, who enjoyed a veritable renaissance in technology, and who inherited from their parents a nation that was strong and capable.
And promptly gutted the industry, passed restrictive laws not seen since Prohibition, showed themselves to be greedy, grasping, and self-centered, who sent young men off to more wars then they ever faced (and protested against the whole time), and now are flailing about trying to remaining meaningful in a nation that just wants them to go away.
Dear Baby Boomers: Die already.
Wanna guess my voting party?
Just saw the part about taxes on the rich sinking to near zero. If that’s the case, why do the top 10% pay more than 50% of all income taxes paid? If that’s the case, why do the top 1% pay some 30% of the taxes paid…and that’s after the “Bush tax cuts”?
How terribly unfair! They pay NOTHING! 1% pays 30% – and nearly 50% pay NO income taxes.
JY: It is one thing to embrace a principal (i.e., no one should have to pay an egregious amount of tax, regardless of income), but it is another thing altogether to cut your own throat with it. This weeping for the wealthy has gone on long enough.
By “near zero” I mean of course, the stingiest amount of tax that the colossally rich can get away with paying without having to rename themselves the Czars of All the Americas. The 30% of all tax revenue paid by the top 1% (I’ll take your word on that stat) seems a bit easier to swallow when you remember that they rake in nearly 21% of all income, while the bottom 90% (that’s you, Bartleby) get by on barely more than 50% of all income generated. And by the time you reach that 1% Nirvana, earning $443,000 and up, it’s safe to say that the material woes of the proles, things like filling the tank or putting braces on the kids’ teeth, must seem like something out of an Old World folk story.
And yet even this opulence is not enough for them! Ever heard of the Estate Tax, aka the Death Tax? Of course you have! It haunts the dreams of Republicans like it was Freddy Kreuger! And yet this is a tax that will only ever be levied on the estates of the most resplendent American Pharoahs, such as the Gallos and the Trumps and the… Romneys??
Gosh, I wonder how getting that tax repealed could somehow become a cause not just of the aristocracy but of everyday schmucks who can’t even afford a doctor’s visit! Got any strategies to offer the GOP, Bartleby?
Actually, the inheritance tax is easily avoided by the super wealthy. The people it hits hardest?
1. Farmers
2. The people below the top 1% and above the bottom 89%.
Ultimately, I give the most shit about the farmers. Farms owned by a family outperform corporate farms on a ‘food generated per acre’ basis on a rather significant level AND food is what the USA does best.
Everyday schmucks can afford a doctor visit…if they give up cable television, mobile phones, and other such items. I don’t have cable. *shrug* It works out.
JY: I hate to invoke the “L” word, but you are in LaLa Land, my friend.
Were the Estate Tax not of concern to the Pharaocracy, I hardly think they would have made second careers out of branding it “The Death Tax” and cooking up Washington think tanks that try to advance rolling-in-the-aisles theories that collecting the tax, worth upwards of $30 billion a year to the Treasury, is somehow more expensive than not collecting it at all.
I’m also sorry that you have fallen for the spin that this tax–on estates greater than $5 million in worth–falls disproportionately on country farmers so that they can no longer afford a fresh pair of bib overalls every leap year. Only the largest estates–2% in 2005–are hit with the Estate Tax. Here’s whose cheeks your tears are actually falling on.
I don’t have cable either, or a mobile phone plan, or a single air mile, but that scrounging hasn’t made health insurance affordable for me at all. I am glad you have found a way to cover one of the priciest perks of Western life by simply foregoing Cinemax, though. I guess I could sell a kidney to John Stossel to purchase six months worth of insurance, but I’d need insurance to cover the operation!
Methinks someone needs to read Animal Farm to see where his reasoning goes. IT’S ALL THE FAULT OF THE FARMERS!
I didn’t say health insurance was affordable for you. I said you can afford to go to the doctor. There’s a difference. A lot of doctors are now refusing to accept insurance because it’s too costly for them to manage for too low of a payment. They charge around $40 to $60 for an office visit. That’s ‘going to the doctor.’ Want to know my proposed solution to a lot of the health insurance garbage? Stop putting the licensing approval for new medical schools in the hands of doctors who have a vested interest in there not being enough doctors, so wages keep going up. Allow pharmacists to write basic prescriptions for common ailments.
Wanna know how to avoid the inheritance tax? Really?
You quitclaim everything into a trust and make yourself the beneficiary of the trust. You also make your heirs beneficiaries of the trust, but only at a 1% rate…until you die. Then THEY become full beneficiaries. No inheritance – it’s never changed hands.
Other ways; you gift your kids stock in the ‘family corporation’ every year. These shares cannot be sold or transferred except to one’s own children. When you die, your shares dissolve, thereby increasing the value of their shares to show full vestiture in the family corporation. Since the shares are never sold, there is no capital gain and no inheritance tax.
There are ALWAYS ways around it. You don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to, but a good wealth management attorney can always manage it.
Oh yeah, and I can’t even afford an apartment. I’m renting a room and living with a friend. I have insurance because it’s paid by my employer. Even then I’d be hosed if my employer weren’t terribly nice about things, because they’ve essentially waived my deductible for three years running.
I’ve not read the people saying it costs more to collect than it provides in benefit, but there might be some argument to it (though frankly, I am iffy on that – on a gut level, I’d imagine that there’s a net return in the cash the government ultimately collects of about 30% net). You have the cost of collection and the cost to the economy that removing that money from private hands includes. It’s called ‘opportunity cost’ and it adds up.
Anyway, wealth preservation upon death is a huge industry, and people are willing to spend a fortune to do it. The huge estates that aren’t recorded? That’s because they’re no longer held by individuals. They’re held by entire families.
Another angle on opportunity cost goes to career choice. I turned down a HUGE contract out of the Middle East because I won’t work in a country that turns a blind eye to slave labor. I won’t move to Chicago (and make a whole lot more money) or go to law school in California because my kids are in Indy. I’d love to run my own business, but didn’t do it because I want the insurance that I get where I am. It’s all down to opportunities and opportunity costs. I’m living like crap right now so I’ll make a lot more money later…another opportunity cost.
You know what’s really sad about The Human Steyn? Michael J. Nelson thinks he’s great.
‘Liberals have never prevented a war, and conservatives have never stemmed the tide of history, but they must both always pretend that they have it in them.’
This fact is so very needed.
The sciences of psychology and neurology are going to do to the Conservative/Liberal (greedy/lazy psycho/coward) duality what biology did to folk medicine. Unfortunately scientists are currently either too easy to buy or too scientific to speak.