The Undocumented Mark Steyn (22 page)

This is republicanism as class marker: Apparently, the only argument against an anachronistic, out-of-touch hereditary family ruling by divine right is that they’re way too popular with the masses. I remember, years ago, being told by a Hampstead intellectual that the problem with the Queen was that she was too middle class. Today, for Britain’s elites, monarchy is simply too, too common.

America’s elites, on the other hand, are happy to drool over Barack and Michelle’s neo-royal hotness. Shortly before his death, the sociologist Michael Young, the man who coined the term “meritocracy” for a satirical fantasy he wrote in 1958, observed that Britain’s Blairite meritocrats “can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody’s son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism.” As Young had foreseen a half-century ago, a cult of (pseudo-)meritocracy absolves a ruling class of guilt. They assume not, as princes of old did, that they were destined to rule, but that they
deserve
to. Which is wonderfully liberating—as one sees all around, from Barack Obama’s neo-monarchical selectivity on which laws he’ll enforce to the spambot penis of Anthony Weiner and his industrial-scale exercising of his
Tweet du seigneur
. Both men have bet that the public crave Their Most Benign Hotness.

If it’s any consolation to Ben Franklin, they kept it longer than you might expect. Every so often, I take my children across the Connecticut River and down to Plymouth Notch, Vermont, where a citizen-president lies buried on a hardscrabble hillside under a headstone no different from the seven generations before him. But Coolidge is more alien to today’s presidency than George III is.

Oh, well. Maybe republican virtue will be restored in the 2016 election. Jeb vs. Hillary?

1
    
It’s not an exact comparison, because the Queen doesn’t play “fundraisers,” but in July 2014 a woman who’d gone into labor was prevented from getting to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and forced to wait at a bench across from the hospital on Third Street because the roads had been closed for an Obama/Democrat campaign event. “As soon as we can,” said Sgt. Kurt Smith of the LAPD, “we’ll be able to open it up for traffic and first thing we’ll try to get to will be an ambulance. But I can’t guarantee the time on that.” It is not known if King Barack’s grateful subject named her newborn “Motorcade” in his honor.

QUEER THEORY

The Daily Telegraph
, January 11 2005

PERSONALLY
,
I THOUGHT
the Queen’s Christmas message this year was rather old hat, or old crown. She’s been peddling the let-us-celebrate-the-strength-of-our-diversity guff for a good three decades in her Canadian speeches.

Of course, they’re written for her by her Canadian ministers, and one had hoped that she might be reading the multiculti boilerplate through at least partially clenched teeth. But the Christmas message is the one speech she writes without the advice of her governments, so one must assume she means it.

In which case, it seems an odd theme at a time when the internal contradictions of the multicultural society are ever more evident.

For example, last week
The Guardian
forced itself to consider the awkward fact that many young black males are “homophobic.” This would be a disadvantage if one were hoping to make a career in the modern Tory party, but, on the other hand, if one’s ambitions incline more to becoming a big-time gangsta rapper, it’s a goldmine. Don’t blame Jamaican men, though. After all, who made them homophobic? The “vilification of Jamaican homophobia,” says Decca Aitkenhead, is just an attempt to distract from the real culprit: “It’s a failure to recognize 400 years of Jamaican history, starting with the sodomy of male slaves by their white owners as a means of humiliation.

“Slavery laid the foundations of homophobia,” writes Miss Aitkenhead. “For us to vilify Jamaicans for an attitude of which we were the architects is shameful. Jamaicans weren’t the architects of their ideas about homosexuality; we were.”

I should have known. It’s our fault: yours, mine, the great white Queen’s, for all her shameless attempts to climb aboard the diversity bandwagon.

If we hadn’t enslaved these fellows and taken them to the West Indies to be our playthings under the Caribbean moon, they’d have stayed in Africa
and grown up as relaxed live-and-let-live types like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who’s accused Tony Blair of a plan to impose homosexuality throughout the Commonwealth;

. . . or Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi, who attacked the “gay scourge” sweeping Africa;

. . . or Zambia’s Frederick Chiluba, who has said gays do not have “a right to be abnormal”;

. . . or Namibia’s Sam Nujoma, who accused African homosexuals of being closet “Europeans” trying to destroy his country through the spread of “gayism”;

. . . or Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who proposed the arrest of all homosexuals, though he subsequently moderated his position and called for a return to the good old days when “these few individuals were either ignored or speared and killed by their parents.”

But no doubt Decca Aitkenhead would respond that African homophobia is also the malign legacy of British colonialism. Who taught them to spear gays, eh?

By refusing to enslave them and take them to our Caribbean plantations and sodomize them every night, we left them with feelings of rejection and humiliation that laid the foundations of their homophobic architecture. The point to remember is, as the
Guardian
headline writer put it, cutting to the chase, “Their homophobia is our fault.”

And it always will be. It’s forty years since Jamaican independence, but in four hundred years, if there are any Englishmen left (which is demographically doubtful),
Guardian
columnists will still be sticking it to them for the psychological damage of colonialism.

How heartening to know that, at a time when so many quaint old British traditions are being abolished—foxhunting, free speech, national sovereignty—the traditional British leftist colonial guilt complex is alive and well. Even with hardly any colonies left.

When, say, Mahmoud Bakri of the Egyptian weekly
al-Usbu
, writes that the tsunamis were caused by Zionist nuclear testing, we roll our eyes. But, in
the mass derangement stakes, blaming everything on the Jews is, if anything, marginally less loopy than blaming everything on yourself. One thing you notice, for example, in the Indian Ocean is that the countries making up the core group co-ordinating relief efforts—America, Australia, India, Japan—are three-quarters British-derived. The same can be said of the most effective second-tier nations involved, such as Singapore and Malaysia. A healthy culture should be able to weigh the pros and cons of the Britannic inheritance in a balanced way. But the wilful perverseness of Miss Aitkenhead’s argument suggests that, if anything, it’s the mother country that’s been psychologically damaged by imperialism.

As for the notion that even the randiest plantation owner could sodomize so many male slaves that he could inculcate an ingrained homophobia enduring for centuries, that’s a bit of a stretch even for advanced western self-loathers. Colin Powell, the son of Jamaicans, recalls it rather differently: “The British were mostly absentee landlords, and West Indians were mostly left on their own.”

Can absentee landlords be absentee sodomites? I’ll leave that one for
Guardian
columnists. But, before her next intervention in this area, the Queen might like to ponder the motives underlying all the sappy diversity blather. The British have always been open to other cultures: that’s one reason they made much better imperialists than the French or the Belgians. But “multiculturalism” is really a suicide cult conceived by the western elites not to celebrate all cultures, but to deny their own. And that’s particularly unworthy of the British, whose language, culture, and law have been the single greatest force for good in this world.

This isn’t merely a question for the history books, but the issue that underpins all the others facing the country today, not least the European Constitution: at a time when the benefits of the Britannic inheritance are more and more apparent everywhere else, how come Britain has no use for them?

Robert Mugabe subsequently warmed to his theme, and called Tony Blair a “gay gangster” leading “the gay government of the gay United gay Kingdom.” A Downing Street spokesgay denied the charge: “The Prime Minister is not a gay gangster
.”

SON OF EMPIRE

In a basic sense, the essay below is wrong: Colin Powell chose not to run for the presidency. But I reread the piece in light of the man who, twelve years later, did become “the first black president.” Like Colin Powell, Barack Obama is the son of a British subject—in his case from Kenya rather than Jamaica—and so America’s first black president is, as Powell would have been, a man whose family history lies wholly outside the African-American experience. Of course, the big difference between them with regard to their British roots is that one loves them while the other loathes them:

The Spectator
, September 29, 1995

IF YOU
’
RE NOT
excited by the prospect of a black president of the United States look at it this way: if Colin Powell runs and wins, he’ll be the first president since the Civil War to be the son of British subjects.

True, most American leaders, from Washington to Clinton, have been of Anglo-Celtic stock, but you have to go back to the first generation of Americans, to the children of George III’s rebellious colonists, to find, so to speak, as British a president.

Pick up General Powell’s freshly minted bestseller,
My American Journey
, and the first thing you see, even before the preface, are the original British passport photographs of Luther Theophilus Powell and Maud Ariel McKoy, taken just before they left Jamaica for America in the 1920s. They’re the earliest pictures General Powell has of his parents. The English, having psychologically written off the Empire, no longer think of Jamaicans as British, but the General does: again and again, in emphasizing his Jamaicanness he also emphasizes Jamaica’s Britishness.

Turn the page and the second thing you see is his grandparents’ tiny cottage in St. Elizabeth parish. The text—his “American journey”—begins, in fact, with a British journey—to a small Caribbean outpost of Her Majesty’s Dominions and an inspection of the Jamaican Defence Force: “All very British and very professional,” he writes, approvingly. To the end, Mom and Pop referred to Jamaica as “home,” and that’s the culture in which young Colin was raised.

In many American memoirs, there’s a moment, usually cringe-making for British readers, when the celebrity Yank visits “the old country” and talks about how he feels that he’s “coming home.” In General Powell’s book, the equivalent passages are unusually persuasive and intense. He recalls addressing the British-American Parliamentary Group at Westminster: “The image of my mother and father, born as humble British subjects in a tiny tropical colony, flashed before me, and I wished they could see where fate had taken their son.”

He didn’t come across their faded British passports until December 1993, just before another trip to London: “The son of those two solemn-faced black immigrants from a tiny British colony was off to be knighted by the Queen of England.”

Yet, even as he savors the scene, he’s grateful he’s only an honorary KCB:

         
Had my parents remained British subjects, I would now be “Sir Colin” and Alma “Lady Powell.” On the other hand, if my parents had stayed in Jamaica, I can’t imagine I would ever have been knighted. If Luther and Ariel had shipped out for Southampton instead of New York City, I might have made sergeant major in a modest British regiment, but not likely British Chief of Defence Staff. I treasure my family’s British roots, but I love our America, land of opportunity.