The Undocumented Mark Steyn (54 page)

Authors: Mark Steyn

As the ne plus ultra of unbalanced right-wing thinkers, it’s not for me to suggest how the U.S. debate might be balanced in these pages. I have only one theory on column-writing, which is this: at a certain basic level, a columnist has to be right more often than not, otherwise the reader (I use the singular advisedly) is just wasting his time. If I were Robert Fisk, the famed foreign correspondent with decades of experience in the Muslim world, I’d be ashamed to leave the house. Sample Fisk headlines on the Afghan War: “Bush Is Walking into a Trap,” “It Could Become More Costly than Vietnam.” Sample insight on the Iraq War: when the Yanks announced they’d taken Baghdad International Airport, Fisky insisted they hadn’t and suggested they’d seized an abandoned RAF airfield from the Fifties by mistake. It’s this kind of unique expertise that has made him so admired around the world, not least in Ireland.

By contrast, readers of this column may have gained the impression that George W. Bush will win the presidential election on November 2. If he doesn’t, I shall trouble readers of this newspaper no further. It would be ridiculous to continue passing myself off as an incisive analyst of U.S. affairs after I’ve been exposed as a deluded fool who completely misread the entire situation. In the bright new dawn of the Kerry Administration, you’d deserve better. If that’s not an incentive for Irish citizens to smuggle a few illegal campaign contributions the Senator’s way, I don’t know what is.

But, if, on the other hand, Bush is re-elected, I make one small request of the Irish and European media: you need to re-think your approach to this Presidency. . . .

If Kerry wins, I’m outta here. If Bush wins, eschewing lazy European condescension for the next four years would be the best way of “balancing the U.S. debate.”

The rapturous reception from Dublin readers rejoicing at the impending demise of my career was so heart-warming that I thought I might as well do it in London, too:

The Spectator
, October 30, 2004

USUALLY AFTER MAKING
wild predictions I confidently toss my job on the line and say, if they don’t pan out, I’m outta here. I’ve done that a couple of times this campaign season—over Wes Clark (remember him?)—but it almost goes without saying in these circumstances. Were America to elect John Kerry president, it would be seen around the world as a repudiation not just of Bush and of Iraq but of the broader war. It would be a declaration by the people of American unexceptionalism—that they are a slightly butcher Belgium; they would be signing on to the wisdom of conventional transnationalism. Having failed to read correctly the mood of my own backyard, I could hardly continue to pass myself off as a plausible interpreter of the great geopolitical forces at play. Obviously that doesn’t bother a lot of chaps in this line of work—Sir Simon Jenkins, Robert “Mister Robert” Fisk, etc.,—and no doubt I could breeze through the next four years doing ketchup riffs on Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I feel a period of sober reflection far from the scene would be appropriate. My faith in the persuasive powers of journalism would be shattered; maybe it would be time to try something else—organizing coups in Africa, like the alleged Sir Mark Thatcher
¹is alleged to have allegedly done; maybe abseiling down the walls of the presidential palace and garroting the guards personally.

But I don’t think it will come to that. This is the 9/11 election, a choice between pushing on or retreating to the polite fictions of September 10. I bet on reality.

Reality isn’t the sure bet it once was. Do you remember the afternoon of the 2004 election? A flurry of leaked “exit polls” showed John Kerry cruising to victory.
Across the pond, it was late evening and the traditional election night party at the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square was in full swing when news of the impending Kerry presidency came through. My Fleet Street comrade Peter Oborne contemplated the implications of this bright new dawn:

Not long before midnight on Tuesday, a mood of dogmatic certitude overcame the throng of British MPs, ministers and journalists assembled at the traditional election-night party at the American embassy in Grosvenor Square. We knew that John Kerry had won, and dismissed with knowing contempt the warnings of our hosts—whose election, after all, it was—that it was far too early to tell
.

A delicious report went round that shares in Halliburton, the construction company associated with Vice-President Dick Cheney, had crashed on Wall Street shortly after 4 p.m. local time, in reaction to the first unofficial exit polls. One lonely Foreign Office official, along with Bruce Anderson, the political columnist, challenged the prevailing mood. . . .

The rest of us spent two or three carefree hours, while we imagined the consequences of a Kerry victory: rapprochement between America and the rest of the world; reconciliation between Tony Blair and the Labour Party; the resignation of Mark Steyn
.

But, like Houdini, I escaped yet again. I’m less optimistic than I used to be, and offering to resign if my prediction of total civilizational collapse doesn’t come to pass doesn’t have quite the same ring. And on most of the big questions these days I’d be very happy to be proved wrong
.

1

Sir Mark, the son of Margaret Thatcher and brother of my old pal Carol Thatcher, had been arrested in South Africa for his role in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea. He was subsequently convicted, fined three million rand, and received a four-year suspended sentence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THESE COLUMNS ORIGINALLY
appeared in the following publications:
The American Spectator, The Atlantic Monthly, The Chicago Sun-Times
, Britain’s
Daily Telegraph
,
Sunday Telegraph
, and
The Independent, The Irish Times, Maclean’s
, Canada’s
National Post
, America’s
National Review, The Spectator
in the United Kingdom and Australia,
The Wall Street Journal
, and Canada’s
Western Standard
.

I would like to thank the editors at the respective titles: R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., Wlady Pleszczynski, and Marc Carnegie at
The American Spectator
; Cullen Murphy at
The Atlantic
; Steve Huntley at
The Chicago Sun-Times
; Charles Moore, Dominic Lawson, Sarah Sands, Martin Newland, Sarah Crompton, Mark Law, and Anna Murphy at
The Telegraph
; Tom Sutcliffe at
The Independent
; Peter Murtagh at
The Irish Times
; Ken Whyte and Dianne de Gayardon de Fenoyl at
Maclean’s
; Natasha Hassan, John O’Sullivan, and Ruth-Ann MacKinnon at
The National Post
; Rich Lowry and Jay Nordlinger at
National Review
; Boris Johnson, Liz Anderson, Stuart Reid, Tom Switzer, and the late Frank Johnson at
The Spectator
; Max Boot, James Taranto, and Tunku
Varadarajan at
The Wall Street Journal
; and Ezra Levant and Kevin Libin at
The Western Standard
.

I would also like to thank Conrad Black and Dan Colson who ran the newspaper group that operated several of the above titles and many others in which I had the honor to appear. A large number of the pieces here appeared in multiple publications on multiple continents, from
The Ottawa Citizen
to
The Jerusalem Post, The Australian
, and all the way to
Hawkes Bay Today
in New Zealand, with a tweak here and a tweak there en route. So I’ve picked the version I like best and occasionally, no disrespect, put back a line or two that the fine ladies and gentlemen listed above in their wisdom chose to excise.

I am also indebted to readers in America, Canada, Britain, Australia, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere whose comments, questions, historical tidbits, and occasional insults prompted many of the columns.

I would like to thank Marji Ross, Harry Crocker, and their colleagues at Regnery for their enthusiasm and encouragement. And I’d be completely lost without my trusty sidekicks over the years—Chantal Benoît, Tiffany Cole, Katherine Ernst, and Moni Haworth—who’ve put up with a lot of pacing the floor an hour before deadline and all the usual hair-tearing.

I thank my beloved daughter Ceci for permission to include her Memorial Day poem. On the day she was born, I got a bit bored during a somewhat protracted labor and started writing a column for
The Telegraph
. So literally her first sight of this world was me typing away. If what goes around comes around, I’ll look up from my deathbed and see her live tweeting it.

INDEX

20th June Group,
136

24 Sussex Drive,
169

1984
(Orwell),
114

ABC network,
41–43
,
181

Abdullah (crown prince of Saudi Arabia),
407

Abdullah (king of Jordan),
212

Abingdon,
279

abortion,
65–66
,
311
,
315–17
,
339
,
374

Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (United Kingdom),
397

Adams, John,
151
,
236

Advocate, The
,
312