By Mark Steyn
A Review:
I spent the weekend completely engaged with Mark Steyn’s After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, and while it’s not like spending an entire weekend with Mark Steyn himself (I could totally clear my calendar of course-if that became an option...), it’s pretty damned close. It certainly does feel like a frank conversation between friends, not unlike one you would have in person-nodding, laughing hysterically and occasionally heaving a good old sigh in recognition of the difficult tasks at hand.
In many ways, the book reconfirmed my feeling that Steyn is a kind of messenger, with a unique gift for pulling cultural and societal strands together, and crystallizing them both with humour and passion . In the old days of Jerusalem, prophets were scoffed at and mocked. Their heartfelt words and messages went unheeded until it was too late. In recent times, other messengers were doubted as well. There have been visionary politicians such as Churchill, Ben Gurion or Herzl, writers like Fallaci and Hayek, and more modest but fiercely determined messengers like those who escaped concentration camps and tried to warn others of the impending doom and were laughed out of their villages.
Steyn begins with an insightful analysis of the writing on the wall-the literal, biblical real deal and poignantly, painfully points out that the ultimate sign of the writing on the wall is a society not even knowing where “the writing on the wall” ultimately came from (see Daniel-Old Testament for a brush-up course). He seamlessly describes how our truly “multicultural” society (read: Rome, Athens, Jerusalem) is under siege and backs up each example of the current assault with facts, articles from the current press, historical classics, the Bible and incomparable wit.
“Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the kind, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank in them. They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone…”
Plus ca change. Steyn notes that in America “the statists took the vessels of the American republic and filled them up with Big Government happy juice”. The statists continue to throw their “god” at things (money) to try to fix them. A dark assessment, but true to the core.
It is unfortunately impossible to shy away from the fact that President Obama is, in fact, the ultimate President for the task of disintegrating America.
But-despair not! It is a Steyn book, which means that you can, and must go from despair to hysterical giggles in the space of a few short pages. Biblical depression a la Book of Daniel p. 15, and total and utter, epic evisceration of Thomas Friedman on p. 17-to wit:
As to worshipping false gods, even avowed secularists have their moments of evangelical fervor…to its worshippers; globalization is some kind of mysterious metaphysical force that’s out there remaking our assumptions about the planet. The high priest of this cult is the New York Times’ in-house thinking and beloved comic figure Thomas L. Friedman. Hardly a week goes by without the Time’s most frequent flyer filing from a state-of the art departure lounge on the other side of the planet and marveling at its complimentary wi-fi, light-rail link and the way his luggage was brought in by cheery native bearers in traditional dress playing some raucous Abkhazi-Naurruan hybrid of Gemelan gangsta rap on an affordable new xPod iBox you can wear under your sarong back by a Herzogovine hedge fund. All of which makes a forlorn contrast with the scene that greets him when he lands back at Newark.”
He takes no prisoners in discussing the pathetic and impotent new NASA “goal” of developing fuzzy relations with the Muslim world, and the environmental cultists who are “determined to disinvent” every aspect of human progress that has been created over the past several hundreds of years.
Steyn saves his most merciless, deserved criticism for the “Condescendi” class-the supine elites that would have us build the Ground Zero Mosque ("or the terrorists have won") and their supreme leader, President Obama-someone he describes as having done absolutely nothing in his life but was nonetheless has “wafted” (OMG-could you not just die-wafted??) upwards. The narcissism of politics (“fairness”) and the real life incarnation, in Obama, of the Narcissus of America.
The zingers abound. From the bombastic observation that ‘code language’ is code language for 'total bullocks', to defining contemporary American ‘jizyah’, there are more fantastic phrases in this book than you could possibly shake a stick at. With devastating accuracy, he takes aim at the over-educated, over-credentialed stupid legions of America, the politically correct terror enablers, the infantile masses of impotent childish “men”-or “man-boys” and the moral decline of the west, and the Condescendi’s entirely theoretical commitment to diversity.
It’s Hatemongering Happy Juice for the seething NASCAR masses in fly-over country!!
My second most favourite, utterly superb Steynicus destructo ad absurdum part is on p. 317.
I won’t give it away here, but let’s just say I’ve never laughed so hard about cannibalism in my entire life. It kind of made me hungry. And, I’m not sure how happy I am about that…
For full disclosure’s sake, I should note that I utterly adore Mark Steyn (something that I’m sure has been relatively obvious to all but the total clueless…).
He is a personal hero. I love all of the books and columns and essays, and this tome was no disappointment. In fact, almost every line could be (and maybe should be) cut up and made into a fortune cookie of doom and prophetic warning.
There are also some very concrete suggestions as how to take America, and liberty back-it’s not all gloom!
One other interesting part of the book is the vast collection of citations. In a sign of the times, most all (or perhaps every single one) of Steyn’s citations are web-based. That means, that it’s information that is out there, and clearly and easily accessible to anyone with access to the internet (thank you Al Gore!!). So, that’s depressing and enlightening at the same time because it means there are a whole lot of people who read it, and know it, but-as Holocaust scholar Michael Marrus once said about the Holocaust-it’s the difference between “knowing it” and “getting it”.
Steyn gets it.
I'm getting the Steyn groove.
Now you go get the book!
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