Mark Steyn: 'Let's Roll' sounds positively unCanadian

Without doubt, the best Canadian response to the events of September 11th has been from David Collenette. Whoops, sorry, that's a typing error. I meant Neil Young -- assuming, for the purposes of argument, the "Canadian rock legend" is still Canadian. It's hard to know these days. Jim Carrey's response to September 11th has been to apply for U.S. citizenship. America, he says, "defined me." (It's not just Conrad, folks.)

Anyway, Neil's new song, Let's Roll, takes its inspiration from the events on Flight 93, the one supposedly headed for the White House that Tuesday morning but whose passengers -- Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Thomas Burnett, Mark Bingham and others -- rose up and overpowered the Islamakazi hijackers. (Note to our friends at the Canadian Islamic Congress manning the Islamophobic media scoreboard: C'mon, "Islamakazi" 's gotta be worth 200 points; do I win the Lincoln Town Car?)

Flight 93 crashed in a Pennsylvania field, but its fallen heroes saved hundreds of lives, including perhaps the Vice-President's. Todd Beamer's last words, heard by a GTE operator to whom he'd been speaking, were, "Are you ready, guys? Let's roll!" Neil Young's dark, driving anthem begins with the sound of cellphones ringing. Then:

I know I said I love you,

I know you know it's true,

I got to put the phone down,

And do what we gotta do.

One's standing in the aisle way,

Two more at the door,

We got to get inside there,

Before they kill some more.

Time is runnin' out,

Let's roll.

Time is runnin' out,

Let's roll ...

Let's roll for freedom,

Let's roll for love,

Goin' after Satan,

On the wings of a dove ...

I'm not a big Neil Young fan. If I never heard the fey, dopey Harvest Moon or Heart Of Gold ever again, it wouldn't be too soon. But Let's Roll may well be my favourite CanCon number since ... oh, let me see now ... gosh, since Ruth Lowe of Toronto wrote I'll Never Smile Again, a Number One hit for Sinatra and the Tommy Dorsey band in 1940. I'll Never Smile Again is really the other end of those Let's Roll cellphone calls: Miss Lowe had just been widowed and her ballad of love and loss caught the mood of Americans in that interlude between the start of World War Two and their own entry into it. Lisa Beamer would understand Ruth Lowe's song: for all her pride in Todd's heroism, honoured by Neil Young, President Bush and millions of his fellow citizens, it must be poor consolation for a lost husband and father.

With the benefit of hindsight, Flight 93 is the decisive event of September 11th. By all accounts, the hijackers of that plane weren't exactly the cream of Osama's toxic crop. The flight was halfway across the continent before the boobs made their move and started meandering back east to their target. By the time the passengers began calling home, their families were aware of what had happened at the World Trade Center. Unlike those on the earlier flights, the hostages on 93 knew they were a human missile intended to kill thousands of their fellow citizens. So they acted. As Jim Bennett of UPI wrote, "The Era of Osama lasted about an hour and half or so, from the time the first plane hit the tower to the moment the General Militia of Flight 93 reported for duty."

Just so. No one will ever again hijack an American airliner with box cutters, or, I'd wager, with anything else -- not because of new but predictably idiotic FAA regulations, but because of the example of Todd Beamer and his ad hoc platoon. Faced with a new and unprecedented form of terror, the latest American technology (cellphones) combined with the oldest American virtue (self-reliance) and stopped it in its tracks in just 90 minutes. The foiling of the hijackers of 93 began the transformation of Osama from a jihadi to a jihas-been. True, he might yet come up with something new, but invention and improvisation are the hallmarks of a dynamic culture not a fetid, stagnant one, like Islamofascism.

As for America being "soft" and "decadent," let Neil Young nail that one:

No one has the answers,

But one thing is true,

You got to turn on evil,

When it's comin' after you.

You got to face it down,

And when it tries to hide,

You got to go in after it,

And never be denied.

Time is runnin' out,

Let's roll.

Time is runnin' out,

Let's roll ...

My goodness, sounds positively unCanadian, doesn't it? But here's a suggestion for the Prime Minister: Next time you're in the mood to give the Princess Pats a pep talk, instead of sending Mme. Clarkson (Delete Queen and country, you're fighting for the diverse tolerance of our tolerant diversity), or Art Eggleton ("We're not going to send our people into a condition in which they're unwelcome"), instead of dusting off the old Shawinigan battle cry ("Once more not unto da breach, dear friends, dat be da Canadian value"), instead of all that stuff, why not read out the above lyric and listen to the roar of approval our troops would give you?

Ah, but September 11th demanded moral clarity, and, the odd grizzled rocker aside, that's not the Canadian way. As the great Blatchford put it the other week, "Canadians consistently mistake the sidelines for more honourable ground." The funny thing is, even as we preen on the sidelines, we insist we're in the thick of things. For weeks, we went through a little charade in which ministers insisted they were "unable to confirm or deny whether JTF2 were operating in Afghanistan." Hmm. For all we know, they might also be unable to confirm or deny whether their butts are made of weapons-grade plutonium, but most of us can make an informed guess. So, after this bizarre ritual had played itself out, it was announced that JTF2 would soon be leaving for somewhere near the theatre of operations. (Wales?) Just as our fleet has sailed for Kandahar. Whatever.

That's all we thought was required. The old token HMCS Toronto routine. A way to show support without actually giving any. But Washington wasn't interested. It's not even particularly interested in whether Ottawa submits to its affable invitations to get on side in matters of immigration and border security. After all, the trucks are backed up north of the border not south: It's our economy on the line, not theirs.

Three months after the war began, the contours of the new world are emerging: An American "hyperpower" (as David Warren noted yesterday) able to project itself anywhere it wants, militarily, economically, culturally; below it, a second tier, entirely vacant; a little further below, a cluster of medium powers -- Britain, France, Germany, etc. -- united in an ersatz federation defined mainly by its somewhat snooty attitude to the rawer liberty of the American Republic; and way, way, way down at the bottom of the list most of the Arab dictatorships, economically, technologically and culturally utterly irrelevant.

The Americans who died on Flight 93 are a big part of the reason why the U.S. is outpacing the rest of the West: many of them were tech execs; Thomas Burnett headed a company that made the devices that replace heart valves smaller. These men worked in the most vital sector of the economy, where people start their own businesses, develop new products. We shouldn't be surprised to find that their entrepreneurial spirit extends to the battlefield as well. Where Canada fits in is somewhat problematic: It's a natural EU member beached on the wrong continent. Perhaps they'd take us anyway; who knows? We can get away with sitting out the war, and avoiding the moral clarity of Neil Young. But as a nation adrift we can't avoid the same choice that confronted the brave passengers of 93: Can we act, or are we content to be, in David Warren's words, "spectators in our own fate?"

No time for indecision,

We got to make a move ...

Time is runnin' out,

Let's roll.

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