Posted on 08/24/2007 1:34:37 PM PDT by Rummyfan
About a decade ago, Bill Clinton developed a favourite statistic - that every day in America 12 children died from gun violence. When one delved a little deeper into this, it turned out that 11.569 persons under the age of 20 died each day from gun violence, and five-sixths of those 11.569 alleged kindergartners turned out to be aged between 15 and 19. Many of them had the misfortune to become involved in gangs, convenience-store holdups, drive-by shootings, and drug deals, which, alas, don't always go as smoothly as one had planned. If more crack deals passed off peacefully, that "child" death rate could be reduced by three-quarters.
But, ever since President Clinton's sly insinuation of daily grade-school massacres, I've become wary of political invocations of "the children." In Iraq, for example, everyone in U.S. uniform is a "child." "The moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute," as Maureen Dowd of The New York Times wrote about Cindy Sheehan. Miss Dowd had rather less to say about the moral authority of Linda Ryan, whose son, Marine Cpl. Marc Ryan, was killed by "insurgents" in Ramadi. But that's because Mrs. Ryan honours her dead child as a thinking adult who "made a decision to join the Armed Forces and defend our country."
The left is reluctant to accept that. Ever since America's all-adult, all-volunteer army went into Iraq, the anti-war crowd have made a sustained effort to characterize them as "children." The infantilization of the military promoted by the media is deeply insulting but it suits the anti-war crowd's purposes. It enables them to drone ceaselessly that "of course" they "support our troops," because they want to stop these poor confused moppets from being exploited by the Bush war machine.
Which brings me to Canada's most famous warrior: Omar Ahmed Khadr, captured five years ago this month fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, and today, since the repatriation of various Brits and Australia's David Hicks, the most celebrated of Her Majesty's subjects to be enjoying George W. Bush's hospitality at Guantanamo. Mr. Khadr is alleged to have killed Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer of America's Delta Force in the battle at Khost - or rather in the aftermath, when he was lying on the ground playing dead and hurled a grenade. And perhaps I should say not "Mr." Khadr but young Master Khadr, for he was 15 at the time. "The fact that his age is not going to be considered is a travesty of justice," Kristine Huskey of the International Human Rights Law Clinic in Washington told the Western Standard's Terry O'Neill. That's the pro-Khadr argument: he's a child. He didn't know what he was doing.
I wonder. Among Master Khadr's "fellow" Canadians, "boy soldiers" are an established feature of the British military tradition. The dean of Canadian columnists, Peter Worthington, was "under age" when he sailed on HMCS York in the Second World War. Private Walter Beck was as old as young Omar - 15 - when he joined the Nova Scotia Regiment in the Great War.
Omar Khadr is not just a terrorist legal matter. He represents one of the critical questions at the heart of the West's twilight struggle: what is a child? As readers will wearily recall, since 9/11 I've become a big demography bore. Recently, I was on a panel with Claire Berlinski, who, like me, has written a book on how Europe especially is running out of children, and we were, as is our wont, swapping horror stories. The Italian rural wedding full of aunts and uncles and grampas and grandmas - but no bambini. Seventeen Continental nations have deathbed fertility rates from which no society has ever recovered. Thirty per cent of German women are childless. Among German university graduates, that statistic rises to 40 per cent.
But hold it right there: is there a connection between those two numbers? In other words, instead of looking around for the children we never had, might it be quicker just to look in the mirror? As you'll know if you've got a kid in elementary school almost anywhere in the western world, we accept today that children's bodies enter adolescence much sooner: the guidance counsellor is practically slavering to get 'em hep to sex from the third grade. If a 13-year-old wants to have an abortion, that's her decision and her parents shouldn't get a look-in. But at the same time we presume that our minds take longer and longer to form and that the end of adolescence must thus be deferred until pretty much the age Mozart was when he died. So, if a 22- or 25- or 37-year old is serving his country overseas, he must be a wee "child" who isn't really old enough to know he's just a patsy for the Bush-Blair-Harper oil war.
In Australia last year, I met a very engaging demographer who presented very lavish and detailed charts of the span of modern life. In the old three-score-and-ten, we were born, had a decade and a half or so of childhood, and were conscripted into adulthood more or less around the same time Peter Worthington signed on with the Royal Canadian Navy. In the new four-score-and-ten of the 21st century, we've extended life a couple of decades, but not our adult life, our productive life, our working life. Instead, we've created a whole new category of glacial-paced adolescence stretching from those middle-school sex-ed classes through a torpid high school and ever more indulgent and leisurely college courses to what previous generations would have regarded as early middle age. If anything, we've reduced the "adult" phase, entering the workforce later and departing it earlier, leaving government health systems to figure out how to support a population of state-funded retirees for two or three decades, for the last of which they'll require round-the-clock Alzheimer's care.
The chief characteristic of the fin de civilisation West is "deferred adulthood." Look at the sepia photographs of any old 19th century weatherbeaten 13-year-old farmboy and compare it to your average listless teen today: who would you rather leave in charge of the house for the weekend? We take it as read that our bodies mature much earlier than our great-grandparents but that our minds don't. So we start adolescence much sooner and try to avoid having to leave it at all - to the point that the marketing chappies have taken to identifying the 20- to 35-year-old segment as "adultescents." In Japan, 70 per cent of working women aged 30-35 live with their parents. In Italy, some 80 per cent of men live with mum and dad until into their thirties. We've created a world where a 36-year-old European male can stroll into a nightclub, tell the babes he lives at his parents' place in the bedroom above the garage - and still walk out with a hot-looking date. This guy would have been a laughingstock at any other point in human history.
Omar Khadr is not a child. He knew what he was doing when he killed Sgt. Speer - at least to the extent that hundreds of thousands of his nominal compatriots knew what they were doing when they went a-soldiering at Vimy and in the Transvaal. And I suspect, if he had to do it all over again, Mr. Khadr surely would: he is as adult as he will ever be. And, if the International Human Rights Law Clinic gets its way and has him ruled a "child," then the jihad will only recruit more such "children," of which it has an endless supply: the median age in Gaza, for example, is 15.8. We, on the other hand, will send our children to do a six-year Bachelor's Degree in Anger Management Studies.
So, on the one hand, we have single European women having fertility treatment in hopes of an only child in their fifties and even sixties, and, on the other, we have Mirpuri cousin-marriage traditions that in 30 years have firmly established themselves among Muslim teens in Pakistani communities in northern England. Which side of the equation has the demographic energy? To put it more bluntly, which side has a future? We are decaying into a society of geriatric teenagers and, agreeable though that is, it's unsustainable. We need, very literally, to grow up.
The other day I found myself on a panel with "Ibn Warraq," the pseudonymous Muslim professor - or, as he sees himself, non-Muslim professor. Born in British India, raised in Pakistan, educated in Scotland and now resident in the United States, Professor Warraq has spent his whole life on the ever-moving frontier between Islam and the rest of the world. But, for all his scholarly research, he'd been asked by the organizer of the conference we were at to frame the issue in personal terms. So he said that awhile back he'd been in Mississauga visiting his niece. And, while they were talking, her children came into the kitchen and were eagerly anticipating a forthcoming hockey game between an American team and a Canadian team - presumably the Maple Leafs, though Professor Warraq is evidently not a great follower of the NHL. At any rate, the kids were excited about cheering for the Canadian team because, after all, they're Canadians and they wanted their fellow Canadians to win.
And their mom rebuked them sharply: "You are not Canadian. You are Muslim." Ibn had been depressed about this, as well he might be. There are many people who might say I am a Christian first and a Canadian (or American or Irishman) second and would regard it as entirely reasonable to place their obligation to the Almighty above their allegiance to the Queen. It would not prevent them being functioning members of a civil society. But the professor's niece was demanding not that their Muslim identity supersede their Canadian identity but that it supplant it entirely.
From the point of view of hockey, this isn't especially critical. There are presumably Muslim players on the Russian and other teams, but there is no explicitly Islamic franchise in the NHL. To be honest, I haven't checked the lower reaches of the game. A couple of years ago, I stumbled across something called the "Muslim Football League," whose New Year tournament in Irvine, California, brought together some of the most exciting Muslim football teams in Orange County: the Intifada, the Mujahedeen, the Saracens and the Sword of Allah. I wouldn't have minded, but the Muslim community leaders 20 miles down the road in San Juan Capistrano had just leaned on the local Catholic high school to change the name of their football team from the Crusaders to the less culturally insensitive Lions. In my book, I anticipated the California sporting calendar circa 2010 or so: the Malibu Hizb'allah vs. the Santa Monica Inoffensives, the Pasadena Sword of the Infidel Slayer vs. the Bakersfield Self-Deprecators, the San Jose Decapitators vs. the Berkeley Mutually Respectfuls. Perhaps there is some equivalent in hockey, but not yet at the Stanley Cup level: it will be a long time before the Montreal Canadiens are playing the Dearborn Jihadists.
So, despite that Mississauga mom's admonition, it is possible to cheer for the Leafs without it conflicting with one's Muslim identity. Within a very short time, western Islam has quietly accustomed Europeans and North Americans to not only Muslim sporting leagues but rather more obviously self-segregating concepts such as single-sex Muslim-only school proms. But these remain adjuncts to their core priorities. Islam is not really in the football business. That's merely a marketing opportunity - the T-shirt of the film.
By contrast, the football and the hockey seem to be the West's core brands. When we talk about what it means to be Canadian, we say, oh, well, you can't get more Canadian than watching Hockey Night In Canada, and, er, getting coffee and a Boston Creme donut at Tim's (see the Toronto Star essay "Timbit Nation") and, um, well, whatever that guy in that beer commercial about being Canadian used to list - it's called a Chesterfield not a couch, et cetera. In fact, when it comes to being Canadian, you can't get more Canadian than sitting on your Chesterfield watching a beer commercial about what it means to be Canadian. Never mind that the beer and the donuts are, in the corporate sense, both American - or that every day thousands of folks get coffee at Tim's who don't feel in the least bit Canadian. Separatist Quebecers, for one.
The British went through this routine in the days after the London tube bombings - perpetrated, you'll recall, by British subjects, born and bred. For a moment, this shocked the opinion-makers: we need to teach our young persons to feel British, they twittered. And what does being British involve? Drinking 28 pints after the Man United game and then staggering down the street baying and mooning and urinating in people's gardens before passing out in a pool of vomit? Er, well, no, that's too British. But golly, how about fish'n'chips and cricket and liking caterwauling popsters? Then a picture of the four bombers appeared on the front page of the tabloids: they were whitewater rafting in Wales. They were dressed as any other young Britons. They loved cricket and fish'n'chips. One of them left a video message to be broadcast on al Jazeera. He did all the usual jihadi-blather but in a broad Yorkshire accent: "Eee-oop, Allahu akbar!" If Coronation Street had been looking to introduce an Islamist cell into the Rover's Return, he'd have been perfect. These men were entirely assimilated - if being assimilated means chips and cricket.
The Dutch, on the other hand, acknowledged that there's more to being a citizen of a pluralist democratic state than junk food and sports teams. Four or five years ago, I had a fascinating conversation with some Dutch cabinet ministers about the need to ensure that immigrants understood what they would be required to assimilate with. So I was interested to see what they'd come up with. It turned out to be a video which they distributed to every embassy around the world to play to anyone thinking of moving to the Netherlands. It showed a topless woman on the beach and two guys kissing. Message: If you're uncomfortable with this, you might prefer to emigrate somewhere else. Except that they added a rider to say that, if you are uncomfortable with this because you're a Muslim or whatever, then you don't have to watch it. And that pre-emptive negation of the entire point of the exercise said more about the real state of the Netherlands than anything on screen.
Islam is a challenge to the West because of the assumption behind the Mississauga lady's injunction: being Muslim is not just a religious but a civil identity. There is historically no distinction in Islam between rendering unto God and rendering unto Caesar. By contrast, to be Canadian or British or Dutch seems less and less a civil identity and more and more just a smattering of local colour. If you're a travelling salesman who likes donuts in Toronto and chips in London and a spliff with a legalized prostitute in Amsterdam, presumably you're impeccably Canadian, British and Dutch.
This is a sad and reductive idea of national identity. And it's the vacuum into which pan-Islamism flowed - not for everyone, not for all Muslims, but for enough for it to have metastasized around the world into the most profound challenge to the nation-state. Another Dutch cabinet minister remarked a few months ago that if a majority of the electorate voted to introduce sharia that would be OK. In other words, as long as the tyranny is ushered in constitutionally (as it was in Germany three-quarters of a century ago), it's fine by him. Not by me. Liberty is a 24/7 condition, not merely a trip to the voting booth every few years. If a cabinet minister in a settled parliamentary democracy doesn't understand that, then why be surprised when the fire-breathing imams don't get it?
The nullity of the modern multicultural state is the heart of the problem. We talk airily about "moderate Muslims," but the reality is that Islam is moderated mainly by the overarching culture--often a dictatorial culture, such as the Soviet Union or the Suharto regime in Indonesia, but sometimes something less so. There is no reason for Islam to moderate itself in a land that declares we worship only donuts or topless sunbathers. We have to teach our children an "heroic national narrative" (in the splendid words of Australia's John Howard), one that teaches them their history warts and all, as opposed to (as now) warts only. A nation cannot survive as merely a big zip code: it has to be understood as the physical expression of certain ideas and the ongoing projection of a grand inheritance. If we can't articulate why sharia is wrong even if it's legitimized by plebiscite, then we fully deserve to end our days living under it. It's not about Islam. It's about us.
Good post!
“We’ve created a world where a 36-year-old European male can stroll into a nightclub, tell the babes he lives at his parents’ place in the bedroom above the garage - and still walk out with a hot-looking date. This guy would have been a laughingstock at any other point in human history.”
Steyn is so good at mental images.
Series, this article is spot-on! Thanks!
Maybe I'm just a polyanna, but I feel sure that, when things go too far, there will be a moral or cultural upheaval which will settle this issue. Judging by the last 300 years of European history, it could get very nasty.
All the heroes are dead.
Only the pygmies live on.
“”It turned out to be a video which they distributed to every embassy around the world to play to anyone thinking of moving to the Netherlands. It showed a topless woman on the beach and two guys kissing. Message: If you’re uncomfortable with this, you might prefer to emigrate somewhere else. Except that they added a rider to say that, if you are uncomfortable with this because you’re a Muslim or whatever, then you don’t have to watch it. And that pre-emptive negation of the entire point of the exercise said more about the real state of the Netherlands than anything on screen.””
One of many gems.
As always, some outstanding writing from Steyn. Thanks for posting.
Let’s not forget the SCHIP program,
where anyone up to age 25 is a child,
and any family making 80k or less is considered “poor”
for the purposes of socialist healthcare.
Excellent article!
Liberalism puts people to sleep. Political correctness eliminates the values of 'distinction' and judgment. . .the importance of 'discrimination'; it eliminates the need and desire for excellence. And we are dangerously close to national lethargy because of it.
No doubt, we have more than a few here, who would echo the Dutch Cabinet member who allowed that Sharia would be just fine; if democratically agreed to. Because they cannot muster a judgment; or understand the difference or just can no longer remember a reason to care, either way.
Great article by Steyn!
With respect to the extended adolescence advocated by the educationists, I'll just say that there will always be those who seek better opportunity. That is evident in lower college enrollment rates for men. some are idle, but others are already working.
Quite.The great problem being the extent to which, pace Theodore Roosevelt, at present it is "the critic who counts," and emphatically not than "the man who is actually in the arena."
That is the natural narrative of journalists accustomed to successfully employing a mutual admiration society "proof" of their own heroic "objectivity."
"It is not the critic who counts . . . the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena - Theodore Roosevelt
Always love reading Steyn. Although, I kept waiting for The Minnesota Flyin’ Imams.
I find that almost unbelievable
In Italy, some 80 per cent of men live with mum and dad until into their thirties.
No wonder America rules the world
By my mid thirties, I had gotten some higher education, got married, procreated six children, bought a home, moved into mid management, built a life.
Don Juan or Antonio still are living with mommy and daddy past their thirties !!!
BTW, I'm nobody special, I consider myself a normal American male.
bttt
-bflr-
Dang. How’s he do it?
And when they finish work; who do they go home to?
Have personally thought there was a contradiction or irony of sorts; watching the latest batch of young, 'mature'. And of course, this is not 'all'; but more than a few to make observation legitimate. . .
Many of them have, by the time they are sixteen had class trips that take them to neighboring borders; Mexico. . .South America; the Islands. . .by eighteen or nineteen; have spent summers abroad; school for a month; unsupervised travel for two. . .. They were educated to 'sex' by fourth grade. They are bright. . .worldly. . .but yes, ten - or more - years later; Mom is still 'moving them'. . .getting them 'settled'. . .with every luxury they have become accustomed to. If they are in long-term relationships then they have enjoyed the extended honeymoon on more than a few of their vacations together. . .
Others; are experiencing their 'divorce' from their partner in the long-term relationship that was supposed to be a marriage - eventually. By and large; they will tell you they are not ready. And the sad thing is; they are right.
Again, this does not describe all the 'up-coming' generation. . .but there is an irony; that the earlier so many of these kids are educated to 'life'. . .and the more they are exposed to life and the world; the more mature they appear; the more you see this adolescent clinging to their 'own child' while exhibiting a fear to move honestly forward towards genuine committment and responsibility. Many of this 'bunch' have been educated to the 'world' and are in fact, 'worldly'. . .but - not genuinely mature; or so it would appear. . .
Perhaps it is the 9/11 effect. . .or, too much of the wrong thing, too soon. . .or maybe it is the Parents who are clinging to their children for the same reasons. . .
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