Happy Labor Day! Mark Steyn

I wrote this column for The National Post eight Labor Days back, but, at the end of a week in which the Reverend Jesse Jackson's Cadillac Escalade gets stripped while he's at a "green jobs" rally, its central point holds up: The Reverend Jackson, the Reverend Gore, HRH The Prince of Wales and our other leaders think the masses have amassed too much. The planet can handle Jesse, Al and Prince Charles swanning about in SUVs and jets, but when you peasants start doing it, that's unsustainable:

No, honestly, I did. Okay, I was on the beach, but the folks around me lying on the sand had jobs they'll be getting back to this morning. They worked. They would be classed as workers. But they're not a homogeneous "working class," they're not conscripts in Karl Marx's "masses." The transformation of Labour Day, from a celebration of workers' solidarity to a cook-out, is the perfect precis of the history of Anglo-American capitalism.

If you want to see what "the masses" are meant to look like, buy a DVD of Metropolis, Fritz Lang's 1926 "expressionist masterpiece." As futuristic nightmares go, it's hilarious: The workers are slaves, living underground, chained to the levers, wheels, cranks and cogs of a vast machine, dehumanized by the crushing anonymity of their servitude, etc., etc.

Alas, nothing dates faster than a futuristic vision: Today, the nightmare that beckons is quite the opposite. Instead of a world in which the workers are forced to operate huge, clanking machines below the Earth all day long, the machines are small and silent and so computerized no manpower is required and the masses have to be sedated by shallow distractions like supersized shakes and Wal-Mart and 24-hour lesbian wrestling channels on Premium Cable.

It took the workers' tribunes a while to catch on: Even today, when your average union leader issues his annual Labour Day address, you can tell at heart he still thinks it's 1926 and Metropolis is just around the corner. But the intellectual left has been scrambling for decades to come up with explanations as to why, if everything's so bad, everything's so good: Noam Chomsky's theory of media manipulation - "manufactured consent" - can stand for an entire school of philosophers who believe a subtler breed of capitalist overlords are maintaining the workers in some sort of fools' illusion of content.

But, inevitably, this was only going to be an intermediate stage, given that the shimmering mirage seems to be holding up pretty well. The new received wisdom - forcefully articulated by, among others, Maude Barlow's Council of Canadians at the laugh-a-minute Johannesburg "Earth Summit" - is that the masses themselves are the problem. The oppressed masses refuse to stay oppressed. If they were down in the basement chained to the great turbines, all would be well. But, instead, they insist on moving out of their tenements, getting homes with non-communal bathrooms, giving up the trolley car, putting a deposit down on a Honda Civic and driving to the mall. When it was just medieval dukes swanking about like that, things were fine: That was "sustainable" prosperity. But now, everyone wants in. And, once you do that, there goes the global neighbourhood.

Thus, Simon Fairlie, in his new pamphlet The Prospect Of Cornutopia, ponders the consequence of a 3% "sustainable" growth rate and immediately spots the catch: by the year 2100 we'll be 18 times wealthier than we are today.

That's the problem? Of course! These days, for your serious media pessimist, the good news is the bad news. As Fairlie frets, "Will each home have 10 rooms and a swimming pool and, if so, where are we going to build them?"

But to this future of vast, unstoppable, ever-expanding wealth, the champions of the oppressed have come up with an ingenious solution: global poverty! We need a massive Poverty Expansion Program if we're to save the planet. "I don't think a lot of electricity is a good thing," says Gar Smith of San Francisco's Earth Island Institute. "I have seen villages in Africa that had vibrant culture and great communities that were disrupted and destroyed by the introduction of electricity," he continues, globally warming to his theme and regretting that African peasants "who used to spend their days and evenings in the streets playing music on their own instruments and sewing clothing for their neighbours on foot-pedal powered sewing machines" are now slumped in front of "Dynasty" reruns all day long.

George Monbiot, celebrated doom-monger of Britain's Guardian, agrees: "It is impossible not to notice that, in some of the poorest parts of the world, most people, most of the time, appear to be happier than we are. In southern Ethiopia, for example, the poorest half of the poorest nation on Earth, the streets and fields crackle with laughter. In homes constructed from packing cases and palm leaves, people engage more freely, smile more often, express more affection than we do behind our double glazing, surrounded by remote controls."

In Ethiopia, male life expectancy is 42.88 years. George was born in 1963. That may be why the cheery peasants in the fields are cracking up with laughter. They know that even if he moves in tomorrow, they'll only have to endure his column in The Gamo Gofa Times-Herald for another year or two. No wonder they're doubled up and clutching their sides. It's not just the dysentery from the communal latrine.

To measure the distance we've travelled, consider the words of Peter J. McGuire, General Secretary of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, proposing 120 years ago the first Labour Day. It would be an occasion, he said, to honour those "who from rude nature have delved and carved all the grandeur we behold."

What a crazy! Nature's rude and all the grandeur comes from man? What fossil fuel is he inhaling? He should listen to the great Canadian sage David Suzuki, who in a recent column headlined "We're All Animals Here" wrote:

The sign in the shopping mall said, 'No animals allowed.' As I read it, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It reflected a failure to admit or unwillingness to acknowledge our biological nature. We are animals and have a taxonomic classification: Kingdom - Animalia, Phylum - Chordata, Class - Mammilia, Order - Primates, Family - Hominidae, Genus - Homo, Species - sapiens.

Our reluctance to acknowledge our animal nature is indicated in our attitude to other animals. If we call someone a worm, snake, pig, chicken, mule or ape, it is an insult. Indeed, to accuse someone of being a "wild animal" at a party is a terrible insult.

But evidently not at a Suzuki get-together. Party on, dude! Everyone knows what the sign in the mall means. Suzuki may regret it, but the world we live in is defined not by what we have in common with the cats and dogs and Holsteins and black rhinos but by what separates us. As the Eighth Psalm says:

What is man that thou art mindful of him ... ? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea.

You can say that's a lot of Judeo-Christian hooey. But that's not the point. The Psalmist, regardless of whether he got it from God, has characterized the reality of our lives better than Suzuki's alleged scientific classification does. The Eighth Psalm describes the central fact of our modern existence. It was a lot less plausible when it was written, when man's domain stretched barely to the horizon, when ravenous beasts lurked in the undergrowth, when the oceans were uncharted and the maps dribbled away with the words "Here be dragons..." Back in those days, if PBS jetsetting finger-wagger Bill Moyers was sitting under some tree in the South African bush bemoaning man as a "cancer on the planet," nobody in Connecticut would be able to hear a word he was yakking on about, oh happy day.

But, over the millennia, the Eighth Psalm has held up, which is more than you can say for Fritz Lang or those 1970s eco-apocalyptics. By contrast, Suzuki's "We're All Animals Here" is a pitiful reductio, an expression not so much of evolutionary theory as devolutionary theory: We've evolved from the beasts, and, with a bit of a nudge from Moyers and Suzuki and PETA, we can evolve back. And if that means those fieldhands in southern Ethiopia have to eke out their four decades in the rustic version of Metropolis, so be it.

There's no such thing as "sustainable" development. Human progress and individual liberty have advanced on the backs of one unsustainable development after another: When we needed trees for heating and transportation, we chopped 'em down. Then we discovered oil, and the trees grew back. When the oil runs out, we won't notice because our SUVs will be powered by something else. Bet on human ingenuity every time. We're not animals, and it's a cult as deranged as the screwiest fringe religion to insist we are. Earth's most valuable resource is us.

The planet can handle Jesse, Al and Prince Charles swanning about in SUVs and jets, but when you peasants start doing it, that’s unsustainable:

Our poverty level is such that most on welfare have two cars, two color TV's, a decent place to live if they can keep their neighbors from junking the joint, and plenty to eat. I remember reading a few years ago about two men from India who wanted to immigrate to this country. One made it but the other was denied yet he kept trying. Since both families were rather well off in India the one in the U.S, asked his friend why he wanted so badly to come to this country. He replied, "I want to live in a country where the poor people are fat!"

Me too, I read that story as well. The fact is unless you’re somewhere between 75-85 years old , there isn’t anyone living in America who knows what real poverty and hunger is like.

On this Labor Day:

Prayer of the Christian Farmer and Gardener

For all our work on our lawns, gardens and fields, we need to thank God and ask for his blessings.

O God, Source and Giver of all things, Who does manifest Thy infinite majesty, power and goodness in the earth about us, we give You honor and glory.

For the sun and the rain, for the manifold fruits of our fields, for the increase of our herds and flocks, we thank You. For the enrichment of our souls with divine grace, we are grateful.

Supreme Lord of the harvest, graciously accept us and the fruits of our toil, in union with Christ, Your Son, as atonement for our sins, for the growth of Your Church, for peace and charity in our homes, for salvation to all. Amen.

Exactly. My parents, who were born in 1911 and 1912, grew up poor in Philadelphia, but there were no handouts, and they would not have taken them if they had existed.

When you were down and out then, your family helped you out. I remember my mother's tales of how they always had one relative or another staying with them for some period of time.

But, as we well know, the progressives need to keep minorities on the plantation so that they have a reliable voting block and an “underprivileged” group to “champion”.

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