Posted on 08/21/2006 8:19:32 PM PDT by WarrenC
When the president of the New Zealand Police Association, Greg O'Connor, recently issued a domestic call for the all-enveloping burka garment worn by some Muslim women to be banned from the roads, it wasn't only local drivers who were paying attention to his words.
In faraway New Hampshire, Mr O'Connor's crisp authority also struck an appreciative chord with the individual often regarded as one of the conservative world's most visible media commentators on the great civilisational clash of the past five years.
"These little anecdotes are wonderful to come across," Mark Steyn said in an interview during a stopover in Australia, where he has been addressing standing-room-only crowds, in a tour sponsored jointly by the Centre for Independent Studies and the Institute of Public Affairs.
What tickled the self-described "one-man global content provider" had been Mr O'Connor's response to the inevitable point that burka-shrouded drivers are part of an important cultural tradition.
Mr Steyn had been impressed by the police representative's argument "that if your cultural tradition is that you wear a burka then maybe your cultural tradition shouldn't extend to driving an automobile, which I thought got to a very good point.
"In our multicultural cravenness, we're missing what's going on here with large numbers of Muslims expecting to be able to combine a seventh century ideology with 21st century conveniences but it doesn't work like that.
The Islamic Dominion of New Zealand would very quickly become a society in decline, living on the capital of its pre-Muslim past."
Mr Steyn is a Toronto-born high school dropout turned music critic who first entered journalism in 1986. Today, he commands an international following for his muscular defence of the administration of President George W Bush and knows a thing or two about clever rejoinders.
Since the terrorist attacks of 2001 he's been going 9/11 24/7. Mr Steyn's regular columns have become seemingly ubiquitous in op-ed pages across many jurisdictions, including the Australian, Chicago Sun-Times, Irish Times, Jerusalem Post, National Review and Washington Times.
One of Mr Steyn's notable stocks in trade is a knack for humorously dismantling some of the liberal left's barmier apologias issued on behalf of radical Islam. Jokes aside, it's a task to which he brings the same ruthless intelligence that Karl Marx brought to critiquing capitalism; but there any similarity probably ends, for this occasional Baptist laypreacher with the tony English accent has yet to construct a sentence that would cause a reader pain on account of its arrangement.
Mr Steyn has been called a lot of things the young British columnist Johann Hari recently dismissed him as "the court jester for the American far right" but nobody ever called him boring.
A collection of his political journalism from 2001-02, The Face of the Tiger (Stockade), ironically casts the words of Ghazi Algosaibi, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the UK, as its front cover endorsement: "Mark Steyn, the dismantler of sovereign nations and destabiliser of whole regions."
Despite the international recognition, Mr Steyn remains virtually unknown in the mainstream New Zealand media. An initial online archive search for references about him in the country's largest-circulation newspaper turned up just six matches.
"I wouldn't presume to generalise about the state of a nation from whether a particular editor or publisher has any interest in running me," Mr Steyn said.
"One thing I've learnt since September 11th is that in a lot of places the press does not match the predisposition of the people. That is true in a lot of American states and Canadian provinces and it's true of Australia to a degree the Fairfax newspapers here are by and large a terribly dull and dreary read that do not reflect the great energy of their country.
"Similarly, in New Zealand, I know from time to time ... well, I believe the last I was in was the Sunday Star-Times I think it was, off the top of my head, a piece about the new Star Wars movie from five years ago. So I suppose there is a certain antipathy to my political writing. But I wouldn't dream of holding that against New Zealanders."
Not surprisingly to those who follow these things, the same online search for local material on Mr Steyn also threw up more than 150 references to his ideologically opposite number, the Independent''s Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk.
The two men have tangled in the past. It happened most memorably in the wake of one of Mr Steyn's crueller vignettes published in the Daily Telegraph, in which he imagined Dr Fisk discussing the evils of Texan politicians while - ow! a little lower please - hanging upside down in Madam Fatima's Discipline Parlour, Beirut.
"Fisky's been at this game a long time, and good luck to him," Mr Steyn said. "It was always pretty clear what his view on the Middle East was even 15 years ago when I was briefly at the same paper as him. He was exactly the same kind of person then. The problem with him is that he's incoherent. He's one of those fellows who's been on the beat too long, and as a result he's gone ... well, it's beyond having 'gone native,' actually.
"This is a man who, whenever he tries to pin down a factual aspect of a situation, is wrong. And the rest of the time he essays off into these crazy, drivelling columns, which tend to be framed as a series of questions that loop around the canyons of his mind to no effect at all."
The question of Dr Fisk's longevity could, of course, be asked of Mark Steyn: Won't there come a day, if it hasn't arrived already, when the belly-laughs dry up for him, too?
"Well, that happens with this particular subject for sure. You can't do jihad 24/7 without going bonkers. And that's not something many people thought about on Sept 11: the need to pace yourself. After all, this great existential struggle is going to be with us for decades. "
For him, this has meant lots of writing about the cinema and a lifelong passion the great show tunes. What's more, those sideline gigs offer unforeseen perks not available on the jihad beat the lack of death threats being one.
"In a way, writing about the musical comedies is more satisfying, too. When people tell me I've helped change their political views I usually nod politely. But in a lot of ways it's more satisfying for me when I get a letter from a guy who's a heavy metaller or gangsta rapper who tells me he started following me because he agreed with my politics, but after reading me for a while went on to develop a taste for Frank Sinatra."
Still, as he has discovered, the great clash of civilisations intrudes here too. In the theatrical world, one reads often about the "courage" of many artists making their own statement on international affairs in the new world. These are the types who congratulate themselves on the tremendous moral courage involved, say, in placing a crucifix in urine or some such religious offence provided it is not an affront to the type of Muslim radical who might actually do something about the offence.
As Mr Steyn notes, "we've devalued language to the point where 'courage' means saying something rude about George W Bush rather than having the real courage to identify the real threat to the world we live in."
If one thinks western civilisation is collapsing from "a decadent exhaustion," as Mr Steyn puts it, echoing a strikingly similar critique put years ago by another great commentator, Malcolm Muggeridge, then one is presumably obligated to write about it.
But why would someone want to save civilisation in the first place? Couldn't the fortysomething Mr Steyn, who lives in New Hampshire with his editor wife and three children find something else to occupy himself with?
"You want to do it because you want to enjoy all those small personal pleasures like being able to walk into a piano bar in London and hear a fantastic new singer singing The Way You Look Tonight. That is one of the small pleasures of life, and it's those accumulated pleasures that are something very important and something valuable.
"Radical Islamists, of course, take the view that there are no small pleasures in life- that you can't go out dancing, you can't listen to music, you can't play sport and that earthly life is a drudgery you endure until you get to paradise. I don't look at it that way."
In Mark Steyn's own words:
On multiculturalism:
As I understand it, Mark Steyn the benefits of multiculturalism are that the sterile white-bread cultures of Australia, Canada and the UK get some great ethnic restaurants and a Commonwealth Games opening ceremony that lasts until two in the morning.
But, in the case of those Muslim ghettoes in Sydney, in Oslo, in Paris, in Copenhagen and in Manchester, multiculturalism means that the worst attributes of Muslim culture the subjugation of women combined with the worst attributes of western culture licence and self-gratification ... Yet even in the face of the crudest assaults on its most cherished causes women's rights, gay rights the political class turns squeamishly away.
On the UN
It is a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice cream and mix it with a quart of dog faeces the result will taste more like the latter than the former.
On 'disproportionate' Israel
If, say, some fellows in Mexico had kidnapped California state troopers and were lobbing rockets randomly into residential areas of San Diego and Los Angeles, even La-La-Land libs would be demanding the US respond.
It's only the Israelis the world wishes to deny the conventional rights of sovereignty. In other words, it's the legitimacy of the state that's at issue. In effect, Israel has become the geopolitical version of the European Jew, who's allowed to operate a store in the town but not to exercise full ownership rights. In the old days, Jews faced property restrictions; now they face sovereignty restrictions. 21-Aug-2006
ping list
This was a great line: "we've devalued language to the point where 'courage' means saying something rude about George W Bush rather than having the real courage to identify the real threat to the world we live in"."
The text in the NBR is somewhat light and a little bit messy, they're emphasizing mainly his puns and jokes, but he's actually one of the deepest analysts of the international affairs I've ever read.
Fisk is not an ideological opposite of Fisk. That implies that Steyn is as far "right" as Fisk is left. Fisk is psychologically imbalanced, a lunatic, off the charts anti-American. Steyn is mainstream in American political life, part of what we would call normal. His opposite number might be someone like Jon Stewart, if Jon Stewart could write well. Fisk is opposite Himmler, so far opposite that the meet on the backside.
Well, to be fairer than K. Marx deserves, he WAS German.
And did anyone know Mr. Steyn was a laypreacher? I don't remember his mentioning it anywhere...
Self ping (is that permitted? am I logged in?)
...and a marvellous tour it's been. Mark (and co-speaker Owen Harries) spoke brilliantly here in Sydney, skilfully dealing with a Muslim interjector. For the transcript press here and scroll 1/3 down the page, to the panel with the black background.
You know, this is New Zealand after all, a country where "moderate Democrats" would sit squarely as conservatives around here, particularly hawks like Joe Liberman. NBR is about as right as you can get here, and yet by US standards it is sort of moderate.
I think we know him, but certainly those who don't have access to the net or those who don't read any overseas political commentaries will be asking "who?".
Sometimes I just hope he will write a bit on, in his own coining, "the other deranged Dominion". We need that.
Watch out for the local (NZ) lefties' pukings LOL:
http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz/2006/08/steyn_notices_nz.html#comments
We do. But is there one among the NZ rags brave enough to break free from the rigid Lefty pattern? The Commissars in charge of the NZ press never sleep (like Chuck Norris from the website with little known facts of his life).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.