The Undocumented Mark Steyn Read Free

the state, I always found the caper less interesting than the unseen backstory: How did they get there from here? From free western societies to a bunch of glassy-eyed drones wandering around in identikit variety-show catsuits in a land where technology has advanced but liberty has retreated: how’d that happen?
    I’d say “the nationalization of the family” is how it happens. That’s how you get there from here.
    But I see I’ve worked my way back to all that apocalyptic gloom I came in with at that long-ago publisher’s lunch. So you’ll be relieved to hear there’s some lighter stuff along the way—Viagra, potpourri, Marilyn Monroe, Soviet national anthem rewrites. . . .
    Finally, a note on what Daffy Duck, in a livelier context, called “pronoun trouble”: I wound up living in New Hampshire through the classic disastrous real estate transaction. I walked into the realtor intending to buy a little ski place I could use for a couple of winter weekends and a week at Christmas, and walked out with a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse needing two hundred years of work on it. In those days, I wrote mainly on music and film and other showbizzy subjects, and gradually my editors in London and elsewherebecame aware that I was doing all this showbizzy stuff from some obscure corner of America. And so they started to ask me to write on this or that political story. Most foreign correspondents in America are based in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles, so I like to think I came at the subject from a different angle (again, see this book’s postscript for more on my whereabouts).
    But, as I said, it can lead to Daffy-style pronoun trouble. Writing for publications in Britain, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, I used to be very careful about my pronouns. Then I discovered that for the previous six months some malicious Fleet Street sub-editor at The Daily Telegraph , in my more contemptuously hectoring surveys of the London scene, had been taking out every dismissive “you snotty Brits” and replacing it with “we.” A while later, I got a barrage of emails from Canadians sneering at me as a wannabe American along with even more emails from aggrieved Americans huffing at my impertinence at claiming to speak on behalf of their country. It turned out some jackanapes of a whippersnapper at The New York Sun had been removing all my “you crazy Yanks” and replacing it with “we.” The same thing happened to my compatriot Michael Ignatieff, who returned to Canada from a lucrative gig at Harvard intending to become Prime Minister only to find that his opponents dredged up every New York Times column of his in which he’d used the word “we” as shorthand for “we Americans.” Mr. Ignatieff led the Canadian Liberal Party to their worst defeat in history and is now back at Harvard.
    When the Internet took off, someone commented that my colleague David Frum wrote for Americans as an American and for Canadians as a Canadian. And someone else responded that I’d taken it to the next level: Steyn wrote for Americans as an American, Canadians as a Canadian, and Britons as a Briton. And then a third person chipped in that, no, it was subtler than that: Steyn wrote for Britons as a Canadian, for Canadians as an American, and for Americans as a Briton. . . . Well, I don’t know about that, but throughout my time writing for The Chicago Sun-Times and Canada’s National Post and Britain’s Spectator and The Australian and The Irish Times , I do think it helps sometimes to view one society through the lens of another:Two pieces here on welfare as viewed from Britain’s “housing estates” and Canada’s Indian reservations offer lessons for Americans too.
    And, whatever Michael Ignatieff feels about it, for my own part I generally use “we” to mean “western civilization,” which could use a few more friends on the pronoun front. Left to my own devices, I’d probably write just about music. But the Taliban banned