Mark Steyn isn't a great writer, in fact his book, America Alone isn't a very good book. I think he's way better as a radio commentator and columnist. So this effort seems a bit scattershot for me. But I think it's just the kind of book that someone like me needs to have read. It gives me a handful of double-ought shotgun shells of red hot facts to spew. By 'someone like me' I mean someone with a reason to defend America in the face of all the gibberish that passes as constructive dissent.
The other day, I was talking with some friends about global warming. 'Jack Jones', is Boy's best friend's dad. We're kind of 'best neighbors'. Jack's an investment adviser with a rather serious portfolio of clients. So he gets paid to make sense of global events. He reminded me that there's some interesting things going on in the commodities markets with corn. I told him that I look to the supermarket shelves: when we're down to just 3 kinds of corn flakes, then I worry. He agreed. More likely the price will go to 7 bucks a box first. On global warming, he reminded me of something we can all try at home. Put ice cubes in a glass, then fill it with water. When the ice melts, the level of the water goes down, not up. So let's not worry about flooding Manhattan.
Mark Steyn has given us a signal to worry about and it is the fall of Europe. If there's anything completely coherent in 'America Alone' it is that it paints a bleak picture for the EU's undeclared war against Islamism. The EU, according to Steyn, is outsourcing its democracy to Muslim youth. So what we Americans need to watch, instead of corn flakes and coastlines, are what concessions EU ministers will do in the face of its losing demographic battle against Muslim youth and how bold the radical Islamists will be in that rising tide. Here are some buckshot for you, the most popular name for male babies in Amsterdam is Muhammed.
The current talking point on Right Radio these days is whether or not Liberals and Democrats have any idea of the size of the Islamic foe. The answer is no, of course not. The correct estimate is that it may or may not matter because nobody, it seems, has any strategy to help 'Moderate Islam' actually moderate the rest of Islam. But the syllogism works something like this:
Who is the enemy? Jihadis?
Where do they get support? Islamists
Who are the Islamists? People who want to live under sharia.
Where do Islamists get support? From all sorts of Muslims.
There are dots to connect for sure. Let the FBI do that. But the fact of the matter is that Jihadis only get support from Muslim communities, and Muslim communities in the West are working their way towards and through all sorts of concessions via a multicultural imperative of Western liberals. The only chance to have Jihadis are through politically active Muslim population bases. And these bases are all over Europe.
Steyn isn't long on solutions. He tends to offer a rather dim outlook. His gripes are classically conservative but he doesn't do so much to rally the troops. He speaks in the voice of someone who thinks it should be obvious that what we have in the West is worth preserving, so he doesn't go into all that. In that regard he's not got a popular book. He's not likely to win any converts to his vision through any cheerleading, however he does show a hundred different examples of what we generally understand in the conservative movement. That's good enough.
What Steyn gives me is a reason to be a bit more strenuous in my questioning of our ethics with regard to the tolerance of Islam. I've never bought into the 'Clash of Civilizations' theory, primarily because I don't regard Islamists as particularly civilized, nor do I give much credit to the Iraqi militants in their free for all. So I am more likely to ask whether or not the momentum in political Islam is pro- or anti-Western and who arises to block or accommodate cultural concessions. I think that my experience with emergent American populations will be instructive in this, especially since I believe I see clearly through the hokum of multicultural politics. I know a self-hating, self-destructive white liberal when I see one, and I know exactly how loud minority activists walk all over them. And I see their mutual disinvestment in patriotic faith work its retarded miracles. So I'm watching, and guess what? I'm not beyond consideration of loyalty oaths.
I have a great deal of confidence that American prejudices against Europeans can and will be easily awakened from slumber if we see more of the sort of sissyfied crumbling that Spain demonstrated in the wake of the Madrid bombings. And I now expect to see more of that sort of event in the near future. What 'America Alone' does is prepare me to understand how it was that the British allowed their sailors and marines to be captured, Europeans truly are far along the road towards capitulation. They're much worse than we are. We at least still have red states, whereas all of the EU has seemed to have gone baby soft blue.
Americans on the whole will recognize what's up. Half of us do already. It's not close to being too late.
