ILLUSIONS OF OVERSTRETCH
Mark Steyn - The National Review, February 19th 2005
Mark posts these two weeks after they appear in the magazine.
Things seem to be going swimmingly for America on the international scene these days, so naturally the rest of the world has decided to avert its gaze from the gloomy present and contemplate the more pleasurable landscape of mid-century when the US imperium will be no more and some alternative hyperpower will rule the roost. Take your pick: authors, scholars and columnists have pinned their various hopes on China, India, the EU. But if you’re late into the office pool there’s plenty left: No takers so far for Canada, Belgium, Chad or Vanuatu.
I’m willing to entertain the downfall of the Great Satan, but not on the grounds offered by most of these experts. If you want the gist of their argument, go to Carquefou in north-western France. A year ago, the local schools held a competition in which pupils were required to illustrate what the United States means to them. The older students turned in the usual stuff: pictures of an enslaved Statue of Liberty being run over by Uncle Sam on a motorcycle (liberty, or at least the statue thereof, being a gift to America from France). But the younger kids had a shrewder sense of what was wanted, and offered up big bright posters of corpulent American moppets devouring giant cheeseburgers and slurping supersized sodas over explanatory slogans like “Obesité assuré”: To French children, Americans are a race apart – strange misshapen monsters staggering from across the ocean to devour anything in their path.
When they reach adulthood and become Marxist professors and European Commissioners, those schoolkids will understand that the condition of the American behemoth approximates that of the dinosaurs of old: immense bodies, tiny brains, doomed to extinction. After which, the natural leaders of the world will resume their rightful role – or, failing that, the wiry little Chinamen. Indeed, when Europeans fall into delirious effusions over America’s imminent “imperial overstretch”, the very phrase takes on awesome metaphorical power, conjuring a pair of polyester check pants straining at the seams across some almighty global butt.
As it happens, this is the precise opposite of the charge made by the original anti-Americans over two centuries ago. Back then, received opinion in Europe was that the climate made everything in the New World tiny. Two decades before the Declaration of Independence, le Comte de Buffon, France’s leading biologist and head of the Royal Botanical Garden, declared, without ever troubling to visit the continent, that “all the animals which have been transported from Europe to America – like the horse, ass, sheep, goat, hog, etc – have become smaller” - in every particular. The typical Indian “is feeble and small in his organs of generation; he has neither body hair nor beard nor ardor for his female.” British settlers in the New World “visibly degenerated” in much the same way, according to the Abbe Raynal, another leading French thinker. The notion that Americans were small and weak became such a commonplace that Ben Franklin, while Ambassador in Paris, lined up his 36 dinner guests against the wall: all 18 Americans were taller than the 18 Europeans, and the chief proponent of the shriveled Yank thesis, Abbe Raynal, was the shortest of all.
The imperial overstretch thesis is as wrong as the colonial overshrunk thesis was. When you’re not imperial, it’s hard to be overstretched. By comparison with Rome or Britain at their zenith, America travels light. And, if it’s looking for cuts, its decision to shoulder the cost of defending its wealthiest allies seems an obvious line item for reconsideration: the first victims of any imperial overstretch by the US are likely to be those most gleefully contemplating it – France, Germany, Canada, Belgium. In that sense, the waddling lardbutt grade-schooler is a misleading symbol. The whole is leaner than the sum of its parts.
As for the tiny brains bit, I don’t take that lightly. American education starts bad and gets worse with every passing grade. British values were spread around the world by British schoolteachers, who taught the natives about Shakespeare, Magna Carta, the glories of Greece and Rome. Can you imagine what Iraqis and Afghans would think of America if you sent over the average high-school faculty? The dumbest statements since 9/11 have been made by the folks with the biggest brains. American parents save their entire working lives to send their children to colleges where the make-believe Cherokee professor claims the victims of 9/11 were “little Eichmanns” who had it coming or the gay Dean of the Ethnic Studies College proudly declares himself Queen Bitch of the Universe, to cite two recent examples. I’d be in favor of a federal law mandating that every person in America automatically receive a complimentary college degree on his 21st birthday, thereby freeing up parents to invest their hard-earned dough in Internet cafes in Kabul.
Most of us automatically discount the “little Eichmanns” blather: these guys are decadent but they’re blowhards; it means nothing, goes nowhere. But read Harvey Kushner’s new book, Holy War On The Home Front, which opens with the case of Sami al-Arian, the computer science professor at the University of South Florida whose extra-curricular activities included raising money for and directing the activities of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and who numbered among his long-time buddies Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the brains behind 9/11 and the murder of Daniel Pearl. The reflex defense of Professor al-Arian by America’s academic community protected him for years and thereby advanced his causes. It’s foolish to assume that airhead eggheads who talk the talk don’t, consciously or otherwise, help those who walk the walk.
Those French schoolchildren got it backwards. The US won’t collapse because of its flabby butts. The flabby brains of the Queen Megabitches in the groves of academe are a tougher challenge. |
