Steyn's Year, Part Three
JURY STILL OUT
London/New York murder rates
In my part of New Hampshire, we’re all armed to the hilt and any Burger Bar Boy who fancied holding up a gas station would be quickly ventilated by guys whose picks-up are better equipped than most EU armies... In post-Dunblane, post-Tony Martin Britain, that constraint doesn’t exist: that’s why the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea now has a higher crime rate than Harlem; in modern Britain, all neighbourhoods are, so to speak, black neighbourhoods.
Meanwhile, America’s traditionally high and England and Wales’ traditionally low murder rates are remorselessly converging. In 1981, the US rate was nine times higher than the English. By 1995, it was six times. Last year, it was down to 3.5. Given that US statistics, unlike the British ones, include manslaughter and other lesser charges, the real rate is much closer. New York has just recorded the lowest murder rate since the 19th century. I’ll bet that in the next two years London’s murder rate overtakes it.
The Sunday Telegraph, January 5th
North American union
A North American “confederation” is never going to happen. Not now, not in 50 years. Europeans, living on a continent of mostly failed nation states that rewrite their constitutions every generation as they lurch from Third Empire to Fifth Republic, have concluded understandably enough that supranational institutions are the way to go. Equally understandably, Americans have no interest in diluting either sovereignty or democratic accountability in transnational bodies. Canadians are free to fantasise about a North American Supreme Court with the likes of Madame L’Heureux-Dube on it, just as I’m free to fantasise about being strapped to a rack while a whip-wielding Shiela Copps walks across my back in stilettos. But my fantasy’s got more chance of coming true.
A North American Central Bank managing a North American currency? Forget it. When the loonie slips below 60 cents – circa 2005 – then, as Prof Bliss says, “the debate about a united currency will become serious”. “United”? Canada’s welcome to use the US dollar as its currency, as, indeed, any other country is. But we won’t have any say in the management of that currency. And the notion that simply doing business in US dollars would transform our fortunes is very curious: the loonie is not the problem, merely a symptom thereof.
As for Canada “joining” America, we’ve got more chance of getting admitted to the EU, or, come to that, the Arab League. Prof Bliss may confidently assert that “we are becoming more similar to the Americans in our culture and our values”, but, values-wise, he’s looking at the graph back to front. If the Prof really believes the border is “not so much a fence as a lawn-marker”, he should try living in a Quebec mill town on the hitherto informally monitored Maine line. This coming Sunday, eight timber-road crossings will be permanently closed and the four bigger border crossings will be open only until 2pm and shut all weekend. Quebecers who work in the Maine woods will either have to make a hundred-mile detour or look for other employment. On the Canadian side of the line, there’s talk of mill closures. The lawn-marker just got replaced with razor-wire.
The National Post, January 20th 2003
America's downfall
My colleague Matthew Parris is falling prey to theories of “imperial overstretch”. But, if you’re not imperial, it’s quite difficult to get overstretched. By comparison with 19th century empires, the Americans travel light. More to the point, their most obvious “overstretch” is in their historically unprecedented generosity to putative rivals: unlike traditional imperialists, they garrison not remote ramshackle colonies but their wealthiest allies. The US picks up the defence tab for Europe, Japan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia, among others. As Americans have learned in the last 18 months, absolving wealthy nations of the need to maintain their own armies does not pay off in the long run. This overstretch is over. If Bush wins a second term, the boys will be coming home from South Korea and Germany, and maybe Japan, too. So the EU will begin the second decade of the century with an excellent opportunity to test Mr Lipponen’s theory: it can either will the means to maintain a credible defence, or it can try to live as the first “superpower” with no means of defence. In other words, the first victim of American overstretch will not be America but Europe.
The Spectator, March 15th
The death of Europe
For Europe this is the perfect storm, with Jacques Chirac in the George Clooney role. Best case scenario: you wind up as Vienna with Swedish tax rates. Don’t get me wrong, I love Vienna. I especially like the way you can stroll down their streets and never hear any ghastly rockers and rappers caterwauling. When you go into a record store, the pop category’s a couple of bins at the back and there’s two floors of operetta. All very pleasant, though not if you’re into surfing the cutting edge of the zeitgeist. I quite like Stockholm, too. Well, I like the babes, but they’re gonna be a lot wrinklier by 2050. And Sweden’s 60% overall tax rate is likely to be the base in the Europe of 2020 and fondly recalled as the good old days by mid-century.
Worst case scenario: Sharia, circa 2070.
The Spectator, March 15th
Iraqi theocracy
The real story is how few takers there are for the wackier imams’ line. The Iraqi people ain’t buyin’. Whatever the future of Mesopotamia, the chances of it winding up an Islamist theocracy are zero. Not gonna happen, no matter how many doom-mongers at CNN and the BBC are urging it on. In fact, as long shots go, I’d say there’s more chance of it occurring in Belgium.
The Jerusalem Post, May 6th
Martha Stewart surviving
Most analysts reckon there are two options facing Martha Inc: the brand will sink with its creator, or it will successfully distance itself. Perhaps this makes sense to those immersed in the financial world, a culture of evasive acronymic generalities, where the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation is now HSBC and, instead of the First National Bank of Dead Horse, Nevada, American banks now have names like “Key” or “Banc One”. Or is it Banque One? Supposedly hardnosed financial institutions are far more prone to chichi upscale soft-focus herbal-scented ersatz-Continental designer pablum than Martha: in Britain, Arthur Andersen now goes under the name “Accenture”, which should be the name of Martha’s paint line.
But I can’t see Martha Stewart Living going down Evasion Avenue and emerging as MSL or Elegantia. Let me suggest a third option: the brand won’t be able to shrug off the founder, and it will survive and eventually prosper. The prosecutors are at the very least over-reaching and in some ways attempting a wholesale redefinition of the concept of “fraud”. Who’s to say it won’t be the SEC brand that comes out of this looking like unreasonably demanding control freaks? Martha, on the other hand, is a master of surviving setbacks. As I understand it, on Monday the Feds gave up trying to cut a deal with Martha because (so I hear) she genuinely believes she’s not guilty. Copping a plea is like using store-bought meringue nests or pumpkin pie mix: it’s quick and easy but you feel ashamed and everybody knows, even if they don’t say anything. If Martha’s going down, she’s going down true to her philosophy, with a hand-stitched, beautifully detailed, exquisitely tooled case for the defence. I’m betting it’ll be like the flora and fauna in her home-made Christmas decorations: establishing gilt is harder than it looks.
The Wall Street Journal, June 6th
Howard Dean's dominoes
In fact, though it wasn’t designed with him in mind, Dean could have been custom-built for this election’s highly compressed primary season. Gay marriage is the perfect issue for long-distance pre-primary fundraising, where he’s managed to do serious and possibly fatal damage to Senators Lieberman and Graham. His general leftishness will play well with voters in the Iowa caucuses on January 19th, where he figures he can scupper Dick Gephardt. His Vermontiness will appeal more to New Hampshire Democrats on January 28th than John Kerry’s Massachusetts hauteur. By the time of the big cluster of Sun Belt primaries of February 3rd, Dean reckons he can use his record on gun control (Vermont has none) to ditch the north-east liberal baggage and sell himself to southern white males, seeing off his last opponent, North Carolina’s John Edwards.
I’d say the south will be a bridge too far for Dean and the Vermontification of the Democratic Party.
The Spectator, July 5th
Religious freedom in Canada
In Canada, the government has promised that the new law permitting same-sex marriage will "protect" the rights of churches. But anybody who's paid even cursory attention to Canadian court decisions knows what happens when gays and religion come up against each other: A Christian printer is fined because he politely declined a printing job from gay propagandists; a Christian college is told it cannot fire a promiscuous gay employee; a Christian high school is instructed that a gay teenager must be allowed to take his boyfriend to the prom. I wouldn't bet on the right of a Canadian church to decline to perform same-sex marriages surviving a sufficiently determined plaintiff. Look for gay weddings to become routine in northern churches within the next decade.
The Chicago Sun-Times, July 13th
The Wes Clark bandwagon
I'm sticking to my bet that he won't be President in January '05. If I'm wrong, I'll quit writing about American politics for the entire Clark term. Or both of them.
The Spectator, September 27th
Campaign '04
The electoral-vote adjustments arising from the 2000 census mean that, even if Bush held only the same states as he did three years ago, he’d win by a much bigger margin. But it won’t stop there. Right now, the competitive states – the battleground – are the Democratic turf. Add to that the number of big-time Congressional Democrats who’ve decided to throw in the towel and you’re looking at a solid Bush victory with some key Republican gains in the Senate. The only question is how badly the Democrats do and that depends on whether they allow themselves to be led toward the wilder Chomskyan shores or can content themselves with the artful straddle adopted by Hillary Clinton.
The Spectator, December 13th
The post-Christian future
If Christianity is merely a “myth”, it’s a perfectly constructed one, beginning with the decision to establish Christ’s divinity in the miracle of His birth. The obligation to have children may be a lot of repressive Catholic mumbo-jumbo, but it’s also highly rational. What’s irrational is modern EUtopia’s indifference to new life. I recently had a conversation with an EU official who, apropos a controversial proposal to tout the Continent’s religious heritage in the new constitution, kept using the phrase “Europe’s post-Christian future”. The evidence suggests that, once you reach the post-Christian stage, you don’t have much of a future.
The Daily Telegraph, December 23rd |
