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Jewish World Review
April 18, 2011
/ 14 Nisan, 5771
Doubling down on a bad bet
By
Mark Steyn
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I always enjoy the bit in "Planet Of The Apes" where a loinclothed Charlton Heston falls to his knees as he comes face to face with a shattered Statue of Liberty poking out of the sand and realizes that the eponymous simian planet is, in fact, his own – or was. Also the bit in "Independence Day" where Lady Liberty gets zapped by space aliens. And in "Cloverfield" when she's decapitated by a giant monster. And in "The Day After Tomorrow" when she's flash-frozen after polar ice-cap melting brought on by a speech from Dick Cheney. I've been enjoying such moments, since, oh, the short story "The Next Morning" in the 1887 edition of Life, illustrated with a pen-and-ink drawing of a headless statue with the smoldering rubble of the city behind her. The poor old girl was barely off the boat from France, and she'd already been pegged as the perfect visual shorthand for societal collapse.
But the United States Postal Service has now gone the Hollywood apocalyptics one better and produced a somewhat subtler image of civilizational ruin. The other day the post office apologized for its new stamp honoring Lady Liberty. Due to an unfortunate error, the stamp shows not the 19th century Statue of Liberty that stands in New York Harbor but the 1990s replica that stands at the New York-New York hotel and casino in Las Vegas.
An ersatz statue of pseudo-liberty standing guard over the world's biggest gambling operation: What better way to round out a week in which the Republicans pretended to pass the most historically historic budget cut in history while the president pretended to come up with a plan to address the debt? All while pretending to wage a war in Libya whose most likely outcome seems to be that the only Arab dictator to sleep soundly in his bed at night during these turbulent times will be doing so under cover of a NATO no-fly zone for the rest of his 75-year term of office. In such a world, the USPS, bless 'em, has come up with a far more plausible emblem of societal devastation than Hollywood's space monsters and climate-change fairies.
After the revelations that the $38.5 billion 2011 budget cut will, in reality, either cut a mere $352 million from the 2011 budget or, in fact, increase it by $3 billion, it might be easier just to build a replica White House, Capitol and Congressional Budget Office at the new Beltway Casino next to Caesar's Palace. Vegas is no longer the world's biggest gambling resort; America is. Barack Obama says we need to "win the future," and one more roll of the dice should do it: A trillion dollars of chips on the stimulus came up empty but let's pile another couple trillion on Obamacare, and "high-speed rail," and "green jobs" and "broadband access... ." And all the while Wayne Newton is singing "Danke Schoen" in Chinese. But don't worry, we're not just throwing our money away. We're playing to a system! The president calls it "investing in the future."
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How do you "invest in the future"? By borrowing $188 million every hour. That's what the Government of the United States is doing. It's spending one-fifth of a billion dollars it doesn't have every hour of every day of every week – all for your future!
Most of the "futures" we've "invested" in are already at record levels of spending. Obama and his speechwriters are among the laziest men in the republic, so they cite the same dreary examples every time. In all three of his State of the Union addresses, he's brought up the highway system, and he did so again in Chicago at the end of the week. If the Republicans get their way, he said, "we can't invest in roads and bridges and broadband and high-speed rail. I mean, we would be a nation of potholes."
That's the choice, is it? Multitrillion-dollar government "investment" or a nation of potholes? America "invests" a lot in roads. It has more highway signs than almost any other country: not just mile markers but fifth-of-a-mile markers; not just "Stop" signs, but four-way "Stop" signs, and "Stop Sign Ahead" signs, and, one day soon, "Stop Sign Ahead Sign Ahead" signs. America also has the worst automobile fatality rate in the developed world, in part because there's so much fascinating reading material on the shoulder. Our automobile fatality rate is three times that of the Netherlands, about the same as Albania, down at 62 in the global rankings, just ahead of Tajikistan and Papua New Guinea. But don't worry, if we ever do become "a nation of potholes," you can bet there'll be federally mandated "Pothole Ahead" signs in front of each one.
Anything else? "Our airports," continued the president, "would be worse than places that we used to call the Third World, but who are now investing in infrastructure." Maybe he should get out of the motorcade once in a while and swing by LAX or LaGuardia: They're already decrepit cheerless dumps, mainly because they've been lavishly governmentalized into bureaucratic holding pens through which the citizenry dutifully shuffle while armies of crack TSA operatives poke around in the panties of 6-year-old girls.
Oh, and let's not forget "education." "We should invest in education," says the president. But we have done, spectacularly. We spend more per pupil on "education" than any other developed nation except Switzerland, and our math scores barely make the global Top 40, scraping in at big hit sound No. 35 between Azerbaijan and Croatia, the former of which was a Commie dictatorship until 20 years ago while the latter was reduced to rubble in the Yugoslav civil war. Maybe, when it comes to "investing in the future," civil war gives you more bang for the buck.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Mark Steyn is a syndicated columnist. Comment by clicking here.
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It's the end of the world as we know it…
Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are.
And liberals will still tell you that "diversity is our strength"—while Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber shops, the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn't violate the "separation of church and state," and the Hollywood Left decides to give up on gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy.
If you think this can't happen, you haven't been paying attention, as the hilarious, provocative, and brilliant Mark Steyn—the most popular conservative columnist in the English-speaking world—shows to devastating effect in this, his first and eagerly awaited new book on American and global politics.
The future, as Steyn shows, belongs to the fecund and the confident. And the Islamists are both, while the West—wedded to a multiculturalism that undercuts its own confidence, a welfare state that nudges it toward sloth and self-indulgence, and a childlessness that consigns it to oblivion—is looking ever more like the ruins of a civilization.
Europe, laments Steyn, is almost certainly a goner. The future, if the West has one, belongs to America alone—with maybe its cousins in brave Australia. But America can survive, prosper, and defend its freedom only if it continues to believe in itself, in the sturdier virtues of self-reliance (not government), in the centrality of family, and in the conviction that our country really is the world's last best hope.
Steyn argues that, contra the liberal cultural relativists, America should proclaim the obvious: we do have a better government, religion, and culture than our enemies, and we should spread America's influence around the world—for our own sake as well as theirs.
Mark Steyn's America Alone is laugh-out-loud funny—but it will also change the way you look at the world. It is sure to be the most talked-about book of the year.
Sales help fund JWR.
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© 2010, Mark Steyn
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