Mark Steyn, Public Enemy #1 and great writer

Mark Steyn is a guy I discovered while listening to talk radio.  He's a writer that regularly appears on a variety of shows; always with wit and great satire.  He's currently being indicted by the CHRC (Canadian Human Rights Commission) also known at the GNTCC (Great Northern Thought Crimes Commission) for having the temerity to suggest that traditional Islam is fundamentally at odds with liberal western democracy.  Whether you agree with that assertion or not, to litigate the author is contrary to the the freedoms we (and our northern neighbors) hold dear.

I just caught a great piece that he wrote regarding the American left's infatuation with the idea of revolution and simultaneous refusal to accept the facts of actual revolution.  If you don't follow current events very closely and sometimes wonder why liberals elites and Hollywood folks are demonized as simple-minded, read on.

HAPPY WARRIOR
from National Review

There was a sad little interview in The New York Times the other day. Carmen Peláez is a playwright and, therefore, a liberal, but she’s also a Cuban-American, and she was a little disappointed in her ideological soulmates’ reaction to her latest play. Rum & Coke examines in part the west’s cultural fascination with Castro and the revolution that time forgot. You know the sort of thing – the Che posters decorating the Obama campaign offices in Houston; Michael Moore’s paean to Cuban health care, though it doesn’t seem to have worked out so great for Fidel. The enduring sheen of revolutionary chic is in forlorn contrast to the decrepitude of the real thing. “When I started writing the play, I thought people just didn’t know what was happening in Cuba,” Miss Peláez told the Times. “But the longer I live here, the more I realized, they don’t care… They would rather keep their little pop revolution instead of saying it is a dictatorship. I had somebody come to me after a show and say, ‘Don’t ruin Cuba for me!’ Well, why not? They’re holding on to a fantasy.”

“Don’t ruin Cuba for me” the way the Vietnamese ruined Vietnam for Tom Hayden. The old leftosaurus went back for the first time in 36 years to see the country he and his then wife, fair Hanoi Jane, had saved for Communism. Alas and alack, he found the ingrate natives in the midst of a capitalist frenzy. It’s been like that awhile on the Ho Chi Minh trail. A few years back, I ran into Mrs Thatcher’s daughter Carol in South Kensington looking for a taxi to Heathrow. This was in the grey days following the Conservatives’ act of matricide, when the Iron Lady’s wan successor, John Major, was trying to keep the party’s ramshackle show on the road. “I’m off to Hanoi,” said Carol, cheerily. “It’s a boom town. These Vietnamese chaps seem to have got the hang of capitalism a lot better than the Tories.” As he glumly informed readers of The Nation, Tom Hayden did not enjoy hearing his old revolutionary chums regaling him with a lot of stuff about GDP per capita: Don’t ruin Vietnam for me.

“Pop revolution” is a fine coinage. Pop stars have been peddling revolution for nigh on half-a-century, and they’re still doing it. At the Live8 all-star gala for Africa a couple of years back, Madonna urged us to “start a revolution”. Like Africa hasn’t had enough of those? Along with her fellow members of the aristorockracy, Madonna lives in a whirl of hyper-capitalism – agents, managers, lawyers, accountants, publishers, all tussling over rights to her songs, her children’s books of recent years, her sex book of earlier years with the nude photographs of her bottom hanging over the garden wall while a gay black dance troupe cavorts below with a German wolfhound, her digitally remastered mouthwash gargles… For a quarter-century, every aspect of Madonna’s life has been lawyered up to the hilt and leveraged to the max. In real revolutions, the mob rises up, pillages the CD factory, torches your inventory. Royalty statements become optional and occasional. All a bit of an inconvenience frankly. Still, if you can hold the revolution somewhere else, I’ll certainly wear the T-shirt. And, anyway, where’s the harm in it in Somalia or Congo? When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose. Don’t ruin Africa for me.

“They’re holding on to a fantasy,” says Carmen Peláez. But, once a fantasy’s taken hold, it’s hard to dislodge. On the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, 55 per cent of Iraqis polled by the BBC and ABC said their own lives are going well. True, 73 per cent of Kurds and 62 per cent of the Shia reckon things are swell, compared with only 33 per cent of the Sunni, but that’s what happens when you spend the first few years after liberation pining for the ancien regime. Did that poll get a lot of play in your local paper? Didn’t think so. Don’t ruin Iraq for me. The Code Pinkers at Berkeley know it’s a Bush quagmire, even if the Iraqis don’t.

What is Iraq? What is Vietnam? What is Cuba? Well, each is a state, but it’s also a state of mind – or mindlessness. These are real places where real people live, real Iraqis and Vietnamese and Cubans, but they’re vague and amorphous, like the anonymous natives in the British Empire yarns of my boyhood, disposable extras filling out the background who only rarely get to play a scene with a star – as when Cameron Diaz was obliged to apologize to the citizens of Peru for swanning about Machu Pichu with an attractive designer bag bearing a red star and the Maoist slogan “Serve The People”. Unfortunately, the last time a bunch of Maoists showed up in the Andes it was the Shining Path guerillas and instead of serving the people they slaughtered them, some 70,000 or so.

Well, what do the Peruvians know, or the Vietnamese, the Cubans, or any of them? Don’t ruin the frisson of vicarious revolution for me. Meanwhile, the careless disdain for the peasantry gets closer to home. The Archbishop of Canterbury says the introduction of sharia is inevitable in the United Kingdom, which is a tough break not just for those Brits who believe in quaint concepts like Common Law but also for Muslims who left their moribund homelands in search of free societies unencumbered by Islamic jurisprudence. Don’t ruin Britain for me? Hey, sometimes radical transformation isn’t just for T-shirt slogans.