From the Archives: Book Review: "The [Un]documented Mark Steyn"

Previously Published at "Parcbench" and My Defunct Weblog "Mencken's Ghost"

The defunct web publication Parcbench published this circa November 16, 2014. Thanks to editor Gregory Zeigerson (whose striking caricature of Steyn which accompanied the review I no longer have).

Edit: Here is the caricature.

In the twenty-first century, after decades of leftist domination of academia and media, learned, articulate, and erudite scribes on the other side of the false leftist/conservative dichotomy are elusive. 

After decades of America’s march toward transformation (fundamentally and otherwise) into a lower-brow, more Puritanical European country without the reverence for philosophy and art (in other words, the worst of both worlds), certain foreign-born-and-raised Americans, who embody the American spirit more than most natural-born citizens, provide some of the most trenchant and enlightening words to the shrinking minority who retain and sustain that spirit.

Mark Steyn arrived and admirably, effectively, and impressively embodied both elusive phenomena. His admirer Christopher Hitchens was a similar figure to some extent (at least after he partially disowned his past Trotskyism). Now that Hitchens is gone, Steyn (whose views are somewhat different, for better or for worse) may be the most important mainstream public pundit. He is an inestimable happy warrior (as he calls himself).

He was born in Toronto and educated at a boarding school in Birmingham, U.K., before he dropped out (ending his formal education). A former disc jockey, he is still a recording artist (Ted Nugent praised him as “the czar of common sense” as he praised Steyn’s big band rendition of “Cat Scratch Fever”)—his CDs are for sale and his tracks are audible at his website, steynonline.com. But he is best known as an incendiary (and uproarious) writer and conservative pundit, filing his posts for Steyn Online, National Review, Maclean’s, and other publications as well as broadcasting as an occasional guest host for Rush Limbaugh from a small New Hampshire town forty minutes from his home country (he remains a Canadian citizen).

The author of the provocatively titled America Alone and After America (among others) has a new collection, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn: Don’t Say You Weren’t Warned (Regnery), published in October. An anthology of previously published short pieces with diverse subjects, ranging from 1987 to a few months before publication, they are united by an overarching theme: an intransigent, indefatigable defense of the virtues of Western civilization. 

Steyn is using proceeds from the book’s sale to fund his interminable legal battle for defamation initiated by climatologist Michael Mann (inventor of the infamous “hockey stick” graph), but buying this informative, integrated, witty collection is no act of charity. Whether musing on coffeehouse culture (he may disapprove of me writing these lines in a coffeehouse while sipping a “vanilla steamer”), or contrasting hygienic advances taken for granted today with the curious (and antithetical) attitudes of celebrity environmentalists, or castigating the nattering nabobs of “diversity” (“where nations go to die”), or (somewhat bizarrely) composing the “memoir” of Monica Lewinsky’s dress or an interview of an alternative-universe Marilyn Monroe circa 1996, or concluding with a contemplative, earnest, subtly passionate tribute to William Wilberforce (the nineteenth-century British legislator credited with outlawing slavery in the British empire who arguably ushered in the international abolition movement), Steyn skillfully and hermeneutically holds high the banner of Western individualism, virtue, standards, and fiscal restraint (and genuine liberalism) while skewering his “liberal” ideological opponents, from leftist North American journalists to overseas jihadists.

While implicit, Steyn’s logical arguments and grasp of the conceptual level of thought provide a convincing, subtly pro-reason framework that few of the myopic pluralists on the left can match. And the high school dropout’s extensive array of facts, vocabulary, and allusions is matched by few credentialed pundits on either (or no) side of today’s ideological and political conflicts. No matter how sagacious or historically aware you are, you will learn something from Steyn’s facts and integration while being entertained by his wit. (An example of the latter: “James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, once offered this trenchant analysis of Pete Seeger: ‘“If I Had a Hammer”? Well, what’s stopping you? Go to the hardware store; they’re about a buck-ninety, tops.’ Very true. For the cost of a restricted-view seat at a Peter, Paul, and Mary revival, you could buy half a dozen top-of-the-line hammers and have a lot more fun, even if you used them on yourself.”) One need not agree with all of his views (such as his traditionalism and quasi-Victorianism) to respect the adept prose with which he argues and expresses them.

Unlike the anti-ideological, percept-oriented pragmatists and multiculturalists he ridicules, the perspicacious Steyn makes connections that, while fairly obvious to the relatively few rigorous, rational intellectuals left, are all too rare in a culture of disconnections. Whether objurgating celebrity environmentalists or lambasting leftists for failing to come to the defense of their own (see his impassioned lament on the fate of cartoonist Molly Norris) or teaching his less astute allies that government will not change significantly until (more fundamental) culture is changed, the depth of this author’s perception and conceptions is a vital corrective to a short-sighted, shallow culture.