After America - Mark Steyn [138]
But in leaving Israel to its fate we have told our enemies something elemental and devastating about the will of a decaying West, and of the supposed global superpower. Around the world our foes will draw their own conclusions. Just as there are neglected and rubble-strewn Jewish cemeteries from Tangiers to Czernowitz to Baghdad, one day there will be abandoned American cemeteries, too. Across the globe there will be towns and countries where once were Americans and now are none—from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to Germany and Japan. What’s left of the republic will hunker down and finally understand what’s it’s like to be Israel. Washington will be the new Jerusalem—a beleaguered citadel in a world that wants to kill it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
AFTER
A Letter from the Post-American World
Again upon the sea.
This time for Persia, bearing our wounded and the ashes of the
dead .... The skull of the last
Mehrikan I shall present to the museum at Teheran.
—J. A. Mitchell, The Last American (1889)
What follows purports to be a missive from the future. Author unknown. It was found tucked into the glovebox in the remnants of what appeared to be a Victorian-era contraption:
This is a letter from the day after tomorrow, from the world after America. I would have entrusted it to the genial gentleman on a “time machine” who turned up last week with excited tales of the marvels of an American golden age circa 1950. Less than a hundred years ago! But the young ’uns told him he sounded like those Islamophile “scholars” boring on about the glories of Córdoba and el-Andalus in the tenth century. His machine looked promising, but it attracted the attention of rival gangs and they wound up with half of it apiece, neither of which functioned. Much like what happened to America. But they left behind what I believe is the key time-traveling mechanism, and, while it is no longer sufficient to transport a person, I’m hopeful this letter will make it back to you in 1950—assuming, that is, that, like so much else of interest, the timetransporting device isn’t stymied by the Sino-Russo-Islamic cybershield that has reduced the Internet to little more than an archive of cautionary tales of all but forgotten minor American celebrities. (The Internet was a turn-of-the-century phenomenon, like your hula hoop, if that’s been invented by the time you get this.)
Before he got mugged, the time traveler wanted to know how we were getting by without the United States. Well, for want of any choice in the matter, we adjusted. As it beggared itself, cannibalized itself, and finally consumed itself, the hyperpower’s networks of globalization remained largely in place. We know their names still—Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Google.... Many of the famous multinationals survived the collapse of the United States. In economic terms, they were bigger than most nation-states, and so they had no trouble finding small countries to serve as company towns of convenience. Some aspects changed. McDonald’s and KFC and the rest are now halal. It’s just easier that way. Otherwise, you wind up like the Russians, with two of everything—the Muslim-compliant Burger King, and the branch across the street that still serves vodka: “Have it your way—da?” And all that does is make it easier for Chechen gangs to blow up sad gaggles of Red Army alcoholics while minimalizing collateral damage of photogenic moppets and devout burqa-clad women. I no longer imbibe myself. Like the late American entertainer Dean Martin, I drank to forget. But we forgot almost everything very quickly, so the excuse is less persuasive.
Much of the world would still seem familiar to you. Have you ever been in the executive lounge of an upmarket American chain hotel in the Middle East? The Grand Hyatt in Amman perhaps? Very congenial in the old days. At breakfast you could get pancakes and hash browns, and the TV would be tuned to CNN International, while Saudi sheikhs and Russian “businessmen” and the representatives of Chinese state corporations conducted their affairs. For a while, that’s what it