After America - Mark Steyn [162]
Going over the computer footage one morning, the guards see a truck managed to get across during the night. Not a big deal, probably just a couple dozen peasants heading north to join their families.
Funny thing, though. The truck didn’t stop in the Arizona desert and let out its human cargo. The border guys found out a couple days later it had headed north, picked up Interstate 40 eastbound, all the way through New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee until it hit Greensboro and swung north on I-85.
Towards Washington.
They figured it out when they saw it on the news.
In this chapter, Steyn paints a bleak picture of the world “after America”:
Western Europe is semi-Islamic, Russia has the monopoly on energy and security, China is the new economic superpower, Iran is a nuclear power, Latin America is for sale to the highest bidder, Japan’s population is part robotic, and cannibalism is standard practice in Africa.
Could this happen? Is this happening? Or is it just fantastical?
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EPILOGUE
THE HOPE OF AUDACITY
I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.
—Milton Friedman, Milton Friedman in Australia (1975)
In February 2009, a few weeks after his inauguration, President Obama went to Congress to deliver America’s first State of the European Union address. It included the following:
I think about Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the young girl from that school I visited in Dillon, South Carolina—a place where the ceilings leak, the paint peels off the walls, and they have to stop teaching six times a day because the train barrels by their classroom. She had been told that her school is hopeless, but the other day after class she went to the public library and typed up a letter to the people sitting in this chamber. She even asked her principal for the money to buy a stamp. The letter asks us for help, and says, “We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president, so we can make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world. We are not quitters.” That’s what she said. “We are not quitters.”1
There was much applause, and this passage was cited approvingly even by some conservatives as an example of how President Obama was yoking his “ambitious vision” (also known as record-breaking spending) to traditional appeals to American virtues. In fact, the Commander-in-Chief was deftly yoking the language of American exceptionalism to the cause of European statism. Apparently, nothing testifies to the American virtues of self-reliance and entrepreneurial energy like joining the monstrous army of robotic extras droning in unison, “The government needs to do more for me....” The animating principles of the American idea were entirely absent from Obama’s vision—unless by American exceptionalism you mean an exceptional effort to harness an exceptionally big government in the cause of exceptionally massive spending.
Consider first the least contentious part:
We are just students trying to become lawyers, doctors, congressmen ...
The doctors are now on track to