After America - Mark Steyn [69]
This is correct. Barack Obama is a symptom rather than the problem. He didn’t declare himself president; America chose him. That’s what should worry you, not whether he was born in Mombasa and had his minions fake a Hawaiian birth certificate. That just gets you off the hook: aw, gee, we were duped. No, you duped yourself, America. That’s the problem. Mr. Prager explained that the single greatest threat facing the nation was that “we have not passed on what it means to be American to this generation.... A society does not survive if it does not have a reason to survive.” For Prager, small government is a moral question:
We give far more to charity per capita than Europeans do. Why? Are we born better? No. The bigger the government the worse the citizen. They are preoccupied in Europe with how much time off: Where will they vacation? When will they retire? These are selfish questions, these are not altruistic questions. So the goodness that America created is jeopardized by our not knowing what we stand for. That’s our greatest threat. We are our problem.
Instead of teaching “what it means to be American,” we teach anything but. We are obsessed with identity, but any identity other than “American”—female, gay, African-American, Muslim-American, Undocumented-American. At American universities, women take Women’s Studies, Latinos take Latino Studies, queers take Queer Studies. For many Americans, the preferred academic discipline is navel-gazing, sometimes literally: people of girth take Fat Studies. The best way to celebrate diversity is by celebrating yourself, and the best way to celebrate yourself is without anyone else getting in the way. And why wait till college? In New York, gay, lesbian, and transgendered schoolchildren can attend Harvey Milk High.14 Are there many transgendered 13-year-olds, even in Manhattan? Well, it’s about every student’s right to a “non-threatening learning environment,” and, if he doesn’t actually learn anything in the non-threatening learning environment, he’s still better off than if he’d been in the non-learning threatening environment of most New York high schools.
In all its shallow obsession with sexual and racial politics, the ever more leisurely vacuity of education also puts a question mark over identity in a more fundamental sense. In January 2009, Canada’s Globe and Mail (which is like the New York Times but without the jokes) chose to contrast the incoming U.S. president with, er, me. “He belongs to a demographic—it made his win possible—that doesn’t even get the problem with a black, a woman or a gay president,” wrote Rick Salutin. “They don’t clutch old identifications with race or ‘the west.’ They glory in ‘hybridity’.... For another demographic, this shift induces panic. They worry about ‘shriveled birth rates’ in the United States and its ‘enervated allies’ (Mark Steyn); they mourn the decline of ‘the last serious western nation.’”15
Crumbs. I wasn’t aware I was an entirely different “demographic” from Barack Obama. We’re more or less the same generation, but plainly the president stands for hope and the future and I represent the past and fear. As for “not getting the problem,” a lot of those black voters who turned out in huge numbers for Obama in California stayed in the polling booth to vote down gay marriage:16 the rainbow coalition shimmers beguilingly but dissolves on close contact—and that’s before you ask the shy Muslim girl in the corner of the classroom if she wouldn’t be happier at Lesbo High. Still, in a broad sense Rick Salutin is correct: the demographic that is the change it’s been waiting for doesn’t want to be seen “clutching old identifications.” What a yawneroo that’d be.
For decades, western elites have been bored by their own traditions and fetishized the exotic. Obama was both the beneficiary of this syndrome