No, he doesn’t improvise in rhyming couplets but one feels he could if it might provoke a laugh at the foolish world’s expense. One doesn’t want to be at the end of his verbal rapier. He’s already skewered the Obama Nation with such style that one’s first encounter with him always feels like the opening scene of Cyrano de Bergerac! The only, overly large protuberance out of his head is wit!!
I first began reading Mark Steyn when he seemed to be writing mostly for Canadians. That, of course, was my mistake. He’d already captured the interest and admiration of the entire English-speaking “Lost”, which is most of us.
Despite his unmistakably British diction, Mark was born in Toronto. Despite his Anglican affiliations, his family is rife with Catholicism. As a Moriarty, I attribute most of his genius to his disinherited Catholicism.
His most formative education was in the United Kingdom at the King Edward’s School, Birmingham, England and according to his Wikipedia biography his professions seem to have gone from disc-jockey to musical theater critic for The Independent of London. That accounts for his impressive knowledge of the entire American Songbook, not to mention the theatrical panache he can summon up in an entertaining instant.
Despite the indelibly British cadences, he has a Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls bite to his television appearances.
Broadway off of Piccadilly Square!
After entertaining the folks at The Independent, he then moved to the UK’s magazine, The Spectator.
Now, of course, Mark Steyn is all over the English-speaking world and I assume his eternally provocative books have been translated into every European language there is. If not, it is their loss, despite the inevitably great losses in translation.
Mark Steyn is locked into my memory because of the laughter he inspired in me at some very unhappy times of mine as an American exile in Canada.
It was the gallows humor of a realist whose POV still carries the panache of a lone but fearless, Fourth Musketeer.
He’s an Anglo-Canadian-American combination of Mark Twain, James Boswell and, well, Mark Steyn, recording the seemingly inevitable disintegration of English-speaking individual freedom into an imperialistic, Obama Nation of Marxist cookie cutters.
He travels the world as if it were not only his backyard but his own private bookshelf. He can pull out any corner of the globe and bulls-eye its major problem in one sentence, i.e., “In Britain, everything is policed except crime.”
This, of course, in the wake of recent riots in the U.K.
Erasing the entire Atlantic ocean, he sums up an English-speaking humanity, “For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population”.
For a law of life to take home with you: “Big Government means small citizens”.
“Thrusting home”, our Cyrano adds, “Nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.”
He can also be excruciatingly merciless with his puns: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.”
In short, “Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances but its human capital, too.”
Here is the article in its entirety.
We American exiles of the despairing class need a Mark Steyn the way America needs another Ronald Reagan. The styles of Steyn and Reagan would both appear to be entirely different but then one of Reagan’s greatest admirers was William Buckley. Three entirely different deliveries arriving at most of the same conclusions.
And the Progressives call Conservatism “provincial”.
I tend to believe, with increasingly Catholic faith, that the Progressive, bipartisan triumphs in the last twenty, New World Order years of Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama were God’s cunning plan to lead the Ivy League Know-It-Alls into the very bubble that is now being popped by Reality.
God wisely gave Mark Steyn the sharpest pin with the longest reach to help Reality do the job we’ve all been waiting for.
“And as I end the refrain, thrust home!”
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