The Undocumented Mark Steyn (50 page)

As I said, a bold conceit, at least to those who believe that shorn of all those boring procreation hang-ups we can finally be free to indulge our sexual appetites to the full. But it seems the Japanese have embraced the no-sex-please-we’re-dystopian-Brits plot angle, too. In October, Abigail Haworth of
The Observer
in London filed a story headlined “Why Have Young People in Japan Stopped Having Sex?” Not all young people but a whopping percentage: A survey by the Japan Family Planning Association reported that over a quarter of men aged sixteen to twenty-four “were not interested in or despised sexual contact.” For women, it was 45 percent.

The Observer
seems to have approached the subject in the same belief as P. D. James’s government porn stores—that it’s nothing that a little more sexual adventurism can’t cure. So Miss Haworth’s lead was devoted to the views of a “sex and relationship counselor” and former dominatrix who specialized in dripping hot wax on her clients’ nipples and was once invited to North Korea to squeeze the testicles of one of Kim Jong-il’s top generals. So, as
The Observer
puts it, “she doesn’t judge.” Except, that is, when it comes to “the pressure to conform to Japan’s anachronistic family model,” which she blames for the young folks checking out of the sex biz altogether.

But, if the pressure to conform were that great, wouldn’t there be a lot more conforming? Instead, 49 percent of women under thirty-four are not in any kind of romantic relationship, and nor are 61 percent of single men. A third of Japanese adults under thirty have never dated. Anyone. Ever. It’s not that they’ve stopped “having sex”—or are disinclined to have hot wax poured on their nipples. It’s bigger than that: It’s a flight from human intimacy.

They’re not alone in that, of course. A while back, I flew from a speaking engagement on one side of the Atlantic to a TV booking on the other. And
backstage at both events an attractive thirtysomething woman made the same complaint to me. They’d both tried computer dating but were alarmed by the number of chaps who found human contact too much effort: Instead of meeting and kissing and making out and all that other stuff that involves being in the same room, they’d rather you just sexted them and twitpicced a Weineresque selfie or two. As in other areas, the Japanese seem merely to have reached the end point of western ennui a little earlier.

By 2020, in the Land of the Rising Sun, adult diapers will outsell baby diapers: The sun also sets. In
The Children of Men
, the barrenness is a medical condition; in real life, in some of the oldest nations on earth, from Madrid to Tokyo, it’s a voluntary societal self-extinction. In Europe, the demographic death spiral is obscured by high Muslim immigration; in Japan, which retains a cultural aversion to immigration of any kind, there are no foreigners to be the children you couldn’t be bothered having yourself. In welfare states, the future is premised on social solidarity: The young will pay for the costs of the old. But as the west ages, social solidarity frays, and in Japan young men aren’t even interested in solidarity with young women, and young women can’t afford solidarity with bonnie bairns. So an elderly population in need of warm bodies to man the hospital wards and senior centers is already turning to robot technology. If manga and anime are any indication, the post-human nurses and waitresses will be cute enough to make passable sex partners—for anyone who can still be bothered.

A STROLL AT TWILIGHT

From a speech in Boston,
¹
October 10, 2010

A COUPLE OF
months ago, I happened to be in Tangiers, in a fairly decrepit
salon de thé
off the rue de la Liberté in Tangiers, enjoying a coffee and a stale croissant grilled and flattened into a panini. What could be more authentically Moroccan? For some reason, the napkins were emblazoned with “
Gracias por su visita
.”

And, while enjoying all this vibrant diversity, I chanced to remember yet another example of it—a recent headline from Canada’s
Shalom Life:
“No Danger to the Jewish Cemeteries in Tangiers.”

Apparently, the old Jewish hospital in this ancient port city had been torn down a couple of months back, and the Moroccan Jewish diaspora back in Toronto worried that the old Jewish cemetery might be next on the list. There are a lot of old Jewish cemeteries around the world, not a lot of new ones. Not to worry, Abraham Azancot assured
Shalom Life
readers: The Jewish cemetery on the rue du Portugal is perfectly safe. “Its sanctity has consistently been respected by the local government that is actually providing the community with resources to assist in its current grooming.”

Sounds great. Being in the neighborhood, I thought I’d swing by and check out the “current grooming.” It’s kind of hard to spot unless you’re consciously looking for it: two solid black metal gates off a steep, narrow street where the rue du Portugal crosses the rue Salah Dine, and only the smallest of signs to indicate what lies behind. On pushing open the gate and squeezing
through, I was greeted by a pair of long underwear, flapping in the breeze. In Haiti, this would be some voodoo ritual, alerting one to go no further. But in Tangiers it was merely wash day, and laundry lines dangled over the nearest graves. If you happen to be Ysaac Benzaquen (died 1921) or Samuel Maman (died 1925), it is your lot to spend eternity with the groundskeeper’s long johns.
Pace
Mr. Azancot, there is no sense of “sanctity” or “community”: as the underwear advertises, this is no longer a public place, merely a backyard that happens to have a ton of gravestones in it. I use the term “groundskeeper,” but keeping the grounds doesn’t seem to be a priority: another row of graves was propping up piles of logs he was busy chopping out of hefty tree trunks. Beyond that, chickens roamed amidst burial plots strewn with garbage bags, dozens of old shoes, and hundreds of broken bottles.

It’s prime real estate, with a magnificent view of the Mediterranean, if you don’t mind the trash and the stench and the chicken crap, and you tiptoe cautiously round the broken glass. I wandered past the graves: Jacob Cohen, Samuel J. Cohen, Samuel M. Cohen. . . . Lot of Cohens here over the years. Not anymore. In one isolated corner, six young men—
des musulmans, naturellement
—watched a seventh lightly scrub a tombstone, as part of a make-work project “providing the community with resources to assist in its current grooming.”

What “community”? By 2005, there were fewer than 150 Jews in Tangiers, almost all of them very old. By 2015, it is estimated that there will be precisely none. Whenever I mention such statistics to people, the reaction is a shrug: why would Jews live in Morocco anyway? But in 1945 there were some three hundred thousand in this country. Today some three thousand Jews remain—i.e., about 1 percent of what was once a large and significant population. That would be an unusual demographic reconfiguration in most countries: imagine if America’s black population or Canada’s francophone population were today 1 percent of what it was in 1945. But it’s not unusual for Jews. There are cemeteries like that on the rue du Portugal all over the world, places where once were Jews and now are none. In the Twenties Baghdad was 40 percent Jewish, and Tripoli. But you could just as easily cite Czernowitz in the Bukovina, now part of Ukraine. “There is not a shop that has not a Jewish name
painted above its windows,” wrote Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, visiting the city in 1937. Not today. As in Tangiers, the “community” resides in the cemetery.

You can sense the same process already under way in, say, London, the thirteenth-biggest Jewish city in the world, but one with an aging population; and in Odense, Denmark, where last year superintendent Olav Nielsen announced he would no longer admit Jewish children to the local school; and in Malmö, Sweden, where a surge in anti-Semitism from, ahem, certain quarters has led Jewish residents to abandon the city for Stockholm and beyond. Soon Malmö will be just another town with an abandoned and decaying “old Jewish cemetery.”

I was there a couple of weeks ago—sat and had a coffee in a nice little place in a beautiful medieval square, and fell into conversation with a couple of cute Swedish blondes. Fine-looking ladies. I shall miss Scandinavian blondes when they’re extinct.

At dusk, and against their advice, I took a twenty-minute walk to Rosengård. As you stroll the sidewalk, the gaps between blondes grow longer, and the gaps between young bearded Muslim men coming toward you grow shorter. And eventually the last blonde recedes into the distance behind you, and there are nothing but fierce bearded men and the occasional covered woman. And then you’re in the housing projects, and all the young boys kicking a soccer ball around are Muslim, and every single woman is covered—including many who came from “moderate” Muslim countries and did not adopt the headscarf or hijab until they came to Sweden. In progressive, post-Christian, swingin’ Sweden, the veil is de rigueur for Muslim women. Increasingly, ambulances and fire trucks do not respond to emergency calls in Rosengård without police escort. The writ of the Swedish state does not really run.

Sweden is about as far as you can get from Israel, but, as in the Jewish state, they’re trading “land for peace,” even if they’re not yet quite aware of it—and will likely wind up with neither. As I said, it’s about a twenty-minute walk between downtown and Rosengård, as the Nordic blondes thin out and yield to the beards and hijabs. That’s Europe’s future walking towards you.

1
    
At a meeting of CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

XVI

AGAINST THE GRAIN

DUTCH COURAGE

The Irish Times
, June 7, 2004

ALL WEEKEND LONG
, across the networks, media grandees who’d voted for Carter and Mondale, just like all their friends did, tried to explain the appeal of Ronald Reagan. He was “the Great Communicator,” he had a wonderful sense of humor, he had a charming smile. . . self-deprecating. . . the tilt of his head. . . .

All true, but not what matters. Even politics attracts its share of optimistic, likeable men, and most of them leave no trace—like Britain’s “Sunny Jim” Callaghan, a perfect example of the defeatism of western leadership in the 1970s. It was the era of “détente,” a word barely remembered now, which is just as well, as it reflects poorly on us: the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the free world had decided that the unfree world was not a prison ruled by a murderous ideology that had to be defeated but merely an alternative lifestyle that had to be accommodated. Under cover of “détente,” the Soviets gobbled up more and more real estate across the planet, from Ethiopia to Grenada. Nonetheless, it wasn’t just the usual suspects who subscribed to this feeble evasion—Helmut Schmidt, Pierre Trudeau, François Mitterrand—but most of the so-called “conservatives,” too—Ted Heath, Giscard d’Estaing, Gerald Ford.

Unlike these men, unlike most other senior Republicans, Ronald Reagan saw Soviet Communism for what it was: a great evil. Millions of Europeans across half a continent from Poland to Bulgaria, Slovenia to Latvia, live in freedom today because he acknowledged that simple truth when the rest of the political class was tying itself in knots trying to pretend otherwise. That’s what counts. He brought down the “evil empire,” and all the rest is details.

At the time, the charm and the smile got less credit from the intelligentsia, confirming their belief that he was a dunce who’d plunge us into Armageddon.
Everything you need to know about the establishment’s view of Ronald Reagan can be found on page 624 of
Dutch
, Edmund Morris’s weird post-modern biography. The place is Berlin, the time June 12, 1987:

         
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” declaims Dutch, trying hard to look infuriated, but succeeding only in an expression of mild petulance. . . . One braces for a flash of prompt lights to either side of him: APPLAUSE.

               
What a rhetorical opportunity missed. He could have read Robert Frost’s poem on the subject, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” to simple and shattering effect. Or even Edna St. Vincent Millay’s lines, which he surely holds in memory . . .

         
Only now for the first time I see

         
This wall is actually a wall, a thing

         
Come up between us, shutting me away

         
From you . . . I do not know you any more.

Poor old Morris, the plodding, conventional, scholarly writer driven mad by fourteen years spent trying to get a grip on Ronald Reagan. Most world leaders would have taken his advice: you’re at the Berlin Wall, so you have to say something about it, something profound but oblique, maybe there’s a poem on the subject. . . . Who cares if Frost’s is over-quoted, and a tad hard to follow for a crowd of foreigners? Who cares that it is, to the casual (never mind English-as-a-second-language) hearer, largely pro-wall, save for a few tentative questions toward the end?