The Undocumented Mark Steyn (53 page)

After that hilarious interview with Boris, I suggested to Dan Colson, the Telegraph Group’s executive supremo, that we hire Dr. Algosaibi and alternate him as a columnist with me—one of those Point-Counterpoint deals, Infidel & Believer, Whacko & Wahhabi, that kind of set-up. But a couple of days later it was announced that King Fahd had appointed him Minister of Water—which, on closer inspection, turns out mostly to involve being Minister of Sewage. It’s a sad day when an offer of a
Telegraph
column isn’t competitive with manning the Sewage Department in Riyadh. Ghazi issued a statement saying he accepted his new gig “with humility and a deep sense of responsibility.” Like his incendiary heroine “the bride of loftiness,” he embraced the sewage portfolio with a smile.

I don’t know whether Boris has yet introduced the lash to the Speccie office but, judging from Thursday’s
Telegraph
column, he’s pretty much signed on to the Algosaibi line on Iraq. Who says ambassadors have no impact? As for me, I’ll miss the old suicide-bomber groupie, but I’m keeping his name in the Rolodex. Of all the A-list Saudis I know, he’s the one with the most effluents in government circles.

A couple of days later
The Telegraph
published the following letter:

         
Sir—Mark Steyn was kind enough to greet my appointment at what he calls the Ministry of Sewerage in his usual, charming manure of speaking (Comment, Sep 28). I would like to inform him that our
treatment plants will always be ready to receive the literary outpourings emanating from his most humane soil
.

               
Ghazi Algosaibi

               
Minister of Water and Electricity

               
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Ghazi’s replacement as ambassador in London was the deeply sinister Prince Turki, a classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown and former head of Saudi intelligence. And His Highness was no barrel of laughs. “The arrogance of Mark Steyn knows no bounds,” he huffed after one column. “With his imperialist pen he would like to wipe my country off the map.” I read it and re-read it, but I couldn’t spot any wit or wordplay, and I felt an odd sense of loss
.

Not long afterwards, Sheikh Algosaibi sent me a book—a slim, rather limpid novel he’d written called
A Love Story.
On the inside was written:

         
To Mark
,

         
Ambivalently
,

         
Ghazi

That’s my all-time favorite book inscription. He wrote many novels, and a memoir of his time in government
, Yes, (Saudi) Minister!,
which is a lot funnier than
The Audacity of Hope
or
It Takes a Village.
Most of his books were at one time or another banned in his native land: The House of Saud found Ghazi an indispensable diplomat and technocrat, but the playfully subversive themes of his literary side were less welcome. He died of cancer in 2010, and for me a little bit of the fun went out of our civilizational death-match. I wish he were around for me to send this book to:

         
To Ghazi
,

         
Ambivalently
,

         
Mark

1
    
Boris Johnson, now the Mayor of London, had just “inherited a safe seat” at Henley-on- Thames from Michael Heseltine, and been elected to the House of Commons.

2
    
Miss Amiel had hosted a party at which the French Ambassador, M. Daniel Bernard, had opined that “all the current troubles of the world are because of that shitty little country Israel.”

OF ALL THE GIN JOINTS IN ALL THE TOWNS IN ALL THE WORLD . . .

The Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle wrote of the piece that follows:

“Can we build a special museum just to put this Mark Steyn post in?

Stick it in a fancy gold frame and surround it with red velvet ropes?

Almost too amazing to be real.”

Well, nobody offered the money for the museum and the velvet ropes, so I’d thought I’d stick it in a book. And yes, it’s amazing but it’s true. I believe there are just shy of twenty thousand municipal entities in the United States. How hard can it be to pick three random all-American towns that one effete Canadian writer would never have set foot in? Harder than you’d think. . . .

The Corner
, September 20, 2011

OVER AT
The Hill
, the daily newspaper covering Congress, Bernie Quigley notes a spate of similarly-titled apocalyptic tomes:

         
Several recent books see the end coming. John Birmingham’s
After America:
Fighter bombers rushing at us on the cover. You get the picture. Paul Starobin’s
After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age:
Planet of the Apes with nerds instead of apes. Be afraid. But not that afraid. Mark Steyn’s
After America: Get Ready for Armageddon:
Self-explanatory. Andrew Breitbart said, “May puke I’m so happy.” Meaning he liked it.

               
These books see America as an idea rather than a place because the authors don’t understand place and have probably never been to an American place they were inclined to stay in. They would get a rash in real places like Tobaccoville, N.C., Haverhill, N.H., or Luckenbach, Texas, where Waylon, Willie and the boys hang.

There are arguments to be made against my book, but that’s probably not the one to hang your hat on. As it happens, the Steyn global corporate headquarters are located in Woodsville, which is a
quartier
of the town of. . . Haverhill, New Hampshire. My
Corner
posts are filed from Haverhill. My
National Review
columns are filed from Haverhill. My fabulous hair for tonight’s
O’Reilly Factor
was coiffed by Amanda, my Haverhill hairdresser. I’ll be guest-hosting
The Rush Limbaugh Show
live from Haverhill this Friday, and, if Mr. Quigley cares to swing by the studio, I promise to do the show naked so he can observe that I have no rash.

Better luck next time, genius.

Bernie Quigley never took me up on my offer. As to his other rash-inducing “real places,” Luckenbach, Texas, is a ghost town (population: 3) and Waylon, Willie and the boys don’t hang there, because Waylon Jennings is dead and, even when he wasn’t, never set foot in the joint. But, if all it takes to be authentically American is to record a song about a place you’ve never been to, I’m happy to do “Luckenbach, Texas” on my next album
.

LAYING IT ON THE LINE

In 2000, a few weeks before that year’s presidential election, running out of cheap Alec Baldwin jokes (he’d promised to leave the country if Bush won) and in need of a bit of filler to pad out the page, I wound up accidentally inaugurating what became a quadrennial tradition. Here’s how I ended that column
.

The National Post
, September 21, 2000

ONE OF THE
peripheral reasons Dubya will triumph on November 7 is that he has no interest in Hollywood celebrities. Still, on the matter of his self-removal, I think Alec Baldwin shows great courage. Following last week’s prediction that Bush would win with around 380 of the 538 electoral college votes, I see that several readers have written in to query my sanity. So, while I’m at it, let me make another prediction: Bush will win the debates—at least in the political sense of improving his position as a result of his performance. Go ahead, scoffers, scoff your scoffiest. “Al Gore will win,” wrote Alan Rutkowski on Monday’s letters page. “When he does, will Mr. Steyn turn in his political pundit’s badge?”

I’ll do better than that, man. If Bush loses, I hereby pledge that I will kill myself live on the Internet.

Er, okay, maybe not. Being a corpse would severely impact on my earning potential, though apparently it’s no obstacle to holding down a columnar gig at
The Globe and Mail
. But I think Mr. Rutkowski makes a good point—that the sage whose wisdom is unheeded ought, like Alec Baldwin, to depart the scene. It would be ridiculous to continue posturing as an incisive analyst of
U.S. affairs once I have been exposed as a complete buffoon. So I’m happy to assure readers that, if my prediction of a Bush victory is wrong, I will refrain from writing on U.S. politics in
The National Post
for the entire duration of a Gore presidency.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get on with my application for
National Post
ballet critic.

A few weeks later, we were plunged into the hell of dimpled chads, recounts, and Supreme Court decisions—none of which I’d had an inkling of when I breezily put my job on the line. Notwithstanding that that was a closer shave than I’d anticipated, four years later I did it all over again—this time across the Atlantic:

The Irish Times
, October 11, 2004

IT WAS SOBERING
, on reading the recent flurry of letters in this newspaper under the heading “Balancing the U.S. Debate,” to discover that it was this column that had single-handedly unbalanced it. “If Steyn represents the American right, where is the spokesperson for the American left?” demands Conor McCarthy of Dun Laoghaire. The hitherto perfectly poised seesaw of press coverage of the United States is apparently all out of whack because my corpulent column is weighing down one end while on the other up in the air are the massed ranks of
Irish Times
correspondents, RTE, the BBC and 97 percent of the European media class, plus Anthony O’Halloran, who opined in these pages a few days ago that “anyone who cares to visit a small town in the Midwest will encounter what can only be described as ultra-right-wing thinking.” Prof. O’Halloran didn’t cite any examples of this “ultra-right-wing thinking,” secure in his assumption that most readers would know the sort of thing he had in mind.