The Undocumented Mark Steyn (9 page)

Meanwhile, I see the Bundesbank has decided to move three hundred tons of German gold from the Federal Reserve in New York back to Frankfurt.
It’s probably nothing. And what’s to stop the Fed replacing it with three hundred tons of Boston cream donuts and declaring them of equivalent value? Or maybe three hundred imaginary dead football girlfriends, all platinum blondes.

Memo to John Boehner and Paul Ryan: No one will take you seriously until you find some photogenic second-graders and read out their cute letters. “I want everybody to be happy and safe and fithcally tholvent.” They may have to practice.

1
    
Manti Te’o had recently been praised for continuing to play stellar football for Notre Dame while mourning his late girlfriend, Lennay, who had died in a car accident while battling Leukemia. Lennay turned out not to exist.

III

THE REPUBLIC OF MANNERS

POTPOURRI ROASTING ON AN OPEN FIRE

Maclean’s
, December 25, 2006

I
’
M ONE OF THOSE FELLOWS
who tends to leave the old Yuletide preparations until around 2 p.m. on Christmas Eve only to discover that half the stores closed early at 1 p.m. and those still open have nothing left except for massive storewide clearances on Hannukah wrapping paper. Yet for a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-Santa-suit-pants kind of guy, I seem to have acquired over the years an enormous number of books on how to have the perfect Christmas. There’s
Checklist for a Perfect Christmas
by Judith Blahink and
How to Have a Perfect Christmas
by Helen Isolde and
The Absolutely without a Doubt Most Fantastically Perfect Christmas Ever
by Evelyn Minshull and
Creating the Perfect Christmas: Stylish Ideas and Step-By-Step Projects for the Festive Season
by Antonia Swingson and Sania Pell, because there’s nothing you need around this time of year more than a multi-step project. The more steps the merrier, I always say. One stands agape before those folks who not only have their own seasonal celebrations under scheduled-to-the-second control but also find time to write a bestseller with a faintly hectoring title like
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Less Like Christmas than It Should Considering It’s Already the Second Week of September
.

For the most part, these authors seem to have no existence beyond the holiday season. The two-female co-author combo is a particular favorite, both of them on the back in cozy sweaters looking like extras from
The Andy Williams Christmas Show
. Is there really an “Antonia Swingson” or “Sania Pell”? Their names sound alarmingly like their home-making tips: “For fun on
Christmas morning, why not cut up the gift tags and randomly assemble them into holiday-advice-book author-pseudonyms?” “Judith Blahink”? Isn’t the blahinks what Scrooge has when they find him face down in the mulled cider? Christmas? Blah-hink-humbug.

I don’t want to give the wrong impression. A lot of the stuff in these tomes is very intriguing. Each year, for example, I dig out my old pal Martha Stewart’s entry in the field—
Martha Stewart’s Christmas
—and find myself strangely drawn to the phrase “coxcomb topiary.” The thing’s huge. It starts out as a misshapen lump like a hobbit that’s fallen into a trash compactor but that’s before Martha’s got to work “studding” it with—to pluck at random—“tiny pomegranates dusted with clear glitter.” Who would have thought the English language would ever have need for those words assembled in that order? Every third week of December, I read them and marvel. And then I drive to Walmart.

“Coxcomb” is the perfect
Perfect Christmas Book
word. Not all perfect Christmas authors are hip to that. Some think you can eschew “coxcomb” and get away with “potpourri,” which your run-of-the-mill generic mediocre
Most Fantastically Perfect Christmas Ever
book throws around the joint like, well, potpourri. But what is it the Fool tells King Lear? “If thou follow him, thou must needs wear my coxcomb.” Or I am thinking of his codpiece? I always did get them mixed up at school. Codpiece topiary would also add a distinctive touch to one’s holiday, although perhaps a livelier talking-point than one might want in a Christmas centerpiece. But the point is, if thou followest Martha, thou must needs wear her coxcomb. Also her persimmon, another great
Perfect Christmas Book
word. If I were ever to write my own seasonal advice book, I would do so under the
nom de plume
(or, indeed,
nom de plume pudding
) of Persimmon Coxcomb.

In
Old-Fashioned Country Christmas
by Vickie and Jo Ann of the Gooseberry Patch, Joan Schaeffer is more off-hand: “Snip herbs and tie in small bundles to dry. During the winter when the fireplace is in use, toss a bundle of herbs into the crackling fire for a wonderful scent.” I like the insouciance of that “toss.” But it’s a very useful tip. A blazing hearth of oregano helps tone down the overpowering stench of cinnamon that can otherwise so easily
predominate at this time of year. Still, the truly perfect preparing-for-Christmas book eschews Schaefferesque nonchalance, preferring an artful balance of massive effort and minimal reward. Nothing sums up the genre more succinctly than the two words “non-alcoholic wassail,” for which cup of cheerlessness one can find a recipe in
Christmas 101
by Rick Rodgers.

As the title suggests, Mr. Rodgers, the author of
Thanksgiving 101
, sticks with the basics. “Organization is a skill I developed as a caterer,” he begins. Without organization, you’re screwed. You’re Baghdad beyond the Green Zone. But, with organization, you’ll be your very own Red-and-Green Zone, and Mr. Rodgers is the go-to guy. Before you can organize your Christmas it’s important to organize the organization of your Christmas, and a useful aid to organization is something called a “list.” That’s why, like many seasonal advice-givers, he has a section called—wait for it!—“Making a List and Checking It Twice.” This isn’t his line. He got it from the lyric for a song called “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” Did you know that seasonal music can often add an appealingly seasonal touch to the seasonal atmosphere at this seasonal time of the seasonal season? Why not teach yourself vocal arranging and work up your own a cappella multi-part medley of “In the Bleak Midwinter” and “I Wonder as I Wander” for cousin Mabel’s kids to distract Gran’pa with on Christmas morning as you’re putting the final touches of clear glitter on the tiny pomegranates?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before you can organize anything, you have to organize your list. As Rick Rodgers says, “A series of lists will help you breeze through the process.”

And don’t worry, it’s not boring! As Rick Rodgers also says, “Every time you mark a chore off the list, you will get a rewarding sense of accomplishment.”

But what if your list is simply too extensive? As Rick Rodgers further counsels, “If you look at a list and feel overwhelmed, pick up the phone and get a friend to give you a hand!”

But, by this stage, Rodgers knows he may be pushing the joys of list-making a tad too far and that it’s time to get on to the actual lists. “Here,” he writes, “are the lists that I use again and again.”

And the first one is . . . “Guest List”! “If you are having a large holiday season party, send out invitations as early as possible.” But when should one have a holiday season party? A good tip is to hold it during the holiday season. “We usually give our holiday party the week between Christmas and New Year’s,” reveals Mr. Rodgers.

Ha! What a piker! The true secret of successful Christmas planning is not to schedule it in December. As Vickie and Jo Ann recommend in
Old-Fashioned Country Christmas
: “Rather than having your annual party in December when you’re too overwhelmed to enjoy it, host a cookout in July with a Christmas theme, everything red and green!” Bright red watermelon, green salad, but with Christmas decorations! “White twinkling lights, Christmas napkins and a small artificial tree decorated with take-home ornaments make for a very festive atmosphere.” And in Canada in July we may even have real snow!

Christmas in summer, huh? That doesn’t sound much like an “old-fashioned country Christmas,” unless the country in question is Australia. Yet it makes perfect sense, and not just because nothing says “dreary convention-bound loser” like holding your Christmas party at Christmas. After all, if you schedule your holiday season for July, it’ll free up a lot of time in late December to work on your coxcomb topiary.

LAST DANCE

The Wall Street Journal
, April 11, 1997

LIONEL BART
,
COMPOSER
of
Oliver!
, once told me that he did so many drugs in the late 1960s that he came round in the early 1980s and realized that he didn’t have a single memory of the 1970s. “Did I miss anything?” he asked.

“Not really,” I replied. For Lionel and the similarly situated, Anthony Haden-Guest’s
The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night
(Morrow) and John Heidenry’s
What Wild Ecstasy: The Rise and Fall of the Sexual Revolution
(Simon & Schuster) are here to fill in the missing gaps.

If you can remember the Sixties, so the old gag goes, you weren’t really there; if you can remember the Seventies, chances are you aren’t here. For Mr. Haden-Guest, researching his “culture of the night” is now an act of archeology: Deep in the basements of Manhattan warehouses, you can discern traces of the physical landscape, but the witnesses are gone. Steve Rubell, Studio 54’s presiding genius, is dead of AIDS; so’s his onetime partner’s sometime lover, Roy Cohn; so are celebrity regulars like Halston and Nureyev; so are their paramours like “the notorious livewire of Nightworld” Victor Hugo—no relation to the author of
Les Misérables
, though in his final days he wound up sleeping in a park.

In Mr. Heidenry’s account of landmark victories in the sexual revolution, most of the freedom fighters end the same way: Michel Foucault, the French philosopher and S&M devotee, is dead of AIDS; so’s Franco Rossellini, producer of
Caligula
, the “first sexually explicit first-run movie in history”; so’s John (“Johnny Wadd”) Holmes, the gifted star of a hundred lesser epics.

But before it shriveled away to an emaciated cadaver of its former self, what a world it was! Sometimes it seems to blur into one composite haze, involving copious use of Quaaludes and grottoes. There were those so eager
to get back to the nonstop party that they’d leap from bed and get an early breakfast at four in the afternoon.

Once upon a time, there were famous concert pianists and novelists and impresarios, but the heyday of hedonism blended such distinctions into one homogenized category of “celebrity”: The photographs of Studio 54’s celebrity couples are like a computer breakdown at a dating agency—“William Burroughs and Madonna,” “Regine and Salvador Dali,” “Margaret Trudeau on the floor with marijuana importer Tom Sullivan.”

What happened during the Seventies can be neatly encapsulated by the career of one Linda Boreman. Miss Boreman fell in with Chuck Traynor, an abusive gun-toting pimp who put her to work servicing business clients who liked to spank and whip. One day Mr. Traynor landed her a starring role in a film where she was mounted—there is no delicate way to put this—by a German shepherd (by which I mean a dog, not a shepherd). On the strength of this effort, she was signed for another film, called
Deep Throat
, for which she changed her name to Linda Lovelace. The movie earned the first ever “100” rating from
Screw
magazine, but even more surprisingly
Time
magazine and other mainstream publications ran stories on it, and the film took off—a porn film for Mr. and Mrs. America. The star was invited on
The Tonight Show
, shot a cover for
Esquire
, and turned up at Hollywood parties.

Linda Lovelace’s translation from involuntary prostitute to celebrity darling exemplifies the more general trend—of how the dark fringes of society crept into the centrality of our culture. Celebrities were decadent in the Twenties, but they kept it to themselves; in the Seventies, they came out of the closet, trailing nightclubbers and swingers with them. But Miss Lovelace’s original film moniker fits better: In this world, there’s little lace, less love, but it is a bore, man. Mr. Haden-Guest calls it “the last good time,” but look at those snapshots again: Baryshnikov and Jagger and Liza, all dead-eyed. “Grace Jones came in naked. Quite a few times,” says a doorman. “Probably more than she should have. Because after a while it became boring.”

Mr. Haden-Guest’s is the more elegant read: An urbane Englishman, he descends to the lowest depths of New York’s Hellfire Club but always gives the
impression he’s just passing through—Haden-Guest as Hades guest. Mr. Heidenry is more earnest, as you’d expect from a former editor of
Penthouse Forum
, and he mourns the lost Arcady of America’s cities, “where once tourists could obtain both topless and bottomless shoeshines.” For him, the final nail in the coffin was that big 1994 survey showing that the Americans who get the most sex are . . . monogamous married couples.