Life is a Cabaret

In this week's column by documented legal immigrant Mark Steyn, we look at the question of how this upcoming election is marked by the choice between the frivolous and the serious. Mr. Steyn argues that during the 90s Americans opted for the silly party and their court jester pederast Boy Clinton. Charles Kruathammer called it a "holiday from history." And surely there can be no doubt that after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, most Americans thought that all of our national security problems were solved and we could pop the champagne and celebrate with endless episodes of Baywatch.

But just because you ignore it, doesn't mean that history isn't there unfolding behind the scenes. Indeed, all during that long and apparently sunny decade, the storm clouds were gathering on the horizon. And on 9-11 history showed up at our front door to announce that it had never really been away. Will the American people acknowledge the reality of the world we live in today and keep the silly party out of power, or will they opt to hide their heads in the sand until the next attack in hopes of avoiding it? It is difficult to prognosticate. But regardless of which way this election goes, history will not go away, and the world we live in will continue to offer dangers that sooner or later will end up at our front door. The only question is whether we will be ready and prepared to face them or not.

In my new book (out this week, folks: you'll find it at the back of the store past the 9/11 Conspiracy section and the Christianist Theocrat Takeover of America section and the ceiling-high display of the new Dixie Chicks six-CD box set of songs about how they're being silenced), I say that some of us looked at Sept. 11 as the sudden revelation of the tip of a vast iceberg, and I try to address the seven-eighths of that iceberg below the surface -- the globalization of radical Islam, the free-lancing of nuclear technology, the demographic weakness of Western democracies. Other folks, however, see the iceberg upside down. The huge weight of history -- the big geopolitical forces coursing through society -- the vast burden all balancing on the pinhead of the week: in this instance, Mark Foley.

Thomas Sowell says the question for this election is not whether you or your candidate is Republican or Democrat but whether you're "serious" or "frivolous." A lot of Americans, and not just their sorry excuse for a professional press corps, are in the mood for frivolity. It's like going to the theater. Do you really want to sit through that searing historical drama from the Royal Shakespeare Company? Or would you rather be at the sex comedy next door?

In the 1990s, Americans opted for the sex comedy -- or so they thought. But in reality the searing historical drama carried on; it was always there, way off in the background, behind the yuk-it-up narcissist trouser-dropper staggering around downstage. The mood of the times was to kick the serious stuff down the road so we could get back to President Lounge Act offering to feel our pain. With North Korea, the people delegated to kick the can a few years ahead -- Madeleine Albright, Jimmy Carter -- are now back, writing self-congratulatory op-eds about their genius and foresight. Not at all. Albright's much-touted "agreement" was a deal whereby Washington agreed to prop up a flailing basket-case state in order to enable it to buy enough time to become a serious destabilizing threat to its neighbors and beyond. Many of our present woes -- not least Iran -- derive explicitly from the years when Carter embodied the American "superpower" as a smiling eunuch.

Thanks in part to last decade's holiday from history, North Korea and Iran don't have to buy any more time. They've got all they need. Life isn't a night on Broadway where you can decide you're not in the mood for "Henry V" and everyone seems to be having a much better time at "La Cage Aux Foley." Forget the Republicans for a moment. In Connecticut, the contest is between a frivolous liberal running on myopic parochial platitudes and a serious liberal who has the measure of the times and has thus been cast out by the Democratic Party. His state's voters seem disinclined to endorse the official Dems' full-scale embrace of trivia and myopia. The broader electorate should do the same.