Steyn: The (Multinational) Shadow

Doug Traverse, a Canadian who has lived in the U.S. for the last 12 years and became a citizen four years ago, has some observations about another Canadian who (apparently, sometimes, sort of) lives in the U.S.:

It appears that Canadians fit right into the new “universalist” America—Mark Steyn seems to have a protean personality that “fits into” any national context (U.S., Canada, Great Britain). I’ve noticed that he can write for a Canadian newspaper, such as the National Post, on purely a Canadian issue and come off as someone deeply ingrained in the Canadian scene. Then one spots an article by him in a British newspaper and there he is commenting on a specifically British issue—once again coming off as someone deeply ingrained in the British scene. And he will do the same in the U.S.! As if he were deeply rooted in the U.S. I think his humour is a strategic distraction that takes a reader into the mirage that Steyn is “then and there” with him whereas he is really some place else… Humour sucks one into a momentary compliance with the writer.

Whenever I read Steyn, I always come away with the feeling that he has popped into the scene and then like The Shadow vanished away to reappear somewhere else.

A reader writes from England:

While we have good reason to be critical of Steyn, he is an exceptionally talented writer. It is not easy to “fit the mould,” as it were, in the U.S. and in Britain simultaneously—the difference in the style of writing in America and Britain is quite significant. And yet I have read dozens of articles by Steyn in the Telegraph and not once have I ever felt that these were written by a partly ignorant transplant. And the same probably applies to his American stuff too—although as I have never been to the United States, I wouldn’t be able to say so with great confidence.

It is a tragedy that someone with his gifts uses those talents only for the purposes of taking his readers to a fantasy land of dangerous escapism.

I then asked Australian blogger Mark Richardson:

Have you (or any fellow Australians) ever been under the impression that Mark Steyn is an Australian? I ask this because, as a reader in England pointed out to me, Steyn writes as an American for Americans, as a Canadian for Canadians, and as an Englishman for Englishmen. So we were wondering if he also writes as an Australian for Australians.

Mr. Richardson replied:

I think he writes occasionally for our national newspaper, The Australian, which is the one I don’t read so often. I don’t recall having the impression that he was writing as an Australian, but nor does he seem to write as an American or a Canadian or an Englishman. Which is one reason I was so interested when you tried to pin down some biographical details some time ago.

The reader in England writes:

That’s interesting. I think that, to be fair to Mark Steyn, he hasn’t “passed” himself off as a Brit in British newspapers. It is just that the affinity he seems to show for local causes and politics can often lead someone to think he is, in fact, a Brit.

He also writes for the Spectator which is a bedrock of Toryism in this country.

I replied:

Well, he didn’t exactly attempt to pass himself as an American, either. What he did was to write about American politics, frequently mentioning his home in Vermont, and not let on for years that he is a Canadian, or, if he did let it on, doing it so infrequently and briefly that hardly anyone would notice. So he wasn’t exactly passing himself as an American, but he was certainly allowing many people to believe he was one.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 10, 2005 02:43 PM | Send