Steyn’s achievement

The malign influence of Mark Steyn on the conservative mentality is seen in the opening paragraph of Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu’s review of his book at FrontPage Magazine last November:

In America Alone, Mark Steyn presents us with a doomsday scenario backed by impeccable science and research, and he does it in such a clever manner that we are actually amused as we read of the impending demise of Europe-as-we-knew-it, Japan, and Canada.

Cucullu regards it as a good thing, as a positive achievement of Mark Steyn’s, that Steyn makes his readers see the impending demise of Europe as amusing. Is being tickled at the thought of the prospective death of our civilization an appropriate response? Not for normal people. But Steyn does not appeal to normal sensibilities. He appeals to and encourages a weird mood of postmodern detachment, overlaying an attitude of profound hostility, that is rife among “conservatives” on the subject of Europe. Indeed, his writings on the Islam problem are to the Islam problem as postmodern architecture is to architecture: he takes something that is profoundly serious and important to society and turns it into a goof, a game, a series of ironic gestures, the real intention of which is to subvert the serious aims of civilizational defense that he pretends to be pursuing.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 19, 2007 04:35 PM | Send