Austin Bay Blog

A listener sends this transcript of Blog Week In Review’s interview with Mark Steyn. I’ve read Mark’s new book ”America Alone” (which we discussed on the program). It’s excellent.

 

9/22/06 Transcript

^{____________________} u ^{____________________}
Austin Bay: Welcome to Pajamasmedia’s Blogweek in Review, a weekly panel discussion of the Internet’s more important stories with commentary, news and reviews on what’s breaking in the blogosphere. I’m Austin Bay, host and sometimes commentator with a website and weblog found at Austinbay.net.

This Blogweek in Review podcast is brought to you by Volvo Automobiles. Please visit your Volvo Retailer to drive the new 2007 Volvo XZ90, the best-selling European luxury SUV with over 50 international awards just got better with a 3.2 liter , 6 cylinder engine, roll stability control, MP3 capability satellite radio preparation, and available active bi-xenon headlights. Learn more at Volvocars.us.

Well let’s welcome this week’s panelists to Blogweek. First, Glenn Reynolds of Instantpundit.com. Hello, Glenn.

Glenn Reynolds (via telephone): Hi, Austin, great to be here.

AB: And let’s welcome our special guest panelist, Mark Steyn of Steyn online at Marksteyn.com. Hello, Mark.

Mark Steyn (telephone): Hi, Austin, good to be joining you two old hands at this, my first blogcast.

AB: Mark, we’re glad to have you, and we always plug our guest’s new books. You’ve got one coming out with the ominous title, “America Alone, the End of the World as we Know It”. What’s it about, Mark?

MS: Well, the title is pretty much explanatory. I think one of the great dangers of life is that we think of the present tense as a kind of a permanent state. And even if we think about the future, we think of it in terms of technological terms. You know, the horse and buggy give way to the steam train, give way to the Ford model T, give way to the aeroplane. But sometimes the world can go backwards, too, and I think we’re in great danger of a lot of the map being re-primitivized by darker forces and America finding it a much lonelier place in the years ahead. Having said that, there are a few gags in the book, so basically it’s the apocalypse with laughs, too.

AB: Now you said to, … living in the present tense, … looking through the book I saw a line where you said appeasement is really staying in the present tense. Is that good scan of that line?

MS: Yes, I think so, because I think that’s one of the difficulties is that the appeasing tendency, which is a natural one in the human heart in many ways, is really borne out of the desire to stay in the moment and to live in the moment, and to keep the moment, and so you defer on present things as long as they can be deferred. And one of the problems with that is that by the time you do eventually have to do something about them, your options are a whole lot worse. You know, millions of people in the early 1940s because the situation that could have been corrected at far smaller expense in the mid 1930s wasn’t. And I think we’re in danger of that happening again, too.

AB: Well, once again, thanks to both of you for joining us in Blogweek. Glenn’s located in Knoxville, Tennessee; Mark is in New Hampshire, and I’m in the hill country of central Texas. But on the World Wide Web, the Blogweek in Review crew is found at Pajamasmedia.com, the blog collective of 90 of the most active and most interesting weblogs on the internet.

This week, topic one: fighting words from the 14^th Century, but 21^st Century violence. Last week, Pope Benedict the 16^th spoke at Regensburg University in Germany. In an academic lecture that examined Christianity’s linkage of faith and reason, and also assessed historical relations between Muslims and Christians. Benedict quoted the Byzantine Emperor Manual II Paleologos. Muslim Turks had all but dismembered Manual’s realm, leaving little more than the city of Constantinople and a few scattered slices of Thrace and the Peloponnesian peninsula. What was Manual’s situation? In 1391 or possibly 1394, Manual engaged in a philosophical and theological dialog with an erudite Muslim-Persian scholar. The Byzantine challenged the Persian to show him, and I quote, this is the Pope’s quote, “Just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman,” Manual said, “such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” During the lecture, the Pope also pointed out that the dialog between Manual and the Persian examined “the truth of both religious faiths.”

The Pope’s lecture ignited a firestorm of Muslim protest, and in some instances a literal firestorm, with Christian churches attacked in the Middle East, and a Catholic nun murdered in a hospital in Somalia.

So Mark Steyn, you get the first question. What’s your take on the Pope’s use of this quotation, and the subsequent violence?

MS: Well, I think it’s interesting. He gave a rather ruminative speech, that wasn’t explicitly, directly about Islam – that wasn’t the main meat of the speech. And it provoked as the Danish cartoons and all the rest of it all this violence. But I think to be unusually optimistic about this, I think what’s interesting is that in a sense a lot of the people who like stirring things up in the Muslim world recognize that they might have bitten off a bit more than they can chew this time. I was interested to see that the Muslim brotherhood basically told a lot of the sort of angry foaming types to cut it out. But they didn’t feel that it’s in their interest right at this stage to take on the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church. You know, it’s one thing to issue a lot of death threats and intimidate a bunch of cartoonists in Denmark. It’s quite another thing to suddenly, basically declare that you’re going to behead the Pope. And I think they realize that they have perhaps overreached on this and have attempted to reign it back in the last couple of days.

AB: Well, Glenn Reynolds, the instant pundit, have the Muslim-Islamist radicals overreached in their protests against the Pope’s lecture at Regensburg?

GR: Of course they have. That’s all they know how to do. H-heh! Overreaching is their style, and I think Benedict expected this. I think that uh, … that there, there … . It’s been interesting to see sort of the reaction that there were people trying to explain away what he said as not very offensive. And of course it wasn’t very offensive, but that’s exactly the point. I suspect, however, that he’s a smart enough man because he was, … the biggest critics of him have never suggested that he is politically unschooled. I think he intended it. I think he realized he could make a very mild, scholarly remark, and then nonetheless if there was any way it could be interpreted as the least bit critical of Islam or Muslims, that it would set off a firestorm. And I think he figured that was OK, that it would have a valuable, clarifying effect, and I think that it did exactly what he wanted it to do.

AB: So you think Benedict has a strategy behind it, is that right, Glenn?

GR: Oh, I do, I absolutely do. I think he hit the strategy into actually in two directions. He is simultaneously firing a shot across the bow of the radical Islamists, and also trying to administer a wake-up call for the sort of post-Christian Europe that it is really in denial about all this.

AB: Before we get back to Mark Steyn, I want point both of you to Richard John Newhouse’s comments at firstthings.com on the blog where he wrote on September 18^th, it can be argued that the Pope’s Regensburg lecture will turn out to be the most important statement by a world leader in the post September 11^th period. There’s also another additional comment on there by Robert T. Miller who wrote on the blog that he thinks this is part of a Pope’s larger strategy that he intends to challenge the Muslim states to approach Christians and other religions on a basis of reciprocity. In other words, the Pope is going to demand that religious freedom accorded by European states to their Muslim minorities be accorded by Muslim states to their Christian minorities. Is that what you think, perhaps, Glenn, that the Pope was up to?

GR: Oh, I think absolutely. And I think that reciprocity  may seem like a mild-mannered strategy, but of course it’s extremely a radical strategy when you’re dealing with people whose attitude is “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine, too.”

AB: Mark Steyn, is that what the attitude of the Islamists is?

MS: Yes, I think it is largely. I mean, it’s not even. As we were saying earlier, these remarks were relatively mild. But what’s interesting is that even mild remarks, and in a sense even approving remarks about Islam, Muslims regard that as not for us to make. In other words, it’s not just that they don’t want criticism of Islam, they want Islam to be beyond discussion period. And I was interested in this remark that a Muslim in Australia made. She’s at a University down there. And she basically suggested that the Western world should just stop talking about Islam, not because it made Muslims in Western countries mad, but because it provoked what she called basically illiterate Muslims in barely poor countries, like Somalia, where there’s poor numbers mattered. But it’s not quite as simple as that. If you went to mass at Westminster Cathedral in the heart of London on Sunday, you were to run the gauntlet of a mob of people demanding that the Pope be beheaded. That’s standing in the heart of central London. There were British subjects demanding that the Pope be beheaded. There is a problem here. And the problem is not going to get better if we all agree not to talk about it.

AB: So either Mark Steyn or Glenn Reynolds, it strikes me that there’s a kind of censorship being practiced, a censorship of outrage and violence. Is that another way to look at the reaction to what the Pope said, whether he was trying to instigate or incite a reaction or not, look at the effects of the outrage and the violence.

MS: Well, I think Glenn has made this point on Instapundit several times. That essentially if you are either actually violent or threaten violence, if you can possibly threaten violence, that works. And nobody basically thinks twice about insulting Christianity, you can do that anytime and there’s no consequences. The New York Times, at the time of the Danish cartoon thing a few months ago, they actually declined to publish the Danish cartoons of Mohammed on the grounds that they might be offensive, and so to illustrate one of their stories about the cartoon crisis, they printed an illustration of the Virgin Mary covered in dung. Heh! So even when you’re talking about how offensive it Islam is, you can’t even illustrate it, you have to, ah … you can’t … not only can you not insult Islam in a story about Islam, but you can kind of gratuitously insult Christianity while you’re talking about Muslim sensitivities.

And I think Glenn is absolutely right on that. That if all the other people in society who were annoyed about things were to take the line that the Islams do, if Catholic groups and Protestant groups were to start blowing things up, would start shooting people, would start killing people, would start burning down embassies, they’d get a lot more respect sadly.

AB: Not Glen Reynolds, that’s a pretty radical suggestion on Mark Steyn’s point. Is that what the world needs, more religious radicals, not fewer.

GR: I don’t think that’s what the world needs. I think it’s just a restatement of the Maoist dictum that power grows out of the barrel of a gun. And I think you’re beginning, unfortunately, to see a backlash of just that sort. If you look at the Swedish elections this week, the Swedish Nationalist Party picked up a lot of votes, almost to the point of getting representation in Parliament. If you look at the British elections recently, the British Nationalist Party, which is quite openly Neo-Nazi, picked up a lot of votes. What’s happening is, if the people who are supposed to be in charge of being adult about this stuff and keeping the yahoos in line, don’t do so, then far worse elements start to rise to the top. When you send a signal that violence and intimidation are the way to get your way and that obeying the law and behaving decently just makes you a sucker, it’s no surprise that people decide they don’t want to be suckers.

AB: Mark Steyn, what are the prospects of a European backlash along the lines that Glenn just outlined or suggested?

MS: I think Glenn is absolutely right on that. You know, it’s always dangerous, and God bless America in this respect, because at least in the United States, however people feel about Republicans and Democrats, it is a more responsive politics than they know on the European Continent. And they have ruled basically, over the last half century now, more and more subjects beyond discussion, when you have these choices at election time between a very mildly left of center party and a very mildly, mildly right of center party, and they both agree essentially not to talk about immigration, not to talk about crime, not to talk about Islam, not to talk about half a dozen subjects that all happen to be the subjects the people want to talk about. If you rule them beyond discussion, if the mainstream parties won’t talk about them, then as we know in Europe there is a turn to the old strong man on a horse who promises to deal with these things. Usually the strong man on a horse is a disaster and he can’t deal with these things because, …  there’s an awfully lot of bloodshed before everyone eventually figures that out.

AB: Which European country, Mark Steyn, in your opinion, is closest to the potential backlash that Glenn suggested?

MS: Well, I think there were some very surprising countries that are beginning to understand that they can’t square the contradictions. The Netherlands is a very good example, because that’s a …  used to be regarded as the most tolerant city in Europe.  It was the one that was always held up by a lot of Americans who thought that, you know, America was a terrible, unpleasant country full of doctrinaire, religious people and right wing people and you could go to Amsterdam and Rotterdam and they were the most tolerant cities in the world. Well, Amsterdam now has gay-bashing.  You know, if a couple of gay guys coming out of a bar turn left instead of right to ‘em, as they’re walking home, down the, … go down the wrong street, a block either way, they risk getting beaten up. And it’s not right wing neo-Nazi  Dutch, native Dutchmen who’s doing that, it’s a particular subsect of that society that is growing, and growing more confident.

Belgium, I’m half Belgian, I uh … my mother’s family comes from this nothing little town near Antwerp called Sint-Niklaas, which I used to think when we went to visit relatives there was as parochially Flemish as you could get, you know, all outside bathrooms, and coal streaks, and all the rest of it. It’s now got this huge Muslim population, young Muslim population, aging Flemish population, guys getting beaten up on buses, guys getting attacked on buses on trains. It’s a very unpleasant atmosphere in a lot of these towns.

AB: Glen Reynolds, last question in this segment for you. What are the prospects for the Pope’s strategy of reciprocity, assuming that Newhouse and Miller read Pope Benedict correctly on his intents with that speech at Regensburg?

GR: Well, I think it’s going to  open the subject up for discussion, and I think that’s quite important. I think you’ve got to realize that the Pope’s battle is sort of split into two phases. He’s got Europe where everybody’s afraid to talk, but he’s also got a large portion of the world where Catholics are growing rapidly, where they’re much more concerned and frequently much more anti-Muslim than anyone in Europe. I have relatives in Africa who are, … they’re Anglicans, they’re not Catholics, but in Southern Nigeria where they’re from, the non-Muslims are all extremely anti-Muslim, and that in fact is pretty much the attitude throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa for a lot of historical reasons, they’re anti-Arab even when they’re not anti-Muslim, And he I think is going to be waging sort of a struggle on multiple levels, and as with most such struggles from the church, it’s probably going to be interesting to watch.

AB: So Pope Benedict at least gets credit for raising the issue.

GR: Well, he’s certainly trying to do that. I think his strategy goes beyond just raising the issue, but if he can get the Europeans to honestly discuss there problems, that’s actually a huge victory. It’s certainly more than we’ve been able to do.

AB: Pajamasmedia Blogweek in Review, Topic 2. Mark Steyn, our special guest. In Mark’s September 17 Chicago Sun Times column, Mark wrote, and I quote, “Tasteful passivity is the default mode of the age: Five years ago it was striking, even in the immediate aftermath [of 9/11[, how many radio and TV trailers for blood drives and other relief efforts could only bring themselves over the soupy music track to refer vaguely to ‘the tragic events,’ as if any formulation more robust might prove controversial.”

That particular column concludes with this quote. “At what point”, Mark writes, “does a society become simply too genteel to wage war? We’re like those apocryphal Victorian matrons who covered up the legs of their pianos. Acts of war against America have to be draped in bathetic music and uncomprehending reflections and crescents of embrace. We fight tastefully, too. Last week one of America’s unmanned drones could have killed 200 Taliban big shots but they were attending a funeral and we apparently have a policy of not killing anybody near cemeteries out of sensitivity. So even our unmanned drones are obliged to behave with sensitivity. But then, these days the very soundtrack to our society is, so to speak, an unmanned drone.”

So, Mark Steyn, your new book is “America Alone”. Is this lonely America really an unmanned drone?

MS: Well, I think that unmanned drone is a big part of our lives these days. You know, I don’t get too excited about the really crazy, left-wing kooks, who are explicitly and obviously full of vile loathing for Bush and America and all the rest of it. They’re not the problem. The problem, I think, is this far more slippery and sly{?} belief that you can have a kind of entirely enervated, culturally relativist world, in which you never ever have to stand up for what you believe. And it starts very early on. It starts in kindergarten, really, these days. But the whole way, … our whole way of forming the world view of tomorrow citizens is by raising them in this rather, kind of fluffy, nonjudgmental cocoon. You know, I find it to be very interesting in American schools over pre young children in grade school, they go on and on about self-esteem. You know, every individual has to have to self-esteem. Self-esteem is very important. I went to an English  boys’ school where the object was on the first day of term to have every last ounce of self-esteem hammered out of you by the end of the first week, so it’s an entirely different system for me.

For my kids, they’re told all the time, self-esteem, self-esteem is critically important. But what about societal self-esteem? You know, what about saying that the society you live in, the inheritance of that society is actually important and worth valuing, too. And I think we don’t do a very good job of that, and I think it poses a great question mark in the end of the long term future of that.

AB: Glenn Reynolds, I want to pick up on at least an aspect of Mark Steyn’s title, “America Alone”, one of the criticisms that the Bush administration receives in abundance is that America has abandoned its allies, or America is unilateralist, a go-it-alone strategy. Do you believe America really is alone?

GR: No. We’ll be alone if we look like we don’t have faith in ourselves, and if we look like we’re going to lose. You know, the rule is, everybody likes an underdog, but nobody likes a loser. And if we act as the Europeans frequently do, like our goal is just to put off trouble until another day, if we act like we don’t have confidence in ourselves and in our culture, then we’ll be looked upon as losers. And we’ll be looked upon as losers even if we successfully kill a lot of the enemy. Terrorism is, as I have said here before, is really an information war disguised as a military conflict. And, you know, it really calls Napoleon’s victims into reality. The moral is to the material as the three is to one. If we act like we don’t have faith in our culture, if we act like we don’t deserve to win, then the battlefield victories aren’t going to do us any good.

AB: Mark Steyn, early on in “America Alone”, you say that the planet is being primitivized. And then, following that comment, you about the doom sayers. You say, “consider some of Chicken Little’s eminent successors in this field, that in 1968 in his best selling book, the ‘Population Bomb’”, and here I’m quoting from your book, “distinguished scientist Paul Erlich declared that in the 1970s the world would undergo famines. In 1972 the study limits the growth, by, ah … the Club of Rome said that the world would run out of gold by 1981, tin by 1987, lead and gas and copper by 1993, and he also pointed in 1997 President Jimmy Carter of the United States confidently predicted that, ‘we could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.’”

Now before we discuss re-primitivization, why does doom sell?

MS: Well, I think a lot of that kind of doom mongering precisely because in a sense it is so unreal that it doesn’t require any serious effort from you. You know, Al Gore is going around saying that because of earth’s excessive consumption at the moment, its put us out of bounds balance with the rest of the universe. Well, you know, I don’t know how he’s measured than. The fact of the matter is if you pose that as the problem, it is so unreal that there is almost nothing you could do that would have any effect on it. So it becomes in effect a simple way of demonstrating your moral virtue to no purpose whatsoever. And there seems to be a streak in the psyche of kind of post-nationalist, post-modern man that would rather do that than actually attend to the hard, practical problems that need dealing with now. The moral pie-in-the-sky, the problem is, the more universal and intergalactic it is, the more it seems to appeal to a particular disposition these days.

AB: Well now, Glenn Reynolds, I’m going to ask you as well, why does doom sell? But you spoke a moment ago about the necessity for America having confidence in its culture, confidence in its political culture. confidence in American capabilities. Bur our media is permeated with doom. Is this a bit of a carnival?

GR: Well, doom sells because people pay attention to it, and there’s probably a good evolutionary reason for that. The people who sat in their caves and worried about what to do if a bear showed up, probably fared better than the people who sat in their caves and thought everything was going to be fine. So I think peoples are hard wired to be that way, and it does sell. And I have to say, it sells on the right, too. I mean, I get a bit impatient with what I see from some people in the pro-war community who write as if we’re all going to be wearing burqas, even the men are this weak, and as if its all hopeless, and as if we’re all doomed, and you know they’ve fallen victims to the fashion, too. I think that’s just kind of silly. But yes, sure its felt. Disaster movies sell, and that’s just part of marketing.

AB: Mark, that’s a good segue into a discussion of re-primitivization. What does that mean?

MS: You know, Glenn was mentioning his family in Nigeria, a few minutes ago. Nigeria is a very interesting country. Forty years ago it lived under English common law. And obviously when you get into that kind of mode of rule of districts, there was little different to being, say, in a courthouse in the English home counties just outside London. But generally speaking, it had a functioning common law system forty years ago. Now half that country lives under Sharia, and as Glenn says, the non-Muslims in Nigeria are feeling the pinch they … the Anglicans in Nigeria are certainly feeling under a lot of pressure. A lot of times if you have the misfortune to be a non-Muslim in a Sharia-run state, it can be very unpleasant. You see that all over the map, little countries, little territories that have just been picked off by growing, darker forces. Not just in what we like to think of the Third World, but in the heart of Europe. I mean, it’s astonishing to me that the collapse on it … the European Union pretends to be a Superpower, and yet it just sat there and dithered as a quarter million corpses piled up on its borders in Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

And when you look at some of the pressures that countries are going to come under in the next few years, I think it is an open question whether in the end, if these guys are not scared about taken on the Nigerians, not scared about taking on the Israelis, not scared about taking on the Indians in Kashmir, why would they be scared about taking on the Norwegians and the Belgians? And are the Belgians likely to be able to stand up to these forces in the end any more effectively than some of these much tougher countries have been able to do? I think the danger is that in a sense the whole of Europe could have a kind of … it’s certainly demographically moving towards a Bosnian profile. And that in itself means that it’s in for a period of instability. That’s what I really mean by re-primitivization, that countries we think of as stable spiral backwards.

AB: Well, expand on that for a moment, what you mean by the Bosnian profile and let’s relate that to “America Alone”. One of the issues that Mark deals with in depth is Europe’s demographic crisis. 

MS: Yes, well in Bosnia … and at the time we didn’t really make too much of it, you know, when you followed it on the evening news show, you were vaguely aware there were different ethnic groups in Bosnia, but you didn’t actually think of it in terms of a kind of frontline in a civilization struggle. What happened in 1960 in Bosnia, basically the most numerous ethnic group were the Bosnia Serbs who were orthodox Christians, and the Bosnian Muslims were a much smaller group. By 1990, those situations had reversed. The Bosnia Muslims were the much larger group, and the Bosnian Serbs had declined. That’s why demography and birthrates are being so important. So the Serbs concluded that if you can’t buck demography the old-fashioned way, by having babies, all you can do is actually start a civil war and try to reclaim your strength by culling your enemy. And unfortunately for the entire European continent, they face the same demographic that Bosnia did where you have aging, native European populations who are now on the brink of kind of demographic death spiral, and you have these young, surging, incredibly confident Muslim populations, and once …  you know, people say, “Oh well, you’re making a fuss about nothing. The Muslim population in France is only 10%.” It’s not a question of looking at the hard core numbers, it’s a question of what percentage of people under 30 are Muslim. What percentage of people under 20 are Muslim, because that’s your future.  That’s your future, it’s no consolation saying you’re still in the majority if most of your crowd is in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. And that’s the reality in France, and Spain, and Belgium, and the Netherlands, but you have basically European populations that have just, for one reason or another, just basically given up breeding.

AB: Mark, that’s all very depressing. What advise would you give to the Bush administration and indeed to Americans in general who care about what we should do next?

MS: Well, I think America really needs to think seriously about what allies it has, real allies it has, and do its best to shore them up. I’m immensely heartened whenever you go to Australia because one of the most heartwarming features about Australia is you don’t have to just talk sense with the right there, but there’s a remarkable number of people who would identify themselves on the left in Australia who talk an awful lot of sense on this issue, too. And I think America and Australia both understand what it’s about. It’s not about racism, it’s not about being anti-immigration, but is understanding the importance of assimilating immigrants when they come here, and the only way you can do that is to have something they can assimilate with, which is a large part of the problem in Europe. Even if you wanted to assimilate with modern Dutch identity, what would it be? What would you do? And in America, I think whatever the problems here, there isn’t the same problem with just huge millions and millions of alienated immigrants that they have in most of Europe now.

AB: Pajamasmedia Blogweek in Review, topic 3. So Glenn Reynolds, what’s a story to look for in the next week to ten days?

GR: Plummeting gas and oil prices.

AB: Do you still see that in light of Ahmadinijad and Hurricane Hugo Chavez’s trip to the United Nations? I noticed that Hugo was passing out heating oil credits in Harlem.

GR: I think that nonetheless these guys need money, and as the price falls, they’re going to have to keep pumping. I think that you’re likely to see gas and oil prices fall for, well certainly the next week to ten days, and probably for the next month or two, and it’s going to be interesting to the see the impact of that. I suspect that as the Iranian issue heats up again, we’ll see prices rise and things tighten up. The interesting thing here is that people see rising and falling oil prices as something that hurts the United States, but in fact it does more than that. When oil prices go up, lots of people are uncomfortable, and though Iran can manipulate global politics by doing things that push prices up, the Bush administration actually has leverage by threatening to the same thing. And I think they’re going to try to use both the carrot and the stick on that to try to put the squeeze on Iran in the short term.

AB: Mark Steyn, are there any special topics you’re going to address in a column coming up in the next couple of weeks?

MS: Well, I love the opportunity these days, if you can find it, to write about something that isn’t war and jihad and all that depressing stuff. And that’s always what I look to, just because this thing is going to go on for decades, and you treasure these kind of whacky stories. I look back really fondly on the 1990s bal[?] and the whole Monica business, because it was a holiday from history. But I think of the silly little things that you got to write columns about there and weeks that nothing much seemed to be happening. And I wish it could come back to that. There’s a story up in Canada that I thought was hilarious. The chairman of the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, the big national broadcast up in Canada, was forced to resign because he did this long column in a French language magazine in Quebec in which he said, I’m trying to put this as delicately as I can, that he found going to the bathroom as it were and performing his morning ablutions more satisfying than sex. And the minute this little story came up, a bizarre story came out of nowhere and the guy eventually had to resign over it. And I thought to myself, in the good old days of the late 90s, I would have had just gleeful fun doing a column about that, getting all kinds of cheap, unworthy gags out of it. And these days, you know, with war and gloom, a person like Ahmadinijad and nuclear matters and all of this, you never get the chance to do those little whacky  columns any more, and I miss that.

AB: All right, Mark. Once again, the title of the book and your publisher?

MS: It’s “America Alone: the End of the World as We Know It”, and it’s published by Reignery, and if the world doesn’t end by, you know, 2009, I’ll probably do the “End of the World, Part II” as a sequel. Ha, ha. I think it was going to go apocalyptic, you might as well  do it whole heartedly.

AB: And when is the book officially come out, Mark?

MS: I think it’s officially out October the 16th. If you order it online, they have actually physically got the book, these online sellers, so they will ship it back to you in 24 hours or so.

AB: Well I want to thank both of you for being on the program. Glenn Reynolds as usual, thank you for being on Blogweek in Review.

GR: Thanks for having me.

AB: And Mark Steyn, our special guest, Mark, thanks for showing up on Blogweek, and we certainly enjoyed discussing “America Alone”.

MS: Well thanks to you Austin, and to you Glenn. I discovered both of you kind of I think around later afternoon on September 11^th,  2001, so I’m celebrating my 5^th anniversary in respect of both you guys and your immense contribution to debate in this country.

AB: Thank you very much Mark. Until our next Blogcast, this is Blogweek in Review at Pajamasmedia.com. And I’d also like to remind you this Blogweek broadcast was brought to you by Volvo Automobiles. Please visit your Volvo retailer to drive the new 2007 XC90, the best-selling European luxury SUV with over 50 international awards, just got better with a 3.2 liter, inline, six cylinder engine, roll stability control, MP3 capability, satellite radio preparation, and available, active Bi-Xenon headlights. Learn more at Volvocars.us. Let me also add a special thanks to our producer, Ed Driscoll, another Pajamasmedia blogger. Visit Ed’s website at eddriscoll.com. So for Blogweek in Review, and Pajamsmedia.com, I’m Austin Bay.

^{____________________} u ^{____________________}