Jaws image seen on SteynOnline
Mark Steyn’s column yesterday was in part a renewed pitch
for his book America Alone The End of the World as We Know It. Having read the book some years ago, I can
highly recommend it. But it’s Mr Steyn’s
reaction to actor Richard Dreyfuss that prompted the column. Here’s some of it:
American conservatives on the
Internet are abuzz with the recent interview given to Glenn Beck by Richard
Dreyfuss, star of Jaws, Mr Holland's Opus, American Graffiti and many more. Mr Dreyfuss has given up acting to
save his country:
@RichardDreyfuss tells me he gave up acting "ONLY for something I
loved as much, which was saving my country...It infuriates me that people don't
understand what this place means."
SteynOnline regulars will not be
surprised by this development. Mark and Mr Dreyfuss have met only once, very
briefly, two decades back at the memorial tribute in Montreal to their mutual
friend Mordecai Richler. But seven years ago it emerged that the actor was one
of many who had read Steyn's bestselling book. As Mr Dreyfuss put it in a three-part theopolitical dialogue with Susannah Black:
Mark Steyn, a writer with an irritating case of the smart-alecs, has
written a book I urge you read called America Alone.
Just the first few chapters are a geo-political wake-up call, and he is not
someone I agree with very much. But he quotes bin Laden: "When people see
a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong
horse." And he quotes Donald Rumsfeld: "If we know anything it is
that weakness is provocative."
We are on a clock we don't see or comprehend. We will not survive this
century unless civic virtue is revived. We can discuss its origins all day—if
we have the right to speak at all, and aren't dead under jihad.
Seven years after that observation,
"the right to speak at all" is increasingly imperiled, in ever more
areas - even for those as celebrated as J K Rowling, and even in Richard
Dreyfuss's own field, the arts. As Mark mentioned on his first
post-heart-attack appearance, he ran into an actress friend, a lifelong
leftie, who nevertheless has grasped the essential fact of our time - that
western civilization is sliding off a cliff. And, as Steyn put it, once that is
seen it cannot be unseen.
Mark's book was never Harry Potter
boffo, but it kept selling year on year, and picking up new fans en route,
including from Hollywood. For a tome by an irritating smart alec, America Alone proved somewhat prescient,
but its warnings went unheeded by the presidents and prime ministers in a
position to do something about them.
. . .
Non-judgmental multiculturalism is
an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis. After all, most
adherents to the idea that all cultures are equal don't want to live in
anything but an advanced western society. Multiculturalism means your kid has
to learn some wretched tribal dirge for the school "holiday" concert
instead of getting to sing "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" or that
your holistic masseuse uses techniques developed from Native American
spirituality, but not that you or anyone you care about should have to live in
an African or Native American society. It's a quintessential piece of progressive
humbug. . . . Multiculturalism was conceived by the western elites not to
celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide
bomb.
For the rest of it, click here.
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