Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Civic duty   [Mark Steyn]

I wrote a column this week about the malign influence of bigshot Saudis, and received the following letter in response.  

Well, well, well, what a strange trip it's been. 6 years later, the War on Terror still looking to end in a stalemate with Terror, and you're almost ready to admit there's an elephant in the room, Mr. Steyn...

Well, if you mean the House of Saud, way back when in the fall of 2001, I was one of the first columnists on the planet to finger Saudi Arabia not just as the "root cause" of 9/11 but as the worst US foreign policy mistake of the 20th century. Headline: "The Snakes Of Araby". Lots of stuff about America's Frankensaud monster. My anti-Saudi credentials are second to none. But my correspondent thinks that leads logically to certain conclusions:

Yes, the Saudi Wahabbi trogs are liable to win, thanks to their money. But where does their money come from, Mr. Steyn? Comes from the gasoline pump, n'est-ce pas? That same source of money that Dares Not Speak Its Name in right wing circles. For 6 years not a single blessed neocon pundit was ready to point to the obvious thing: that instead of putting a "support our troops" decal on the back of the Ford Expedition, a more patriotic thing would have been to bring the damned thing to the scrap yard and trade it in for a Civic. But heaven forbid that might be said.

Well, you can say it all you want but people will just laugh at you. Americans will never accept that the way to make the world better is to drive smaller, less comfortable cars. And, besides, the premise is completely false: If you trade in the Expedition for a Honda Civic, that oil you save won't stay in the ground and thus impoverish the Saudis; it will merely be sold to the Chinese and Indians and other fast developing nations who will replace America and Europe as buyers of the cheapest and most easily extractable oil in the world. So the sheikhs will be as rich as ever and funding as many Islamist nutters. But we'll be driving worse cars and feeling virtuous.

The long-term solution is to accelerate a move to a post-oil world, to develop something better and cheaper that makes oil obsolescent, and obliges at the very minimum the Saudi princes whoring in London to make do with cheaper hookers. But instead my correspondent calls for "a working passenger rail system", and at that point his choo-choo pretty much jumps the tracks. Look, America is a de-urbanizing society, even compared to Canada. And that's a good thing. This is the cheapest country in the world to buy a four-bedroom house on a big lot and an automobile that'll take three or four kids. That's one reason we're not in the demographic death spiral of Europe or Japan. It's easy to make do with a Honda Civic or 2CV or Fiat Uno when you've got nothing to put in it.

What worries me about this letter is that it came from an "MIT" e-mail address. I think that stands for "Massachusetts Institute of Technology", which I gather is supposed to be an elite institution. I find it disheartening that a big-time MIT prof thinks we can whip the Saudis by all going back to horse-and-buggy and the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe.

Unless, of course, it's the Manitoba Institute of Tap-dancing.

08/08 01:19 AMShare