“Once upon a time there was light in my life…”

We are in trouble.  Big time.  Especially if this is representative of what high-profile conservative opinion writers currently have to offer the wider American electorate intellectually.  Mark Steyn, jumping from a post-revolutionary America moment . . .

…“Live free or die!” When I first moved to New Hampshire, where this appears on our license plates, I assumed General Stark had said it before some battle or other…

. . . and landing smack in the 21st century, at Hillsdale College, April 2009 (via Instapundit):

…Once you have government health care, it can be used to justify almost any restraint on freedom: After all, if the state has to cure you, it surely has an interest in preventing you needing treatment in the first place. That’s the argument behind, for example, mandatory motorcycle helmets, or the creepy teams of government nutritionists currently going door to door in Britain and conducting a “health audit” of the contents of your refrigerator. They’re not yet confiscating your Twinkies; they just want to take a census of how many you have. So you do all this for the “free” health care—and in the end you may not get the “free” health care anyway. Under Britain’s National Health Service, for example, smokers in Manchester have been denied treatment for heart disease, and the obese in Suffolk are refused hip and knee replacements. Patricia Hewitt, the British Health Secretary, says that it’s appropriate to decline treatment on the basis of “lifestyle choices.” Smokers and the obese may look at their gay neighbor having unprotected sex with multiple partners, and wonder why his “lifestyle choices” get a pass while theirs don’t…

The Stark quote aside, don’t accept any else of that above from Mr Steyn on face value, for it is nothing short of overcooked scaremongering.  We know from experience, because we’ve lived it.  As have some 60 million Britons.

In the last couple of years, this blog has been over such ground in some depth here, here, and here.

Presumably during his youth in Britain, Mr Steyn had been registered with and visited a local GP, and perhaps been treated in an NHS hospital?  If so, he appears to have gotten out alive.  And do University of Tennessee law professors know the NHS inside and out also?

Similarly, the Wife was at our GP just the other day.  Went in on time, emerged a short while thereafter.  Yours truly has been also at various times over the years; and, as you can read, has also survived to tell the tale.

Moreover, no one has ever knocked on our door asking to count Twinkies.  Not that we have those anyway.  Yours truly does have Oreos stashed in the cupboard, however.

Despite that, we can still book to see our doctor merely by ringing up and making an appointment.  His practice is located with others amidst a reasonable set of offices just off a nearby main road.  Surprisingly, no, it is not in a wing of Lubyanka Prison.

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The National Health Service is far from perfect, everyone agrees.  And that model probably wouldn’t work in the U.S.  The U.S. is a continent, not a country.

However, note this also: despite its shortcomings, the overwhelming majority of Britons would never do away with Mr Steyn’s tyrannical hell on medicinal earth. They’d more likely get rid of all their MPs first.

Which, come to think of it, the “enervated” people inhabiting these islands appear on the verge of doing. A fact about which enervation expert Mr Steyn would surely be ecstatic to learn. And which would in itself appear also to speak volumes.

Still, tyranny is also tricky. As one of those 60 millions Mr Steyn would certainly point to as having handed his “primal instinct” for survival over to a Leviathan European cuddly state, yours truly’s father-in-law regularly informs his doctor that he has stopped spreading sugar all over his Wheetabix.  And his doctor actually pretends to believe that.

And what of how our U.S. already has “government health care?”  Lots of it?  A huge example: what does one think (now over 40 year old) Medicare is?

Undoubtedly just an unnecessary burden we must endure owing to hordes of old fools who refuse simply to die and save us money.  Ingrates.  Mr Steyn and others believe medicine should be a business, whereas here it is now treated more as a social obligation.  Like policing.  And firefighting.

And education.  Remember “Schoolsandhospitals” is one word here in Britain.  Incidentally, on that first part, what does it mean for “freedom” once you have “free” government schools founded due to monies looted by a sovereign?  As Mr Steyn might well also observe, “let that pass.”

What we have been witnessing for the last 20 years over in the States, and why he and others are becoming so extra defensive of late, is the growing reality that businesses increasingly find they can no longer afford to foot the bill for their employees’ cover.  And, like GM, find themselves going broke paying for the retirees.  So they decide they aren’t paying any longer and therefore lots of people are left out to dry, coverage-less.

What a superbly sustainable, forward-looking status quo.  Among all his scattershot verbiage, Mr Steyn somehow never addresses that fundamental “freedom.”  Moreover asserting government’s getting involved in helping underwrite health care is somehow the latest thin end of freedom’s wedge is a curious position much for that reason: from a business perspective, being “free” from having to provide health care is liberating.

After all, why should GM be providing health care? And why should Microsoft?  And the local hardware store?  They make motor vehicles.  (Well, they do for however much longer, anyway.) And PCs.  And sell power tools.

No business in Britain has to concern itself in the slightest with health care cover for employees.  A small businessman doesn’t fret about funding his major medical for himself and his employees.  He can focus on running his business.

But if one needs surgery in New Hampshire or in Tennessee?  Fine if you have good health cover, but if lacking it in Mr Steyn’s and “Mr Instapundit’s” world, you are stoutly “free” always to try to take on a third mortgage, or sell your house. But if you can’t manage either, well, you may “die” with the quiet satisfaction of knowing you are “free.”

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Which brings us to Mr Steyn’s raft of groundbreaking wider, uh, prescriptions for what ails us.  Actually, there aren’t any.  There are just asides piled next to and on yet more asides.

This is becoming incredibly frustrating to watch unfold.  Where is today’s, say, William F. Buckley, Jr?  His lifelong intellectual struggle to bring together “big city” and suburban Roman Catholic conservatism with the greater electoral clout of the Protestant “heartland” variety, helped pave the way eventually for the rise of Ronald Reagan.  Both men realized fully that to combat liberalism’s excesses, conservatives had to think ahead, be creative, and above all offer voters something substantive to try to win the battle of ideas.

Other than “death,” that is.  But instead, now, we enjoy the likes of Mr Steyn, the Jim Steinman of punditry.  Few can match his nimble ability to churn out torrents of semi-sequitur keystroke all or nothing bombast which too often leads a reader ultimately nowhere.  Perhaps such a talent stems from his early media role reviewing musical theater?  And let us not forget those more prominent, such as the sadly now near-comedic Ms Coulter, and radio laugh riot-ideologue Mr Limbaugh.

That is not to maintain Mr Steyn and those are always wrong.  Far from it, for this blog does concur with many of their various individual assertions.  But if among the most overarching you can put forward is John Stark and “death,” well, one hardly needs Gallup to canvass voters asking why in droves they’ve exchanged you for the likes of the smooth, smiling, twinkle in the eye, Barack Obama.

We gullible mugs.  We had years back actually bought into how Mr Steyn had no use for the jihadist “we love death more than you love life” fetish. Or as he might well have observed, “Turnaround bright eyes, Every now and then I blow apart…”

Putting forward little but “no,” and harping on about “death” is probably why the party supposedly so committed to life, the Republicans, appears shortly to all but expire in the northeast, where the party had rocketed to regional political ascendancy within 2 years of its creation in 1854.  Since when did Republicans take to hectoring voters, rather than heeding what voters say they want from their government?  We had foolishly believed Democrats mostly did that?

To “live free” as also being about people deciding what we want and are willing to be taxed for?  Which was also what the American Revolution was about fundamentally?  Nevermind.  From behind the plow he no doubt pushes with his own hands, Mr Steyn is perfectly entitled to keep castigating the (shrinking Republican) citizenry for burdening august officialdom with little matters like their fears and worries.  He might even choose to produce a musical.

Because President Thomas Jefferson didn’t receive begging letters?  Absolutely not — not in his era of a sturdy, upright, independent yeoman farming, Grand Banks fisherman citizenry.  Or did he?  Doesn’t matter, for those people are now all dead anyway, and good thing, too: if they weren’t, imagine that Social Security “black hole”?

…The inertia, the ennui, the fatalism is more pathetic than the demographic decline and fiscal profligacy of the social democratic state, because it’s subtler and less tangible. But once in a while it swims into very sharp focus. Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay “humanist” (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool), was reflecting on the accelerating Islamification of the Continent and concluding that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.” In the famous Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, Mr. van den Boogard is past denial, anger, bargaining and depression, and has arrived at a kind of acceptance.

“I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.” Sorry, doesn’t work—not for long. Back in New Hampshire, General Stark knew that…

Also thankfully, though, Mr Steyn can at least form complete sentences.  Unlike Glenn Beck.  But if you require yet more evidence why we have President Obama, you’ve just gotten it.

That “1809” New Hampshire was a vastly different place in technology and social development from today’s? Hardly relevant.  And what we have also uncovered here is yet another supposedly “conservative” pundit who jumps feet first from revolutionary America straight forward to the modern, while paying scant attention to the two centuries in-between.

John Stark also retired nightly by candlelight.  Electricity was something terrifying that knocked down trees.  He never had the opportunity even to try to find the funds to reimburse a real doctor, and dwelled throughout his long life in a brutal world in which his lifespan was a lottery win based on good genes and more than a bit of luck, not science.

And had he been struck by a British or Hessian musket ball, almost certainly he wouldn’t have made it into the next day or week.  Let alone to age 94.  In comparison, a soldier shot today quite possibly could.

In fact, even if not bullet-ridden, most of us walking around now wouldn’t be here at all at the equivalent stage of our existences had we lived then.  Nature is a great waster, Thomas Jefferson lamented: so many more children had to be born, so some small number could reach maturity.  And even if we were lucky then to win the childhood lottery, it usually wasn’t for long: prior to the last 100 years, most of us left this world long before reaching Mr Steyn’s now “middle age.”

Pining over what had been in the days of yore, when many had 10 children only to bury 9 of them? Childhood death today?  A statistical shock, but which, now, for the de-ennui of our civilization, Mr Steyn feels perhaps should not be such a shock?

And as for the ennui of the newspaper scribbler?  Regardless, age and death still come eventually.  And hopefully it is not a sign of what’s to come for Mr Steyn that he is now all too often repeating himself.

Because while his “Eurocool” observation was arguably witty the first time out, seeing it recycled here for seemingly the tenth time, it is less so.  Interestingly, though, “Eurocool” is rather more fluid than Mr Steyn evidently appreciates.  For example, yours truly and the Wife just today received an invite to the pending nuptials of an Anglo-German and Canadian couple.  The former’s late father was a long-time UN staffer.  In Switzerland.

Okay, they aren’t gay.  And they are marrying in Canada, and not in Geneva, which might be interpreted as somewhat a bit “less cool,” true.  And as to various other heterosexual continental friends and acquaintances, some of whom, even if now divorced, even had children while married?

Let’s not digress.  Say what one will about Jon Stewart’s juvenile classroom comedian antics, but at least he doesn’t appear to see himself as another Tacitus.  And far left comedian Al Franken at least had the guts to put it on the line seeking elective office.  In contrast, all “Decline and Fall” Mr Steyn can appear to summon up is to suggest Tamil Tiger tactics.

Minus the high explosives, which if one thinks about it is rather oddly “Eurocool-wannabe.” Mr Churchill took hold of his lapels and announced, “His Majesty’s Government can’t have its troops standing idle.  Muskets must flame.”  At that General Marshall retorted, “Not one American soldier is going to die on [that] g-ddamned beach.”

And what does that exchange have to do with the immediate issues at hand here?  Nothing.  But don’t you just love that kinda talk, though?

Mr Steyn certainly seems to.  Hold fast on the op-ed and web pages ’till five minutes past midnight, mates: the “creepy government” is about to swallow whole whomever is still a manly patriot and regurgitate them into dissolutes who dream of Concord finally having its own 6ème arrondisement, there are those troubling non-English speakers in a Quebec their ancestors founded, the Brits are all spineless, and, worst of all, Mehmet II is pounding at the gate.

What’s left to salvage from the civilizational wreckage?  (Surely presaged by the famously indolent General Pershing having quietly had a Rumanian-French girlfriend for over thirty years.)  Nearly surrounded, where to retreat to?  Clutching a copy of Melancton Smith, fall back across the (quite possibly taxpayer-funded cleared) moat into the last redoubt, raise the bridge . . . and from inside blog (as General Stark surely would have, if only he had had broadband) about how everyone else is so g-ddamned wrong.

Brilliant.  A good route to electoral oblivion.  You know, death.