From the shelves of the Paco library

Books that credibly map out the flight plan of pending social and economic disaster tend to make us want to run for the hills screaming. Mark Steyn, however, having cornered the market on the humorous apocalyptic essay, has authored a book which, while it will still make you want to don your mountain boots, gather your gold, guns and canned goods and head for that fortified compound in the wilderness, will at least give you much to chuckle over on the way. After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, manages the difficult task of raising both alarms and laughter, but don’t let the witticisms fool you; this is a deadly serious tome, the lessons of which we will ignore at our peril.

The volume is a kind of sequel to America Alone, which delved into the decline and imminent fall of the rest of the world. Unfortunately, it looks as if we probably won’t be spared the lemming-like race to destruction that is carrying Europe toward the precipice – hence, this very necessary follow-up book. Come for the entertainment; stay for the wisdom. Because, in spite of the comical analogies and the grin-inducing puns, this is a profoundly wise book, and if you have any liberal friends who have not completely lost their grip on logic, they, and the country, will benefit from reading it.

Steyn touches all the bases: illegal immigration, cultural relativism, public education as guerilla warfare, the spiritual enervation caused by the nanny state, the criminal mismanagement of fiscal policy, the Big Lie that props up the proliferation and expansion of entitlements, our (seemingly) inevitable moral and financial bankruptcy. We are faced with a baffling and frustrating confluence of evil ideas and gross incompetence, compounded by our own complacency, and Steyn does not shirk from callin ‘em like he sees ‘em.

After America is extremely quotable; in fact, it’s hard to cite the best passages without reproducing the lion’s share of the book. I’ll leave you with two:

Of all the many marvelous Ronald Reagan lines, this is my favorite:

We are a nation that has a government – not the other way around.

He said it in his inaugural address in 1981,and, despite a Democrat-controlled Congress, he lived it. It sums up his legacy abroad: across post-Communist Europe, from Slovenia to Bulgaria to Lithuania, governments that had nations were replaced by nations that had governments.

Today, in Reagan’s own country, we are atrophying into a government that has a nation.

And this, on our Present President Danger, and the important difference between experience and mere credentials:

His [Obama’s] rise and the dancing fountains of media adoration accompanying it are a monument to the fraudulence of so much elite “accomplishment”. The smart set were bamboozled because he seemed like one of their own: Columbia, Harvard Law, sort of “editing” a journal yet the only editor in its history never to publish a signed article, giving a lecture or two on constitutional law, handing out leaflets on the South Side of Chicago, voting present, listening to Jeremiah Wright’s conspiracy theories for twenty years, dining with terrorist educator William Ayers…This is a life? These are achievements?

Steyn is a pessimist (albeit a cheerful one), but he does hold out hope. The book closes with several sections that outline a strategy for recovery. But it is not a strategy that will work if we remain mere bystanders (one of the sections is entitled Do).

If I had to summarize the message of the book in a few words, I could do no better than to quote the author: “Big government makes small citizens.” An outstandingly entertaining and valuable read.