That’s not such a good bet these days—Starbucks has closed a thousand outlets since 2008—but, on the other hand, world domination–wise, the espresso era does seem to have presided over a transformation in the dominant cultural aesthetic. Inertia has never been cooler. It’s seeped out of the coffee house to stalk the land. I mean Barack Obama barely even bothers to pretend he’s got a plan for debt “reduction” or Medicare “reform,” does he?
I don’t go in for as much pop sociology as, say, David Brooks. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say he got it right on the general sensibility of a decade ago in Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Would you put money on his contemporary American elites to rouse themselves before catastrophe strikes? Or is somnolent, myopic complacency unto the end the way to bet?
Bit of a downer to end on, I know. But have a Dacopa. Unlike a soy peppermint chai frappuccino, it might perk you up.
UNSUNG SONGS
Maclean’s, October 8, 2007
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE between Fred Thompson, actor and presidential candidate, and people fluent in the Amurdag language?
Well, let’s start with what they have in common: they both turned up in the news cycle a few days ago. National Geographic made the headlines with a report that half the world’s seven thousand languages will disappear by the end of the century. Languages are vanishing faster than at any time in human history. In Australia alone, researchers for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages could identify only three speakers each of Yawaru and Magati Ke. As for the Amurdag tongue, I use the singular advisedly: they were able to find just one man with rudimentary knowledge of the language. On the other hand, given that Amurdag was already thought to be extinct, his lone tongue may portend a stunning comeback for the lingo, the first shoots of a new Amurdag spring.
For National Geographic types, the tragedy is “the loss of knowledge about the natural world.” “Most of what we know about species and ecosystems is not written down anywhere,” says Professor David Harrison of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. “It’s only in people’s heads.”
Big deal. The species and the ecosystem will, despite the sterling efforts of SUV drivers, still just about be around for folks to figure out. The real loss is more elusive and more profound. For generations there have been Yawaru and Magati Ke songs: no one will sing them ever again. There are stories of Yawaru and Magati Ke heroes and scoundrels: no one will know them, no one will tell them. And no one will care, because only a handful of anthropologists will be aware they ever existed. The extinction of Yawaru and Magati Ke not only obliterates their future but their past.
The death of even the smallest, meanest culture is a humbling event.
Which brings us to Fred Thompson. The other day, Senator Thompson was on the campaign trail and told his audience: “This country has shed more blood for the liberty of other countries than all other countries put together.”
More than “all other countries put together”? As I told our American friends, I’m the most pro-American non-American on the planet, but if that’s the new default braggadocio, include me out. The Washington Post’s attempt to refute Thompson by championing the Soviets was as predictable as it was absurd—the Reds certainly shed a lot of blood but not obviously in the cause of liberty. Yet slightly more startling was the number of pro-Fred American conservatives who sent me scornful emails belittling the efforts of the Commonwealth.
As old-timers will tell you at Royal Canadian Legion halls, the Dominion “shed more blood” proportionately than the United States in the Second World War. Newfoundland—not yet part of Canada—had a higher per-capita casualty rate than America. No surprise about that: Newfs and Canucks sailed off to battle two years ahead of the Yanks. And, if we’re talking hard numbers, almost as many Britons died in the war as Americans, despite the latter having thrice the population.
To this, my U.S. correspondents responded that that was all very well but these chaps were fighting for King and Empire rather than engaging in a selfless campaign of global liberation for noble reasons. Arguing the respective motivations of a dead Canuck on Juno Beach and a dead Yank on Omaha is a shrill and unworthy argument, and anyway I generally incline to Patton’s line that the object isn’t to die for your country but to make the other sonofabitch die for his. But imagine what the state of liberty in the world would be like had the British Empire not decided to soldier on alone, against all the odds and all the expert advice, after the fall of France in 1940.
Here’s another thought experiment: imagine no Pearl Harbor, no casus belli to draw in the Americans. And yet somehow the mangy old British lion and its loyal cubs in the dominions managed to win all by themselves, and at all those war cemeteries on the Continent there was no Old Glory, just Union Jacks and Red Ensigns. Fred Thompson would not be able to make his claims to American über-exceptionalism über alles because the romance of America the Liberator would not exist. Saving Private Ryan would be about some bloke from the Cheshire Regiment, or maybe even the Princess Patricias. Hollywood would be forced to do as it did up to the Thirties: its tales of derring-do on far-flung shores would be mostly British—the Bengal Lancers et al.
Instead, by 1945 Hollywood was making films like Objective: Burma, in which what was in real life an Anglo-Aussie campaign became onscreen an all-American one. British public opinion resented that enough to chase the movie out of the country. Fifty-five years later, the film U-571 told the story of a critical episode in the Battle of the Atlantic—the capture of a German submarine’s Enigma cipher machine by the Allies. In humdrum reality, it was a British operation. In Hollywood, it was left to. . . well, guess who? By this stage, British public opinion just gave a shrug, and left the picture to flop all on its ownsome.
The Americans entered the war, and they won it, and they won big, unlike the Brits and Canadians. So it’s theirs to mythologize, as Senator Thompson did. And there’s no point anybody complaining about it. The rest of the Allies are not quite in the designated Magati Ke role, but they’re almost there. The Thompson crack and the National Geographic line are both about cultural victory and cultural eclipse.
A year ago I gave a speech down under at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Sell-out audience, standing room only. So many folks that, blinking out across the footlights, I couldn’t really discern midst the great tide of humanity any particular demographic characteristics. But the excitable Aussie pundit Antony Loewenstein did. Evidently he felt like a hip-hopper at a tea-dance: “The crowd largely consisted of old, white males,” he wrote. “Steyn and his fellow travelers speak eloquently about western civilization on the verge of collapse, but the kind of world they imagine is not one that I either recognize or want. Thankfully, his ‘vision’ is likely to die with the Bush Administration. Likewise the elderly types at last night’s event probably still fondly remember the White Australia [immigration] policy. They’ll be dead soon enough.”
Oh, I don’t know. Leaving aside the question of whether the bloom of youth has faded from my own cheeks, I was introduced on stage by Dr. Janet Albrechtsen, who’s a brainy gal but also quite a hottie. At the end of the evening, I posed for photographs with several gorgeous young sheilas, even if too many of them did tend to offer the somewhat dispiriting line that their mothers are really big fans of mine. Greg Lindsay, of the Centre for Independent Studies, which organized the event, responded that 10 percent of the audience were students, another third were under forty, a third were female, etc.
But that’s not really what Loewenstein means. When someone deploys the “old white men” crack, they’re saying you are the past, and your bitterness and prejudice is little more than a side effect of your decrepitude. Whereas we are the forces of progress, and therefore by definition we’re young and healthy and full of vigor. So many of the most deeply ingrained assumptions about a culture are predicated on a youthful dynamism. We love the young because the young are the future—not just in pop songs and movies but i
n everything. As the blond blue-eyed Aryan boy in the Hitler Youth get-up sings in Cabaret, “Tomorrow belongs to me.” It’s his youth that makes the scene seductive and dangerous. If he were an “old, white male” like me or Noam Chomsky or Neil Young or Gloria Steinem, it would be merely pathetic.
I may, indeed, be “dead soon enough,” as Mr. Loewenstein devoutly wishes. But so will the greying Sixties boomers whose ancient pieties provide so much of his cobwebbed progressivism. And to whom then will tomorrow belong? On my Australian tour, I was speaking mainly on demographic decline—on the failure of Spaniards, Italians, Russians, Japanese, and, yes, Canadians to have enough children to sustain not just their welfare programs but their societies and culture. That blond blue-eyed apple-cheeked Aryan lad from Cabaret is now an elderly Berliner wondering why he hasn’t got any grandchildren. By the end of this century, the Yawaru and Magati Ke languages will be extinct. But there’ll be little reason to learn German or Japanese either.
And the last Belgians and Italians, like the Kallawayan people of Bolivia, will make their accommodations with the future. “Children are little barometers of social prestige,” says Professor David Harrison. “They understand implicitly that if they live in an environment where two languages are spoken, one of them is less valued than the other, and they will speak the more valued language.”
That applies to broader cultural choices, too. If you’re Nada Farooq, raised by moderate Muslim immigrants in Mississauga, Ontario, educated at Meadowvale Secondary School, what’s “more valued”? Your “fellow Canadians” who gave their lives at Normandy? Or the fallen Chechen jihadist for whom you named your newborn son? In much of the west, “cultural eclipse” would seem to be a given. The only question is what comes next.
OH, SAY, CAN YOU SEE?
How many politicians does it take to change a light bulb?
Answer: Three hundred and fourteen members of the House of Representatives, plus eighty-six out of one hundred senators, and one president—Bush by name, who signed into law on December 19, 2007, something called the Energy Independence and Security Act.
The act doesn’t do anything for energy “independence,” although it does dramatically reduce yours. Likewise your “security.” And it also outlaws one of the great icons of the Age of Invention—U.S. Patent Number 223,898, granted on January 27, 1880, to Thomas Edison: the incandescent light bulb.
By law, the electric bulb as we have known it is history, as America joins Canada, Australia, and the European Union in punching your lights out. The approved replacement is the CFL. You may have seen it already in certain environmentally conscious households poking out from under ceiling fixtures like a yogurt-coated curly fry (it’s about 25 percent longer than the old bulb). That’s what CFL stands for: Curly Fry Lightbulb.
Or you may not have seen it, not if you happened to be visiting in the evening when the lights are “on” but everything seems a bit sort of blurry. Edison’s soon-to-be-illegal bulb concentrates its light. The new improved bulb diffuses it. And, if you drop one, you could be diffusing it all over the entire municipal sewage system. Guest-hosting America’s Number One radio show, I found myself reading out the official advice on what to do if you break a CFL:
The Rush Limbaugh Show, December 30, 2010
ACCORDING TO THE cheery cut-out ’n’ keep guide from the pro-CFL U.S. News & World Report, “The bulbs must be handled with caution. Using a drop cloth might be a good new routine to develop when screwing in a light bulb.”
That’s not such a big deal, is it? You can get a drop cloth at Home Depot for a couple bucks. Just be sure to keep it handy when you need to change a light bulb—and in a well-lit area where you won’t have to wait so long for the CFL to warm up before you can see where the drop cloth is. And, if while installing the new light bulb you have to drop something, drop the drop cloth rather than the CFL.
But, if you do drop the CFL, which contains “a small amount of mercury,” there’s no need to panic. “We encourage people not to panic if they break a light bulb,” says Scott Cowger, Director of Outreach and Communications, for Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection.
Phew, thank goodness for that. You mean I can just scoop it up and toss it in the trash? Whoa, hold on. This is the official advice from the State of Maine Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management:
What if I accidentally break a fluorescent lamp in my house?
The lamp contains a small amount of mercury, but you can clean this up yourself if you do the following:
Do not use a vacuum cleaner to clean up the breakage. This will spread the mercury dust and vapor throughout the area, and could potentially contaminate the vacuum cleaner.
Okay, I can’t just pick the broken light bulb up and stick it in the trash, and I can’t use my vacuum cleaner either.
Keep people and pets away from the breakage area until the cleanup is complete.
Great, got it, my pooch starts snuffling around it, and the dog’s gonna die.
Ventilate the area by opening windows and leave the area for fifteen minutes before returning to begin the cleanup. Mercury vapor levels will be lower by then.
Okay, so ventilate the area. Open the windows. Leave it for fifteen minutes, get your pets out so they don’t go snuffling around in all the mercury from the light bulb. Got it. So I take me, grandma, the pets, get us all out of the house, open the windows for fifteen minutes.
For maximum protection, and if you have them, wear rubber gloves to protect your hands from the sharp parts.
Fine. So after fifteen minutes with grandma and the pets outside, I have to go inside and find the rubber gloves to throw away the light bulb.
Carefully remove the larger pieces, place them in a secure closed container, preferably a glass container with a metal screw top lid and seal, like a canning jar.
Right. So I need rubber gloves and a canning jar when I reenter the premises.
Next, begin collecting the smaller pieces and dust. You can use two stiff pieces of paper such as index cards or playing cards to scoop up pieces.
Okay, so I need rubber gloves, a canning jar and a set of playing cards when I reenter the contaminated premises.
Pat the area with the sticky side of duct tape, packing tape, or masking tape to pick up fine particles. Wipe the area with a wet wipe or damp paper.
Gotcha. When I reenter the premises, I need rubber gloves, I need a canning jar, I need a pack of playing cards, and I need duct tape and wet wipes.
Put all waste and materials into the glass container including all materials used in the cleanup as well.
Ah. So you have to throw away your playing cards and your gloves and your duct tape and the canning jar, too.
Tape and label the container as “universal waste: broken lamp.” Remove the container with the breakage and cleanup materials. Continue ventilating the room for several hours. Wash your hands and face. Take the glass container with the waste material to a facility that accepts universal waste.
So you can’t toss it in the trash, you can’t toss it in your regular town dump, you have to take it to a special facility.
When a break happens on carpet, homeowners may consider removing throw rugs or the area of the carpet where the breakage occurred as a precaution, particularly if the rug is in an area frequented by infants, small children, or pregnant women.
So now aside from getting the gloves and the canning jar and the set of playing cards, you’ve got to have a pair of scissors to cut up and remove the contaminated carpet from your floor. See how simple it is? Just fourteen easy steps. With Edison’s light bulb, if you break it, it’s one cumbersome step—you toss it in the trash. But according to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, with the Curly Fry Lightbulb it’s just fourteen easy steps. All you need to keep handy are duct tape, playing cards, a canning jar, a sticky label to put on it. Who doesn’t have those within easy reach of every electrical outlet?
If y
ou’ve got a mason jar but it’s still got your pickles and berries in it, the Bureau of Remediation and Waste Management adds:
You may need to empty it into another container before using it.
Don’t ask me why. Are they just stating the obvious? Or will the mercury mutate with the content to create some giant toxic pickle that will rampage up the Maine coast all the way Down East to Campobello Island, where it will pick up the Roosevelt summer retreat and crumple it like matchsticks and hurl it across the Bay of Fundy to Nova Scotia?
This is the official State of Maine advice on what to do if you break a light bulb in America in the twenty-first century, culminating with: Don’t forget to empty any pickled tomatoes or persimmon jelly you may have into another mason jar.
So that’s now two mason jars you need if you break a light bulb. If you don’t have another mason jar available, just empty the pickled tomatoes or the persimmon jelly on to the carpet, because, as the Bureau of Remediation also tells us, you’re going to have to throw the carpet out anyway and any other fabrics that come into contact with the Curly Fry Lightbulb. Throw away your carpet, throw away your canning jar, throw away your playing cards. . . .
Oh, and throw away your clothes. You can’t stick any contaminated clothes in the washer because, says the Environmental Protection Agency, mercury fragments in the clothing will contaminate the machine and pollute the sewage system. Got that? So, even if you do everything right, the li’l ol’ lady next door who’s eighty-seven and perhaps isn’t up to speed on the Curly Fry Lightbulb, maybe she’ll just break a light bulb and she’ll put the drop cloth in the washer and it’ll contaminate the entire sewage system.