Читаем After America полностью

No two ship disasters are the same, but the testimony from the MV Estonia provides a snapshot of our new world: according to the Finnish Accident Investigation Board’s official report, several survivors reported that “everyone was only looking out for himself.” According to a Swedish passenger, Kent Harstedt, “A woman had broken her legs and begged others to give her a life jacket, but it was the law of the jungle.”¹³⁵

“Some old people had already given up hope and were just sitting there crying,” said Andrus Maidre, a 19-year-old Estonian. “I stepped over children who were wailing and holding onto the railing.”

You “stepped over” children en route to making your own escape? There wasn’t a lot of that on the Titanic. “There is no law that says women and children first,” Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine. “That is something from the age of chivalry.”

If, by “the age of chivalry,” you mean the early twentieth century.

As I said, no two maritime disasters are the same. But it’s not unfair to conclude that had the men of the Titanic been on the Estonia, the age and sex distribution of the survivors would have been very different. Nor was there a social norm at the École Polytechnique. So the men walked away, and the women died.

Whenever I’ve written about these issues, I get a lot of emails from guys scoffing, “Oh, right, Steyn. Like you’d be taking a bullet. You’d be pissing your little girlie panties,” etc. Well, maybe I would. But as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle put it: “When we say ‘we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances,’ we make cowardice the default position.”¹³⁶

I prefer the word passivity—a terrible, corrosive passivity. Even if I’m wet-ting my panties, it’s better to have the social norm of the Titanic and fail to live up to it than to have the social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it.

These are Finnish men, Estonian men, Canadian men. Are you so confident after the blitzkrieg on manhood waged by the educational establishment that the same pathologies aren’t taking hold in the U.S.? Consider the ease with which an extraordinary designation has been conferred upon the men who won America’s last great military victory—long ago now, before Afghanistan, before Mogadishu, before the helicopters in the Iranian desert, before Vietnam, before Korea. When Tom Brokaw venerates the young men who went off to fight in Europe and the Pacific seven decades ago as “the Greatest Generation,” by implication he absolves the rest of us. For, if they are so great and so exceptional, it would be unreasonable to expect us to do likewise.

“Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness,” wrote Wells. “Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help—may even be hindrances—to a civilized man.” As the Time-Traveler observed of the Eloi: “Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided against no needs. And their end was the same.”

Wells describes the Eloi drifting into “feeble prettiness.” Here is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard is a Dutch gay “humanist,” which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool. He was reflecting on the accelerating Islamization of the Continent and concluded 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.”¹³⁷

In the famous Kübler-Ross 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. Cuties in a death cab eventually have to pay the fare.

In this chapter, Steyn writes:

“Talk-show host Dennis Prager was asked to identify the single greatest threat to the future of America…. Mr. Prager said that the single greatest threat facing the nation was that ‘we have not passed on what it means to be American to this generation.’”

What do you think is the single greatest threat to America’s future?

Click here to tweet us (@Regnery, #AfterAmerica)

Click here post your answer on our Facebook wall (Facebook.com/RegneryBooks)