Culture Vultures: Scout's Honor

...Who can honestly say his wasn't a better life for the marginalizing of his sex drive...

...On August 27, as Chavez partisans blockaded legislators from entering the national assembly, the big story at eud.com concerned Chavez's stated willingness to meet with FARC over the head of Colombian president Andres Pastrana...

...But instead, the auld sods insist that they be allowed to march in one huge gay phalanx...

...You gotta laugh, especially if you're a scout —for, as Baden-Powell advised his young charges, frequent laughing helps you stay healthy...

...That would be straining and draining it out of your system...

...They already can, say the organizers...

...Instead of passing through this phase in a few fraught months and then getting on with a useful life, "many a fellow gets into the habit of immorality with women or self-abuse with himself, which then goes on after the rutting season is over and when he has grown into manhood...

...All three of these bien-pensant institutions have traditionally expressed knee-jerk fears of American hegemony — hyperpuissance is the term most in favor at Le Monde...

...La Repubblica ran a long essay on the tooth anniversary of Friedrich von Hayek's death, in which it defended the Chicago economist's theories against Keynes's...

...Rutting season is a very upsetting time, and it troubles some fellows to an alarming amount of depression or excitement, which often lasts for several months...

...We'll be here every year...

...in Germany, Die Zeit, which comes out weekly...

...S o the New Jersey Supreme Court has ruled that, like restaurants, the Boy Scouts are a "public accommodation...

...Foreigners sometimes beat the pants off us...

...Such men are regarded by the massed ranks of America's litigious gays as "repressed...

...B-P himself thought that if he ever married it would be to "a sort of girl Peter Pan" —taking his cue from another now famouslyrepressed Victorian, Sir James Barrie...

...It had a picture of Bill and Monica, and above it the headline: "Has the World's Only Superpower Gone Insane...

...in Italy, La Repubblica...

...that doesn't mean the police are conserva . , v tive in their private life...

...The two are sitting side by side in their airy duplex, and Constable Proulx's hand is absentmindedly stroking the nape of Constable Lavallee's neck," wrote Ingrid Peritz: No, indeed...

...It was, in its way, a predictable decision: When even the most resilient body on the American landscape goes head to head against the gays, the gays wind up trouncing them...

...According to polls, about 5o percent of Americans believe homosexuality is wrong "in all circumstances," yet, despite that, the conventional wisdom says that, when it comes to gays, just get with the beat...

...But, in canoeing down life's river (to use B-P's favorite metaphor), there are five potential rocks on which a young chap can easily hole his boat: Horses, Wine, Women, Cuckoos, and Irreligion...

...Anyone who follows Latin American developments in our own press knows there are two huge stories developing in South America now: Hugo Chavez's pseudo-constitutional consolidation of a dictatorship in Venezuela...

...Personally, I'll stick with B-P's Camp Fire Yarn No...

...And looking at the vast amounts of human wreckage society's piled up in the three decades since it began glorifying sex over all else, who could say Baden-Powell is wrong...

...Whether foreign papers bring a fresh ideology to events we already know about is debatable...

...If you look at the fictional exemplars of the scouting life, they too aspire to B-P's ideal boy-girl...

...CU TURE VU TURE by Mark Steyn Scout's Honor "People perceive the police as very con servative," said Constable Lavallee...

...A few years back, there was a revisionist biography of Rudyard Kipling arguing that he, like every other great historical figure, was, in fact, gay...

...They seem to go off their heads for a time," he explains, "running hither and thither, restless andexcited, for weeks unable to settle down for food or to sleep till utterly worn out...

...Unfortunately, one can witness this condition not just in animals, but also in certain types of young men, with their "pink socks, fancy ties and well-oiled hair...

...B-P's Boy Scouts aren't anti-gay, they're anti-sex: They're founded on the proposition that there's a lot of things young men can be doing that are more rewarding than sensual pleasure, whether with women, other men, or oneself...

...After those few awkward months, it'll all be over for life, except for an unfortunate few: "In occasional cases it goes on for a few years...

...Borough presidents, city comptrollers, and other municipal grandees whose absence from the parade would once have spelled political suicide now find it more convenient to steer clear...

...This wasn't uncommon: My wife's grandfather, for example, early in his marriage decided to sleep alone in his old army rope bed every night—though, admittedly, indoors (what a wuss...

...This sounds a bit of a chore, which B-P acknowledges...

...B-P eventually married a slip of a lad called Olive...

...In France, Le Monde...

...It's Constable Sylvain Paquette," continued Peritz, in a vivid portrait of life among the CUM cops (that's Communaute Urbain de Montreal, I should explain...

...Each European country seems to have its New York Times, a Paper of Record spurned by the middle classes for reflecting the conventional wisdom of the country's left-leaning elites...

...But in the Internet era, one certainly gets fresh facts...

...B-P developed his theme in a sequel to Scouting for Boys called Rovering to Success (1922), "A Book of Life-Sport for Young Men" in which the precepts of Scouting and Rovering are commended as the basis for a healthy manhood...

...They're just politically savvy...

...My own suggestion is that it might be easiest just to adopt the oath of Canadian Scouts, who pledge themselves to "God, Queen and Country...

...Here he was wrong...

...A man appears in the living room in a skimpy black bikini...

...Keeping the organ cleaned and bathed in cold water every day is the best preventive...

...queer...

...11: "A Scout will notice people, so that if, for instance, he should be asked by a policeman: 'Have you seen a man with dark, overhanging eyebrows, dressed in a blue 42 October 1999 • The American Spectator 0 suit, going down the street?' he should be able to give some such answer as 'Yes.'" I believe in the new edition the answer has been amended to: "Yes...

...We're MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...

...There are, apparently, more than 6o million Irish-Americans...

...they can march with the heterosexual Irish-Americans behind the banners of their home counties from the auld sod...

...CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL is senior writer for the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press...

...He is an ACLU lawyer coming to sue the pants off us...

...Yet all of them seem in the last couple of years to have made their peace with the new globalism...

...I was at least able to keep the argument open by pulling a newsweekly out of my briefcase...

...Speculation grew throughout South America that Chavez, who has described himself as the avatar of the nineteenth-century Andean liberator Simon Bolivar, has not just national but regional aspirations...

...The other day, the Globe and Mail ran a touching profile of two constables, Patrick Lavallee and Andre Proulx, partners on and off the job...

...Curiously enough, that's exactly how my own scoutmaster used to look on us...

...So, comparing their respective political clout, how many gay Americans are there...

...Laura's bete-noire, the North American Man-Boy Love Association...

...But that was then and this is now...

...EUD's Chavez coverage had cross-links to the Colombian newspapers El Espectador and E/ Pais de Cali and the excellent, Bogota-based newsweekly Semana...

...He admired a lean boyish thigh as much as any of us, but it would never have occurred to him that he should spend his life sodomizing the hell out of any svelte youth who came along...

...But to read the Web-site of Venezuela's E/ Universal (eud.com) is to get a different impression...

...What's more, there was a lot of heated back-and-forth on the matter in the German, and even the French, press...

...But for now, Venezuela and Colombia are incomprehensible without recourse to the local press...

...So with each successive St...

...The New Jersey court has ruled that the Boy Scouts had no right to dismiss a chap because he was, in the modern parlance, gay...

...The crucial difference is that for animals the rutting season comes round once a year, whereas for human beings it only crops up once a lifetime, during the transition from boyhood to manhood...

...So now we're told that the Scouts are in no position to object to openly gay scoutmasters when their own founder was obviously a raving homo unable to come to terms with his sexuality...

...He sublimated his urges and channeled his energies into what, by any standards, was a full life—as founder of a worldwide movement for youth, and as a brilliant soldier, who confounded the enemy at Mafeking by having his men step cautiously over an invisible fence of barbed wire (possibly the only useful example of the art of mime in human history...

...When bedding down in the woods, there was always a frantic scramble among his wee charges to avoid being the one who had his sleeping bag next to Akela and his wandering woggle...

...PRESSWATCH by Christopher Caldwell Pantalonade D wring the Clinton-Lewinsky scandals, I mentioned to a friend over lunch that there were important philosophical differences between new German Premier Gerhard Schroder's divorce-based gallivanting and our own president's preference for the traditional adultery-based version...

...These tend to be the sort of chaps who give in to what B-P calls "Herd Bravado," when "young fellows in the rutting stage are apt to get together to tell smutty stories and look at lewd pictures...

...In the animal kingdom, B-P notes, they have something called the rutting season which leads to an awful lot of "beastliness...

...My friend moaned...

...44 October 19 99 The American Spectator...

...And as his Scout Law Number Eight further enjoins: "A Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties...

...and the rise of Colombia's drug-financed FARC guerrillas on the other...

...Pretty well everyone except the president...

...There was no bigger waste of time, he said, than reading foreign newspapers...

...First, no European country has a tradition of fact-based reporting as well developed as America's...

...But Lord Baden-Powell was more restrained than New Jersey...

...Ah, well...

...Horses, cuckoos, and so forth are relatively easily surmounted, but women require special attention...

...Besides, on balance, I'd wager that B-P would have fewer problems with gay scoutmasters than with the recent updating of the Boy Scouts of America handbook, in which the certainties of Scout Law Number Eight have been replaced by a bleak non-judgmental surrender to the modern world—"The difficulties of unwanted pregnancy can be enormous...

...If Europe is going Luddite, it's not among the readers of the quality dailies...

...His sister Agnes, who headed the Girl Guides, had similar concerns: "Violent jerks and jars can ruin a girl's interior economy" and lead to that recurring complaint of young ladies, "hairy lips...

...In New York, the annual gay protest has gradually become its own St...

...Le Monde's economics page champions the market economy, and editor Erik Izraelewicz even published a ringing defense of globalization in 1997, called The World That Awaits Us...

...It can be easily navigated, as long as you "don't try and bring it on for yourself...

...One hundred and thirty million...

...The Colombia story is the Venezuela story...

...After fathering three children by Lady Baden-Powell, he took to sleeping alone on the balcony—in England, mind...

...There didn't seem to be any evidence to support this theory, but a glance at the jacket and everything fell into place: Staring up from the cover was Kipling himself—shaven head, big mustache, looking for all the world like he's on his way to a leather bar in the Village...

...Patrick's Day tradition, with defiant groups of gay Gaelics taunting their fellow Celts: "We're Irish...

...It's useless for the poor chump to point out that this was a standard look among Victorian men: We lack the imagination to do anything other than judge him by our own time...

...They may well be, but others won't...

...But you can't help feeling he finds the whole St...

...Mayor Giuliani's not gay...

...But why not take Baden-Pow, ell at face value...

...Patrick's Day, the annual Irish show of strength loses a little of its muscle, because of the perennial dilemma: Should gay and lesbian Irish-Americans be allowed to march in the parade...

...Sixty million...

...My lunch companion may have a point about increasing ideological uniformity among the press worldwide...

...In The 39 Steps and John Buchan's other thrillers, the manly types adventuring in service of the Empire approve only of women who "have the slender form of a young boy," etc...

...American journalists will eventually learn to treat these two stories as different aspects of one big story...

...In such a world, there seems hardly any point in the Jersey Scouts contesting the case on the quaint grounds that homosexuality is incompatible with the organization's injunction to be "morally straight," as laid out by Lord Baden-Powell in his seminal tome Scouting for Boys (1908...

...The American Spectator • October 1999 43 to terms with his deepest sexual desires and, instead of being Number One Boy Scout, Lord Baden-Powell would probably be president of Dr...

...The Scout leadership fears that henceforth any boy will be able to earn a Merit Badge for Camping just by turning up dressed as Mayor Giuliani...

...Like many chaps, he thought this bally sex rot was a lot of tosh — the sort of messy, sticky business a fellow should learn to do without...

...Given that such men have the same taste in women as contemporary couturiers, we snigger and draw our own conclusions...

...Here he was right...

...In Boston, rather than accede to the queering of the green, the unreconstructed paddy homophobes wound up canceling the parade...

...Pat's thing a bit tame, at least compared to when he's leading the Gay Pride parade, marching cheerily up Fifth Avenue at the head of a platoon of fawning transsexual nuns...

...It's true Baden-Powell was concerned about the perils of "self-abuse" among Boy Scouts and urged his scoutmasters to, as he put it, "push prudery on one side and take your boys in hand...

...For example, just a few years ago, after an "insensitive" raid on a warehouse called the Sex Garage, the Montreal police were a byword for homophobic bigotry...

...L ord Baden-Powell is not the first Victorian imperialist to find his brand of muscular Christianity under siege a century later...

...And so he did...

...True, Mayor Giuliani still shows up, but then he'll go anywhere —and, if necessary, in blonde wig, sequined gown, and fishnet stockings...

...But don't worry...

...But now the force has cleaned up its act...

...Nor are most of the other mayors heading the Gay Pride marches in America...

...I'm in favor of reinstating that New Jersey scoutmaster, but only if he starts sleeping on the balcony...

...If he were around today, he'd have spent years in therapy learning to come A-rovering we shall go...

...Second, as globalism's elites grow more and more alike, all one gets out of a European paper is canned American prejudices poured out in another language...