Culture Vultures: For the Children

...But who knows...

...But then the Butcher of Bosnia, like so many old-school politicians, has never mastered the new form of infantile political discourse...

...Its reassuring to find, if current polls are anv guide, that even in moclem America sonietiines a politician can bo too infantile...

...The cmcial decision the American people face next year is whether thev're prepared to spend four years under a president who talks to them in the ponderous tones of a concerned grade-school teacher...

...Gore "loved her more than life itself," he told America in a hushed voice, and paused...

...40 May 1999 • The American Spectator Her Majesty's Government defines "poverty" as living on less than half the national average wage...

...Bernard Lewinsky was among them...

...Take the Balkans: insofar as it's about "our children," it should be about ensuring that the next generation of Americans knows where the place is without the president having to get out a map and a pointer...

...When Clinton does his "for the children" stuff, it's like watching Jerry Lewis on his telethon...

...The local dignitaries at Kigali Airport seemed bemused: Children having children is not generally a problem in Rwanda, where the fertility rate per woman is three times that of the United States...

...It's unlikely to make any difference to child poverty, unless you happen to be the child of a government bureaucrat...

...As long as you say "children" often enough, no one minds that none of your child-friendly policies has any beneficial impact on them...

...Dole, with his customary tin ear for the modern American vernacular, forgot to say that he wanted our children to grow up in a world without erectile dysfunction...

...In other words, he's facing a murder rap for doing for free what abortionists do for a living...

...I'll be upstairs playing Armageddon and downloading Sarah Michelle Cellar, but don't forget I'm leaving for the ski condo after lunch...

...Well, yes: Bob Dole's ED ads...

...In the new millennium, life in Britain's slums will be transformed: "Eee-oop, lad, I'm joost off oop High Street to beg outside the bus station and then lie in the gutter swigging industrial alcohol for a couple of hours...

...Is there anything in the United States now that isn't done expressly "for the children...

...Clinton is a caring humanitarian warmonger: He wouldn't be able to bomb all these countries—Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Serbia—if he didn't have the endorsement of that little girl...

...This tender vignette would be a lot more persuasive if it weren't the position of the United States government that a fetus isn't a baby, isn't a human being at all, only a "choice...

...Americans seem inclined to be genially tolerant of this defining trait—and now, alas, so are the British, whose redeeming feature, even in the depths of their defeatism and depravity, has always been a failsafe bulls- - t detector...

...Slobo's mistake, in sending out his Serb irregulars to indulge their traditional practices of genital-severing, breast-mutilation, and child-slaughter, was in not going on TV and saying, "Our historic aim is to be the first generation to end Kosovar child poverty forever, by killing them all...

...A few months later, we had another meeting on the issue and this time, to my horror, I found myself lapsing involuntarily into ghastly Clintonian verbal tics: "It's about the future of all our children," I said, and even as they emerged from my mouth, the words seared my lips like a sour margarita...

...Bob Dole or Bill Clinton...

...I cannot live with the thought that we don't pass on a better, stronger country to our children...

...But, of course, that's not what the prime minister's proposing: The 14,000 bucks will go to government bureaucrats to take surveys, initiate studies, devise programs, etc...

...This isn't a purely hypothetical argument: In Florida, a man has been arrested and charged with "vehicular homicide" for crashing into a pregnant woman and causing her to lose the (Continued on page 77) The American Spectator May 1999 41 Culture Vultures/Steyn (Continued from page 4r) baby...

...The more money they spend on education, the dumber the kids get...

...They roared their approval...

...But that's the funny thing: The more we invoke children to legitimize every aspect of public policy, the more careless we get over those matters that concern them directly...

...Forget the Balkans: If you wander into the average high school and invite the students to identify the Horn of Africa on a map, 78 percent would point to apicture of the president in Rwanda...

...the other day, I saw a guy sleeping under a bridge and asked him if he was Ross Perot...

...Hesaid no, he was Catherine the Great...

...But in March Tony Blair stood up and declared, "Our historic aim is to be the first generation to end child poverty forever...

...By 1996, he'd moved on to his sister, who died of lung cancer...

...Those Transportation TV ads are only the starkest example of how soft-focus policies "for the children" bear no relation to the grubby reality...

...But, for the most breathtakingly cynical exploitation of child sentimentality, look no further than the recent Federal Department of Transportation ads against drunk driving, which feature a heartbreaking scenario in which a mother-tobe is in her car, she's seen the sonogram, she's named the child...but a drunk slams into the vehicle and she loses the baby...

...Presumably, under that distinction, if the mother were en route to the abortion clinic, it would be okay for a drunk to slam into the vehicle, kill the fetus, and thereby save her a couple of hundred bucks...

...But nobody cares: Democrats and Republicans don't argue about whether we should spend even more money, only about how that extra money should be spent...

...Perot failed to grasp a crucial aspect of child-friendly politics: A fellow who sleeps under a bridge is someone you keep away from your children, not elect to protect them...

...The upbringing that proved so disastrous for the heir to the throne is apparently fine and dandy for the average son of a soccer mom...

...The poor will always be with us, if only because It's all done for them, even abortion and war...

...And say what you like about Buckingham Palace, they still have a lower staff turnover than the typical daycare facility...

...Yet my neighbors cheered and, in the weeks that followed, I was besieged with demands that I run for school board...

...S till, I know how he feels...

...Here in New Hampshire, a year or so back, I toddled down to a special school-district meeting on our escalating high-school tuition crisis and made a short intervention, deploying all the rhetorical skills that have made me a sought-after public-speaker around the English-speaking world: piercing analysis, rigorous logic, command of statistics, savage wit, and so on...

...Maybe the reason those Commies aren't targeting their nuclear missiles on American children is that we're doing such a great job of destroying them ourselves...

...That works out at just over £8,5oo per child—and certainly, if you gave every kid nearly Si4000 plus the phone number of a good financial adviser, you'd make a dent in child poverty...

...Okay, dad...

...One sympathizes with Blair...

...Never mind the vice president's years as an enthusiastic tobacco farmer, or the fact that— compared to, say, gay sex — smoking's about one of the safest things our children could take up...

...To be fair to me, education is about the future of all our children—in a way that a military intervention in Kosovo isn't, not really...

...But otherwise, Bill Clinton's America has now taken on the character of isolated tribal cultures: For the gods to smile on any public policy, a rhetorical virgin has to be tossed into the metaphorical volcano...

...I was received by my neighbors in stony silence...

...In 1992, it was his son, who was almost killed in a car crash...

...Because, after all, spending money shows how much you care about "our children...

...One recalls fondly his favorite boast, at least until the CIA brought up the awkward matter of those Chinese Long March rockets, that, for the first time in 5o years, "no nuclear missiles are targeted at American children...

...Therefore, 25 percent of the population is living in poverty— a figure one would expect to remain more or less consistent no matter how many VCRs and boomboxes and SUVs and vacation homes they acquire...

...But it's hard to imagine anything more arrogant, ignorant, or alien than the cultural values the president has been imposing on Africa, and Europe and Asia, in his fetishization of moppets...

...You know that, left to their own devices, these guys would rather be out chasing cocktail waitresses...

...Presumably, like all those Chinese (and North Korean, and Iraqi) nuclear missiles aimed at everyone except American children, it's a marvel of exquisitely calibrated targeting...

...the continent with a change of wind: "When you look at those children who greeted us," he told the Rwandans last year, "how could anyone say they did not want those children to have a chance to have their own children...

...For those of us closer to ED than our SATs, the old certainties of grown-up politics now seem a lifetime away...

...Otherwise, the best explanation for the president's statement comes in Elizabeth Wurtzel's new book, Bitch: Bill Clinton, says Miss Wurtzel, "has made being full of s- - t not just a mere peccadillo, but in fact the greater part of his personality...

...Some pollster took him up on it, and discovered that more Americans would trust their children with Clinton—though it would be interesting to know if Dr...

...In 1998, Bill Clinton blew through MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...

...I don't mean being able to pinpoint it exactly in relation to Slovenia, Slavonia, and Slovakia, but just generally to have a vague idea of what continent it's on...

...And nobody did, except for Auberon Waugh in the Sunday Telegraph, who nervously put his head above the parapet to query politely just how the prime minister proposed to abolish child poverty without also abolishing adult poverty...

...Unlike Bill Clinton, who wants every American child to go to college, Core seems determined to keep us all in kindergarten...

...And what did his compatriots do...

...The United States spends more money on education than any other industrial nation and produces the dumbest kids in the civilized world...

...CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn For the Children I suppose it was too much to expect Bill Clinton to bomb the Serbs without asserting that this policy decision, like all others, was for "our children...

...But somehow I don't think that's what Tone has in mind...

...The American Spectator • AIL T. 9 9 9 77...

...Maybe his pals have sold Peking some advanced form of fun-size neutron bomb that only destroys those Americans too old to qualify for the White House intern program...

...In the 1996 election, Bob Dole, struggling to articulate a reason why he should be president, challenged the American people: "Who would you trust your children with...

...But so what...

...But insert the word "child" between "end" and "poverty" and you're hailed on all sides...

...At 3:20 a.m...

...Most of us assumed the kids' stuff at the end was just the usual soppy Clinton guff...

...But they weren't to know that, in primitive societies like Washington, every policy position—from highway construction to sludge removal and even to genocide—has to be introduced with the traditional Clintonian incantation (all together now): "It's about the future of all our children...

...It takes a child to raze a village...

...These comments are usually made by women who see their own kids for 20 minutes every morning when they drop them off at the daycare on the way to work...

...In 1960, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan toured Africa and spoke soberly of a "wind of change" blowing through the continent...

...You may not know a great deal about Kosovo," said the president, but here's the thing: "I want our children to have a Europe, I want this young girl here"—he waggled his finger at some Monica-inwaiting he'd spotted in the crowd—"to grow up in a world that is safer and more secure and more prosperous...

...Al Gore, by contrast, has no such redeeming virtues...

...Around the same time, the distinguished billionaire goofball Ross Perot told the Dallas Morning News: "As I have said a thousand times, I will cut the grass, I will take out the trash, I will sleep under a bridge...

...He knows that if he pledged to end poverty forever he'd be derided as either a buffoon or a charlatan...

...He believes in touting not just kids in general but his own kids in particular as the basis for public policy...

...Reporting on the NATO air strikes, Sam Donaldson on ABC felt obliged to produce a map of the world, showing Kosovo roughly halfway between South America and Siberia...

...But I don't suppose America's political infantilism will be ending anytime soon...

...The old-school imperialists, we are told, were arrogant and ignorant, insensitively imposing alien cultural values on Africa...

...The still nominally conservative Daily Mail said: "Nobody should doubt the idealism behind Tony Blair's ambitions for an end to child poverty...

...So instead Blair is proposing to spend £6 billion in the next two years rescuing 700,000 children from poverty...

...Likewise, I've lost count of the number of Americans who said to me, after the death of the Princess of Wales, that it's no wonder Prince Charles is a remote, unfeeling, emotionally repressed, dysfunctional weirdo: His mother only saw him for 2o minutes every morning, she had virtually no part in his childhood development, he was raised by nannies...

...And that is why until I draw my last breath I will pour my heart and soul into the cause of protecting our children from the dangers of smoking...