Greetings from an undisclosed location somewhere in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where I am attempting to recover from my Ukrainian exertions. The tenth year of The Mark Steyn Club is underway: We thank (almost) all our First Day Founding Members for signing on to another twelve months, and we hope our First Week Founding Members will want to do the same as the se'nnight draws to a close.
We didn't consciously organise it this way, but our ninth birthday coincides with the final episode of the twentieth-anniversary audio serialisation of my highly prescient bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. The society I postulated two decades ago is now all around us, not least in Thursday's local elections in England.
In our final episode, I muse on the differences between today's westerners and those of just over a century ago - by way of reference to an old potboiler by Conan Doyle published in 1898. This is a paragraph which, save for substituting "the United States" for "Great Britain", will sound wearily familiar:
'It's my opinion that we have been the policemen of the world long enough. We policed the seas for pirates and slavers. Now we police the land for dervishes and brigands and every sort of danger to civilization. There is never a mad priest or a witch doctor, or a firebrand of any sort on this planet, who does not report his appearance by sniping the nearest British officer. One tires of it at last. If a Kurd breaks loose in Asia Minor, the world wants to know why Great Britain does not keep him in order. If there is a military mutiny in Egypt, or a jihad in the Sudan, it is still Great Britain who has to set it right. And all to an accompaniment of curses such as the policeman gets when he seizes a ruffian among his pals. We get hard knocks and no thanks, and why should we do it? Let Europe do its own dirty work.'
Huge numbers of Americans would agree with the above, not least the final sentence. So too would every winning presidential candidate of this millennium:
George W Bush: "I don't want to be the world's policeman."
Barack Obama: "As several people wrote to me, 'We should not be the world's policeman.' I agree."
Donald Trump: "We can't continue to be the policeman of the world."
And yet, and yet...
Ah, well. Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear my thoughts from twenty years ago in the conclusion of America Alone simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
~If you prefer more fictional fancies of a weekend, there are spy thrillers, well, why not start with the above-mentioned Conan Doyle shocker of 1898: The Tragedy of the Korosko. If that doesn't suit, there are comedy classics, tales of horror and historical romance and much more, all over at our Tales for Our Time home page. If you've a friend who might be partial to almost eighty cracking capers, we have a special Gift Membership that, aside from audio adventures, also includes video poetry, live music and more. And I'll be doing a live-performance Tale for Our Time at sea on the next Mark Steyn Cruise - sailing aboard the Queen Mary 2.
To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and don't forget that special Gift Membership. As soon as you join, you'll get access not only to America Alone but to nearly eighty gripping yarns in Tales for Our Time. Please join me in the coming week for a brand new Tale.
