Thank you for your kind (and unkind) letters from around the world. Mark reads all mail, but especially enjoys the vicious ones. Each day Monday to Friday we pick six of the best for our Daily Delivery. So drop a line to Mark's Mailbox, and on Friday if you're chosen to be the one and only Letter of the Week you'll join our roll of winners from four Continents and receive a copy of Mark Steyn From Head To Toe. Congratulations to this week's winner:
Letter of the Week
REGULATION NATION
Mark, in case you collect insane regulations, here's mine; not one regulation, but the effect of the accumulation of too many.
My wife is an MD, in her 50s. She was recently hired as a geriatrician for a large successful company that, near as we can tell, runs an outpatient nursing home. The regulations for real nursing homes are so vast it turns out to be more cost effective not to have a nursing home, but to keep sick folks at home and, when they need an antibiotic or a catheter, to pay a nurse to drive out and give it to them. When grandpa falls Saturday night, he calls the switchboard, the lady there calls my wife, who calls a nurse, who drives to the man's home, assess him and calls my wife. My wife calls the x-ray company and their guy drives out to x-ray the old man's hip right there in his living room. On weekdays a company bus picks the oldsters up, brings them in for day care, and shuttles them home in the evening.
Not a bad result really, keeping folks at home. It would be heartwarming if all this were done on account of us liking old people, but it's not. Again, it's done because it's cheaper to pay a nurse to get in a car and drive across town than it is to have her walk down the hall in a nursing home—and fill out the government paperwork.
Now, here's the insane part. When I ask my wife how her day went, how many patients she saw, she'll say "two" or "four" or "six." That's a tiny fraction of what a doctor normally sees. The rest of the time, she's in meetings, discussing care plans with care planners and nursing administrators and other earnest ancillary form-filling-out functionaries.
So a couple weeks ago I asked, "How was your day?" and she went on about this meeting and that one, and training on regulations and, and... and I said, "Hey, wait a minute, you didn't see any patients!" And she said, "That's right."
Mark, ours has become a country where 50-year-old medical doctors— bright, driven people with valuable skills earned in a lifetime of hard work— go to the medical clinic and don't see any patients. They have days where they exhaust their entire professional effort complying with government regulations (the morning meetings) or learning about new ones (the afternoon). Un-f---ing-believable.
(name withheld)
THE LAST LAUGH
The disturbing trend you discussed in "Criminal Comedy" is nothing less than the deliberate and systematic eradication of all self-expression and individuality. In the bleak wasteland of political correctness, humor is now heresy, and fun is regarded with suspicion. I am reminded of your favorite Khomeini quote: "There are no jokes in Islam."
Far from colliding violently, joyless Islam and the ever-less joyful West may eventually overlap quite comfortably. Once the cheerless commissars in our own society have broken our spirits, how difficult will it be for Islam to move in and impose its special brand of "touchy totalitarianism" on us in the form of Sharia?
Will anyone even notice?
Dolores Proctor
WHIPPING BOYS
I appreciated your recent "Happy Warrior" column on the new criminalization of humor. I find it one of the striking things about the left: they have no sense of humor, which indicates a lack of a sense of proportion on their part. This is something that disqualifies them from government or any other office.
I also find it deliciously ironic— although that is cold comfort to gentlemen such as Dr Greenfield— that these oversensitive females with their hysterics in the face of facts they dislike (one also thinks of the feminist reaction to certain comments by Lawrence Summers at Harvard a few years back) only reinforce the "sexist" stereotype of women as being too sensitive and unreasonable and therefore unfit for professions once occupied solely by men. They do far more damage to their cause of being taken seriously as female professionals when they exhibit such childish behavior. It only demonstrates that men have a much better sense of humor than women, which makes a person much more capable of dealing with the "slings and arrows" of daily life.
What I find dismaying though, is how quickly men such as Dr Greenfield or Summers back down in the face of such humorless women. Men need to show some backbone when feminists (and other leftists) throw their temper tantrums. Make them fire you if necessary, but don't throw yourself under the bus. Why should we make it easy for them?
PS— Your review of Saving Private Ryan was spot on! Spielberg is a highly over-rated director.
Steve Cianca
JUST ASKING
I just received the latest edition of National Review, and as my usual practice read "Happy Warrior" first. I have to tell you though, I just don't quite "get it." I understand political correctness and your example of the fictional Ludvik and yourself being the subject of left-wing thought police. However, after reading the article three times, I still don't understand exactly what Dr Greenfield did to run afoul of liberal dogma. His conclusion that semen is a therapeutic substance for women doesn't seem controversial. Is it entirely the little line about "now we know there's a better gift than chocolates"? And if so, does that mean that he was politically incorrect by assuming that vaginas would receive the semen instead of a male rectum? But then again, he seemed to receive the main complaints from female surgeons, so does that mean he was being somehow sexist by making the little joke about a gift of semen instead of chocolates? Why would that be sexist? Men give women chocolates (and semen) all the time.
Wade Morehouse
Las Vegas, Nevada
TWEET YOU LATER, BABY
I was just reading the critical letters in "Mark's Mailbox" about Anthony Weiner and your "Song of the Week" choice; the two topics together are a disturbing reminder of how dating has changed. Once upon a time, romance was lame pickup lines and singing "This Guy's In Love With You". Today, the new "Hi, I'd like to get to know you better" is a crotch shot on Twitter or an "aggressive seduction" by a VIP in a high-end hotel suite. Social progress?
Lynette Hefner
THIS AND THAT GUY
Mark, I was most interested to read your piece on "This Guy's in Love with You". As a devotee of the song, you might consider investigating its secret pre-history which I've never seen set out anywhere, not even in the pages of Serene Dominic's magisterial Burt Bacharach: Song by Song. That volume does, however, list the song as being originally copyrighted in June 1967 as "That Guy's in Love with You". One word entirely reverses the meaning of the ditty, which now becomes a characteristic Hal David epic of suspicion, anxiety and misery in the style of those great "beat ballads" of the 1962-65 era:
You see that guy,
That guy's in love with you.
That guy's in love,
He looks at you the way I do.
When he smiles, I can tell
You know each other very well.
Why don't you greet him,
You know I'd like to meet him.
'Cause I've heard some talk.
They say there's someone new.
That guy's in love.
And what they're saying might be true.
And so on through a substantially different lyric which, heard in its original context, now makes sense of all the hands-shaking, heart-breaking, fear of the being the last to know-ing activities (or conditions), which at the time puzzled me in what was meant to be a happy song (I thought). Hal rather illogically retained all that when giving the song its radical make-over for Herb.
I got the lyric from the only recording I've ever come across of "That Guy's In Love With You". It was made in London in late 1967 or early 1968 by British singer Danny Williams. It came out on a Decca/Deram LP in advance, I believe, of the release of the Alpert recording in the UK and proceeded straight to the cut-out bin of history. It was produced by Dick Rowe, the poor man forever derided for having (supposedly) turned down the Beatles when they auditioned for Decca in 1962. The arrangement is by Les Reed— much taken up with Tom Jones and Engelbert Humperdinck recordings at this time— and takes the skippy-beat approach, which featured on so many subsequent versions of "This Guy..." (not wholly in keeping with what now stands revealed as a darkly neurotic oeuvre).
Dominic's invaluable list shows that "That Guy..." was re-copyrighted as "This Guy..." early in 1968. Next time you're sharing a bottle of bubbly with Burt or Hal, drop in a question about this one— there's a good chap.
Laurence Purcell