Here Comes the Groom

If you missed our livestream Clubland Q&A on Tuesday, here's the action replay. Simply click above for an hour of my answers to questions from Mark Steyn Club members around the planet on various aspects of identity politics, from micro-aggressions at the University of California to macro-aggressions in Telford and Rotherham - with a semantic detour into nano-aggressions and quantum-aggressions. Speaking of semantics, I saw this question after the show ended, from Steyn Club Founding Member Toby Pilling:

If with regard to language, clarity is the remedy (as Orwell would say), shouldn't the 'Asian Grooming Gangs' be re-named 'Moslem Rape Gangs'? I've been trying to make the case that they should at the local council I work for, but over here in the UK one can be hauled in for hate speech at the drop of a hat.

I agree with Messrs Orwell and Pilling on clarity in language, and have never liked the word "grooming", a bit of social-worker jargonese designed to obscure that what's going on all over England is mass serial-gang-rape sex-slavery. "Grooming" is, in that sense, a euphemism. An hour or two after yesterday's show I chanced to stop at the Upper Valley Grill and General Store on an empty strip of road in the middle of the woods in Groton, Vermont, a small town of a thousand souls that feels, if anything, rather smaller than that. And paying at the counter I noticed that they had a can next to the cash register for donations to what the hand-written card called the "Groton Grooming Fund".

Having just been on the air yakking about Telford, I was momentarily startled. It is, in fact, not a whip-round to enable the gang-rapists to buy more petrol to douse the girls in, but a contribution toward the volunteer group that maintains the local ski and snowmobile trails - ie, they "groom" the snow. Happy the town in which grooming is left to the snowmobile club rather than the Muslim rape gangs. The slogan that greets you on the edge of the village is "Welcome to Groton - Where a Small Town Feels Like a Large Family", which I always find faintly dispiriting. But it's better than Telford, where a large town feels like a small prison.

The old joke I bungled has many variations, but you get the gist:

In Heaven, the police are British, the chefs are French, the engineers are German, the lovers are Italian, and it's all run by the Swiss.

In Hell, the police are German, the chefs are British, the engineers are French, the lovers are Swiss, and it's all run by the Italians.

Feel free to adapt for our less Eurocentric times.

The most alarming question yesterday came from one of our younger members, Natalie Olson:

If I get all A's this semester my Dad will grow a beard and he was wondering how you keep it so neat.

Oh, my. I'm horrified to find my beard is apparently so ostentatiously "neat". I always instruct my beard-groomer to hit the sweet spot between assistant choreographer on La Cage aux Folles and full-blown firebreathing imam. It's evidently not so artfully poised as I thought.

Thanks for all your questions. If you're considering signing up for The Mark Steyn Club, you can find out more info here - and don't forget, for any Steyn fans among your loved ones, there's always our limited-time-only Gift Membership.