I first began reading Mark Steyn when he seemed to be writing mostly for Canadians. That, of course, was my mistake. He’d already captured the interest and admiration of the entire English-speaking “Lost”, which is most of us.

Despite his unmistakably British diction, Mark was born in Toronto. Despite his Anglican affiliations, his family is rife with Catholicism. As a Moriarty, I attribute most of his genius to his disinherited Catholicism.

His most formative education was in the United Kingdom at the King Edward’s School, Birmingham, England and according to his Wikipedia biography his professions seem to have gone from disc-jockey to musical theater critic for The Independent of London. That accounts for his impressive knowledge of the entire American Songbook, not to mention the theatrical panache he can summon up in an entertaining instant.

Despite the indelibly British cadences, he has a Damon Runyon, Guys and Dolls bite to his television appearances.

Broadway off of Piccadilly Square!

After entertaining the folks at The Independent, he then moved to the UK’s magazine, The Spectator.

Now, of course, Mark Steyn is all over the English-speaking world and I assume his eternally provocative books have been translated into every European language there is. If not, it is their loss, despite the inevitably great losses in translation.

Mark Steyn is locked into my memory because of the laughter he inspired in me at some very unhappy times of mine as an American exile in Canada.

It was the gallows humor of a realist whose POV still carries the panache of a lone but fearless, Fourth Musketeer.

He’s an Anglo-Canadian-American combination of Mark Twain, James Boswell and, well, Mark Steyn, recording the seemingly inevitable disintegration of English-speaking individual freedom into an imperialistic, Obama Nation of Marxist cookie cutters.

He travels the world as if it were not only his backyard but his own private bookshelf. He can pull out any corner of the globe and bulls-eye its major problem in one sentence, i.e., “In Britain, everything is policed except crime.”

This, of course, in the wake of recent riots in the U.K.

Erasing the entire Atlantic ocean, he sums up an English-speaking humanity, “For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population”.  

For a law of life to take home with you: “Big Government means small citizens”.

“Thrusting home”, our Cyrano adds, “Nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.”

He can also be excruciatingly merciless with his puns: “Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.”

In short, “Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances but its human capital, too.”

Here is the article in its entirety.

We American exiles of the despairing class need a Mark Steyn the way America needs another Ronald Reagan. The styles of Steyn and Reagan would both appear to be entirely different but then one of Reagan’s greatest admirers was William Buckley. Three entirely different deliveries arriving at most of the same conclusions.

And the Progressives call Conservatism “provincial”.

I tend to believe, with increasingly Catholic faith, that the Progressive, bipartisan triumphs in the last twenty, New World Order years of Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama were God’s cunning plan to lead the Ivy League Know-It-Alls into the very bubble that is now being popped by Reality.

God wisely gave Mark Steyn the sharpest pin with the longest reach to help Reality do the job we’ve all been waiting for.

“And as I end the refrain, thrust home!”

Jim Geraghty started a brouhaha yesterday by criticizing how the makers of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” received $1.2 million in tax credits by filming in the state — and that Palin signed the 2008 law which made it possible. Because she’s now apparently omnipotent, able to see into the future and plan for it by signing into law a complex program with numerous in-house checks and balances. Geraghty questioned Palin’s conservative credentials.

… but it looks problematic for a crusader for small government to end up collecting a seven-figure paycheck from an endeavor that received a seven-figure subsidy, all set up by a program she signed into law.

What’s problematic is to define the tax credit in this issue as a “subsidy.”

Tax credits are offered as an incentive to do business in a particular area, city, or state as a way to attract business and commerce into said area. These tax credits are usually offered as a percentage of total money spent and the credits can be sold at a discount to businesses looking to alleviate their tax load. The exchange creates a cashflow that helps offset the costs of doing that particular business in that area; in this case filming in Alaska is very expensive. A net gain of dollars flows into those local communities and the credits establish a way for a particular locality to compete with other cities or states for business; over the long term it can they help establish a broader tax base by increasing the number of professionals drawn to the area.

The optimal situation is to have a tax code is low enough where regulations aren’t so restrictive so as to warrant the need for tax credits. That is the real debate. However, it is within every state and city’s right to make themselves more competitive by offering tax incentives to attract business and create a business community. Aren’t we, as conservatives, supporters of the 10th Amendment? You pay for things by increasing your tax base, not by increasing regulations or taxes.

It’s also important to note that this was a bipartisan piece of legislation she simply signed into law to spur commerce and diversify Alaska’s economy — not something Palin created to help herself as has been subtly suggested on other parts of the web.

Still, should governments be in the business of subsidizing television programs? The precise arguments against PBS and NPR – that in today’s much more diversified media environment, almost all of the programming on government-funded radio and television networks could thrive in the private sector without government subsidy – would apply to the Alaska-based shows, no?

I respect Geraghty, but this is a bad argument. It’s incomparable to NPR (and absurd to compare it to other federal programs when this isn’t a federal issue) – this program deals with state tax credits first of all and secondly, it occurred in a state that enjoys a budget surplus, as Geraghty earlier acknowledged. Tax payers paid for nothing. It was also the cheapest PSA that Alaska has ever produced, considering that the cost of producing a comparable PSA campaign, excluding ad buys, would run in excess of $500k, and with ad buys you’re looking at over a million dollars. (Relatedly, my in-laws went to vacation and fish in Alaska recently based on the show alone. They found Alaska as beautiful as advertised.)

The bottom line is that the issue of film tax credits is grossly misunderstood. It’s a process open to anyone who can come up with a solid business plan to get them. Arguments against it include complaints about making states compete against each other; well, aren’t we conservatives? Don’t we like competition? Don’t we all realize that such widespread competition lowers the taxes across the board? Is that not a good thing, if we are to discuss this within the context of financial conservatism?

If limited government is to mean something, it means there must be some areas of economic activity that government does not seek to steer, influence, promote, regulate, or restrict.

Allowing companies more control over their dollars (by way of reselling credits, et al.) is less government intervention. Demanding more of their dollars is absolutely steering, influencing, regulating, and restricting the free market, and it certainly does promote the value of filming in one state over another.

As I said, the argument here should be about lower taxes across the board, as opposed to the actions some states must take in order to remain competitive. It’s also illogical to try and discredit Alaska’s program by comparing it with that of other states because variables differ in each state.

I love debate and disagreement when it occurs on the right because a competition of ideas ultimately makes the right stronger and frankly, more invincible. However, if you’re going to take a stand on an issue and place a target on a fellow conservative who takes more than enough heat from the left, it’s wise to make sure that you fully understand the issue and articulate it correctly.

For those unfamiliar with the 2007 Foreign Film Oscar winner “The Lives of Others,” it is a German thriller about the Stasi in 1984 East Germany, the then-Communist German Democratic Republic. The Stasi, GDR’s Ministry of State Security, enforced Party policy and loyalty of speech and action. The goal of the Stasi was to know everything, and they did so through an extensive network of agents and informants that touched the lives of everyone in the GDR. 

In “The Lives of Others,” a strong, mournful Soviet-influenced string soundtrack accompanies an equally Soviet-influenced plot. East Germany’s lone socialist playwright with both talent and loyalty, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), becomes the target of heavy surveillance when a high-up GDR official falls for his actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) and wants him removed. Loyal socialist Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) oversees the surveillance operation to find fault with the socialist artist. But as the hypocrisy of his GDR comrades drives him from faith in the Party, and the faultlessness of his playwright subject leaves him sympathetic, Wiesler begins to question his allegiances, and as Dreyman grows subversive, Wiesler is forced to make a choice – between a Party of falsehood and a man of merit. 

First-time director (and story screenwriter) Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck drained the color from the film, save those moments of happiness between Georg and his girlfriend Christa-Maria. Dull grays and pale blues emphasize the drab atmosphere that pervades hopeless East Germany. 

Choosing a foreign film as the “best” seems like something that Hollywood establishment would do rather than a magazine like NRO, but they aren’t the only conservatives to call it a masterpiece: William F. Buckley, Jr. was a big fan. 

While the film is not based on a historical event, the film accurately portrays Stasi-inflicted fear and influence. Some of the actors in the film were a part of the cultural movement in East Germany in the 1980s, and it shows through powerful performances. Lead actor Mühe, when asked how he prepared for his role as a Stasi officer, said simply: “I remembered.” 

The film is important for more than artistic reasons however. According to Uwe Spiekermann, a deputy director of the German Historical Institute, “Lives of Others” was the first film from East Germany to portray the Stasi in a serious light, instead of mocking them in comic farce. 

John O. Koehler wrote in “Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police” that the Stasi employed “102,000 full-time officers and noncommissioned personnel on its rolls, including 11,000 members of the ministry’s own special guards regiment. Between 1950 and 1989, a total of 274,000 persons served in the Stasi.” 

Including informants, the Stasi network reached into the lives of every East German. 

“The Stasi was much, much worse than the Gestapo, if you consider only the oppression of its own people,” Koehler quotes Simon Wiesenthal of Vienna, Austria, a Nazi hunter. “The Gestapo had 40,000 officials watching a country of 80 million, while the Stasi employed 102,000 to control only 17 million.” 

With its network of informants, the Stasi had a spy over every 66 citizens, and an informer for every 6.5 citizens. “It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests,” Koehler said. He concludes that the communist oppression by the Stasi was, while not as heinous as the attempted extermination of the Jews, as brutal in its oppression as the Nazis. This number is shocking, yet even more shocking is the habit of cultural elites in the United States to hail dictators like Hugo Chavez as democratic leaders, while their artistic kin from across the globe were jailed for speaking the truth about such people. Among punishable crimes in the GDR was engaging in “propaganda hostile to the state,” something artists in the United States should be ashamed to have supported when they defended communism in the past, and when they do so now. 

There’s my sermon. I’ll leave you with Buckley’s final words on the film: 

“I looked at the record and was gratified to find, in the critics’ files, encomiums absolutely unconfined in their admiration of this movie, which in fact won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film. And I was unsurprised to find that what seems the whole of East Germany is riven by its impact. Since so many East Germans were complicit in the postwar reign of the German Democratic Republic, there is a corporate national shame at the betrayal of life, as so brazenly done by so many millions, but whose country, at least, has given the world this holy vessel of expiation.”

Hollywood doesn’t seem very interested in the life stories of conservative icons unless they’re slandering them as in Oliver Stone’s hit piece on George W. Bush called “W.” which was released (sheerly by coincidence) a month before the 2008 presidential election.

Stone is currently working on a documentary series about Hitler, Stalin, Mao and other fiends which is, in his own words, designed to educate the American people so we can learn to “empathize” with them. Well isn’t that just ducky? I can hardly wait to be taught how to empathize with Hitler and Stalin.

In recent years we were treated to biographies like Steven Soderbergh’s heroic homage to Che Guevara, the murderous villain whose face can be seen on numerous t-shirts at your local hipster joint. And who could forget the Ed Harris tribute to the poor misunderstood genius Jackson Pollock? He revolutionized the art world when he wasn’t getting drunk and abusing his wife.

The 1996 film “The People Vs. Larry Flynt” made some interesting points regarding the first amendment but otherwise portrayed Flynt as a victim of censorship and therefore some sort of hero. Couldn’t Director Miloš Forman find a better subject for a movie about free speech than a pornographer?

There’s a movie about Howard Stern but no movie about Rush Limbaugh, a man whose story of overcoming addiction and deafness is the very stuff great biopics are made of. There’s a movie about the Marquis De Sade but no movie (other than a television film) about the life of Pope John Paul II — a man whose leadership was pivotal in the liberation of Eastern Europe from Communism. There’s a movie about John Wayne Gacy but no movie about John Wayne — who’s as popular today as ever! Julia Child rates but not Margaret Thatcher?

Has anyone noticed that there’s not a single decent film about the life of Ronald Reagan? Is his life story not compelling enough? He only brought down the Berlin Wall, won the Cold War and led America to one of its most prosperous ages. Not to mention that prior to his political career, Reagan was a movie actor so well regarded by his colleagues that he was elected to leadership roles in the Screen Actors Guild in the 1940’s.

Am I crazy for thinking that William F. Buckley’s life story would make a great movie? Here’s a man who spoke Spanish and French as his first languages and didn’t begin to learn English until he was seven, yet went on to become known for his brilliant writing and speaking style. Buckley had tremendous wit which he displayed on television as the host of “Firing Line” for over thirty years. Imagine the challenge to an actor to convincingly imitate Buckley’s distinct mannerisms and way of speaking. Buckley worked in the intelligence industry for the CIA and then went on to found National Review, a conservative political journal of unmatched regard.

Speaking of National Review, Heaven forbid anyone in Hollywood make a film about someone like Whittaker Chambers. An American Communist and Soviet spy, Chambers ultimately defected from Communism and became one of its fiercest opponents. He was befriended by William F. Buckley and was part of National Review’s founding editorial board. He was also responsible for identifying former assistant to the Secretary of State, Alger Hiss as a Communist spy in 1948. That’s a pretty compelling story.

What’s that? You’ve never heard of Whittaker Chambers?

Maybe someone should make a movie about him.

NEA Chair Rocco Landesman

Jonah Goldberg in today’s National Review:

“Last week, Landesman gave the keynote address to the 2009 Grantmakers in the Arts Conference. In fairness, Landesman did not reaffirm the White House and NEA’s obvious initial intent to turn the allegedly independent government agency into an adjunct of Obama’s “Organizing for America” operation. He was more subtle than that.

“Instead, Landesman embraced a timeless tactic of power politics. He debased himself with incandescently vulgar obsequiousness to his supreme leader. “There is a new president and a new NEA,” he proclaimed. “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.”

“After more fawning praise for the “Optimist in Chief,” he added that proof of Obama’s desire to take the NEA in exciting new directions was the president’s “out-of-left-field choice to head the NEA, a signal I certainly took to mean he wasn’t interested in business-as-usual for the arts.” One must trust that Landesman’s interpretation of his own appointment is accurate.

“Let us pause to reflect on Landesman’s odd — by which I mean absurd — historical analysis. Obama has written two books, one good, the other a plodding concatenation of political clichés and bromides. Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, published by Mark Twain, were a literary triumph. Woodrow Wilson wrote many books of great import but of less literary worth. JFK won a Pulitzer for one of his books — the one he didn’t write, alas. But Richard Nixon wrote plenty, as did Herbert Hoover, including two definitive texts, one on mining, the other on fishing.

“Oh, and Lincoln never wrote any books.”

Read the full article here.

In addition to wearing the above listed hats, Derbyshire has also written a strange and wonderful little novel called Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, a book described in the New York Times as, “a bouncy, Capraesque tale of midlife crisis, romantic confusion and spiritual regeneration.”  (The Times review was so favorable that it puts the conceit that conservative authors can’t get a fair shake from the liberal media in a good bit of jeopardy).

I asked Derbyshire about Coolidge, the writing of which he recounts with both fondness and exasperation, with decided emphasis on the former.  He claims that writing fiction puts one in a state of “aesthetic bliss” (to paraphrase Nabachov), the prime virtue of which is an expansion of perspective that “…separates you from the everyday world.”  He tells me that writing a good novel gives one a pleasure many times that of reading a good novel, which, if true, must be a high state of bliss indeed.

Concerning modern poetry, Derbyshire tells me that “most of it is rubbish,” and leftist rubbish at that.  Concerning the New Formalists, he seems somewhat ambivalent.  The New Formalists, he says, are “not that formal,” and, in any case, “…art has to change, and some changes are dead ends.”

In prose, Derbyshire sees the prospects for conservative authors as not altogether bleak.  Like Michael Blowhard, he points out that while mainstream fiction tends to be tied to the Academy, and therefore liberal, in genre fiction the story is something else entirely.

Bill Buckley, he notes, wrote tons of excellent spy novels, starting in 1976 with Saving the Queen, the beginning of the long running and popular Blackford Oakes series.  Tom Clancy, best-selling author of political thrillers like The Hunt for Red October, is a decidedly center-right author who has reportedly given large sums to the Republican Party.  Science-fiction superstar Robert Heinlein was a Goldwater libertarian – in fact, Reason magazine said of Heinlein in 2007, “As a literary influence on the emerging libertarian movement, Heinlein was second only to [Ayn] Rand.”

Derbyshire could have added Dean Koontz to his list, the best-selling author of science fiction, horror, and suspense novels who as a young man worked for the Goldwater campaign, and who in 2008 was the subject of a favorable write up in National Review in which he was referred to as a “compassionate conservative.”  Or Michael Crichton, the science fiction writer (Jurassic Park) who in recent years outraged the liberal establishment with his frank and devastating critique of global warming orthodoxy in his novel State of Fear and in his address to the National Press Club in 2005 titled “The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming,” the text of which is to be highly recommended and may be found in full at Crichton’s official site.  (Mr. Crichton has sadly left us, succumbing to throat cancer in November 2008.)

So genre fiction can be welcoming waters for conservatives.  In poetry and drama, however, Derbyshire concedes that conservative authors may have a tougher time, especially in the theater, where “it will always be easier to put on a left wing play.”  Nonetheless, he says, “…conservatives can be poets and dramatists…the reign of the Bohemians is over.”

Ultimately, however, Derbyshire is of the opinion that political correctness rules in the big publishing houses, and that editors “enforce it ruthlessly.”  The silver lining is that “publishers want to make money,” and fortunately there is no shortage of openly conservative authors, O’Reilly, Coulter, et al, who have shown that there exists in North America a vast purchasing audience for “right wing” ideas and opinions.

Andrew (last name withheld), a New York based literary agent, agrees.  He has been in publishing for 16 years, four of them on the editorial side, the balance spent representing authors across the ideological spectrum.  Though conceding that “no question biases are there” in publishing, nonetheless Andrew insists that there are plenty of liberal editors who can and do rise above their prejudices and work with conservative authors.

Andrew insists that the success of conservative non-fiction authors proves that the situation of conservatives in publishing is “healthy,” though he concedes that “most novelists lean left.”  Why that would be so is a topic that we didn’t have time to get in to, but Andrew, who describes himself as a left-leaning centrist, hopes that “more conservatives gravitate towards” the arts and literature, because there is a need for “thoughtful books from both sides” of the aisle.

During my discussion with Andrew, the subject turns to the fear of many conservative authors that they will be ostracized or blacklisted for their views.  As an example, I ask him about the harsh reaction to David Mamet’s recent political conversion.  “Oh, yes, that was unfortunate,” he says, though Andrew correctly points out that ostracism is a phenomena that knows no ideology per se.

Tomorrow we will examine Mamet’s fascinating political coming out, and ask what it means for conservatism in the literary world.

[Ed. note: You can read a new chapter of this eight-part series every Saturday and Sunday morning. Previous chapters --Part one, two, three, and four.]

Matt Patterson is a columnist and commentator whose work has appeared in The Washington Examiner, The Baltimore Sun, and Pajamas Media.  He is the author of “Union of Hearts: The Abraham Lincoln & Ann Rutledge Story.”  His email is mpatterson.column@gmail.com.

One lefty blogger wrote, “In the end, right-wingers cannot excape [sic] from the fundamental fact that great art challenges assumptions and received wisdom and calls on us to look at the world with new eyes — and therefore is inherently progressive.”

If true, then the left’s claim on the arts is about to weaken. Because the “assumptions” and “received wisdom” of the Establishment these days are predominantly progressive. After all, who is the Establishment now? No matter your ideology, surely you must agree that there’s nothing more tired and cliche than a “rebellious” artist infusing his work with the same old leftist bromides.

In sputtering reaction to the National Review’s shameless audacity, the Daily Kos, a leading liberal destination on the Interwebs, slapped together their own list of the top 25 liberal movies of the past 25 years. Their number-one choice? That sublime cinematic masterpiece, An Inconvenient Truth.

Interestingly, there was one overlapping title: Brazil, Terry Gilliam’s brilliant dystopian fantasy. Whether one pigeonholes Brazil as a liberal or conservative film probably boils down to whether or not one agrees with Jonah Goldberg’s thesis in Liberal Fascism. (One of the Kos picks, Thank You For Smoking, also earned a National Review honorable-mention.)

Looking over the Daily Kos list, however, one can’t help but notice that it seems relatively humorless (only two, maybe three comedies, versus five on the National Review roll) and didactic (six documentaries and five docudramas). So ask yourself, dear reader: assuming you had the means to watch DVDs, which group of movies would you rather have while stranded on a desert island?