Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Steyn on John Kerry and Francis Crick

I love reading Mark Steyn (by the way, I know next to nothing about him). The guy is clear and exteremely funny. This piece is entitled "The Kerryness of Kerry," (although I think I have seen an earlier version and put it out, it’s worth seeing it again) and I don’t believe that it could be any funnier than it is. You must read it. A sample: "If it weren’t for the small matter of the war for civilization, I’d find it hard to resist a Kerry Presidency. Groucho Marx once observed that an audience will laugh at an actress playing an old lady pretending to fall downstairs, but, for a professional comic to laugh, it has to be a real old lady. That’s how I feel about the Kerry campaign. For the professional political analyst, watching Mondale or Dukakis or Howard Dean stuck in the part of the guy who falls downstairs is never very satisfying: they’re average, unexceptional fellows whom circumstances have conspired to transform into walking disasters. But Senator Kerry was made for the role, a vain thin-skinned droning blueblood with an indestructible sense of his own status but none at all of his own ridiculousness. If Karl Rove had labored for a decade to produce a walking parody of the contemporary Democratic Party’s remoteness, condescension, sense of entitlement, public evasiveness and tortured relationship with military matters, he couldn’t have improved on John F Kerry."

The thing with Steyn is that he can write a very serious piece with as much ease. The current issue (October) of The Atlantic Monthly has a precious Steyn article (last two pages of the issue, not avaliable on line) on Francis Crick, who, along with Jim Watson, "discovered the secret of life" (DNA), and is the most important biologist of the twentieth century (he died this year). If you think Darwin was off base, think again, for Crick is reductionist in the extreme. This is the guy who "set us on a path to a biotechnological era that may yet be only an intermediate stage to a post human future." Man and chimp share 98.5 percent of their genetic code, but we also share 75 percent of our genetic makeup with the pumpkin. We all evolved from the same soup of chemicals. Steyn: "It turns out there is a fly in my soup--and a chimp and a worm, and a pumpkin." You see the point. (The Churchill story about "I am a gloworm" seems unnecessary). Steyn doesn’t mean to be funny in this one, but you can’t help but smile through it. Crick was a militant atheist. No love, no mind, no free will. No human beings. Just pumpkins. Very clear. Read it.

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