Mark Steyn's Big Fat Canadian Essay + Holmes' Book Review

The structure of Mark Steyn's essay feels like catchy, culturally-specific examples (many of which feel like digressions) supporting his argument that the youth of Islam will prevail, and all of which are annoyingly dispersed throughout the long, dragging essay. Despite this piece not really qualifying as a rant, it has rant-like tendencies. The rant quality is brought about by his conversational techniques which employ the second person, along with images that are pretty fresh in our minds and experiences (baseball teams, "My Big Fat Greek Wedding", Sony, and so on). A lot of his examples that he uses to depict birth and population rates are distinctly As-Seen-On-TV. They're well chosen examples, all effective in getting his point across, and yet, regardless of their accessibility, they seem kind of dumbed-down and fleeting. By the time the essay closes, he has beat the point to death.

Some of the essays more outwardly intelligent moments are undermined by his borderline funny (or perhaps "punny") moments:

"And why leave it at that? Is it likely an ever smaller number of young people will want to spend their active years looking after an ever greater number of old people? Or will it be simpler to put all that cutting-edge Japanese technology to good use and take a flier on Mister Roboto and the post-human future? After all, what's easier for the governing class? Weaning a pampered population off the good life and re-teaching them the lost biological impulse or giving the Sony Corporation a licence to become the Cloney Corporation?"

Well, it is without a doubt that Steyn believes in the unyielding power of consecutive rhetorical questions, so much so that he spends half of a large paragraph asking them to his reader. There's something within his questioning here, as they are the kinds of questions that he already has answers to, that seems enormously phony (ha, more like the Phony Corporation). In the last sentence of the above excerpt, he adopts the language of maternal childcare and offers the ambiguously vulgar image of a population feeding off of the figurative breast of "the good life," and then tosses it up with the name-brand pun of the century! The power of these questions as well as the weird cuteness inside of them ultimately feels very strange in his stylistic scheme. This is the sort of essay, written for publication, that doesn't feel very stylish. It's written to captivate an audience and to argue a point, but the former incentive proves more valuable, as is clear in the writing. With that, he is writing for a widespread, middle-class audience that isn't concerned with deep historical research and explanations supporting claims about the rise of Islam in Europe, but instead is concerned with the social and cultural implications of his argument, or the ideas that will resonate with the readers whose attention spans are, presumably, ever-shrinking. His diction is low and colloquial, and he uses contractions like "you'd" instead of "you would" to pick up the pace, make it sound more spoken.

Holmes' book review is devoid of any distinctive style, and his incentives don't pour out until he's well into his essay. Perhaps this is because book reviews are not conventional mediums in which reviewers express their political beliefs--though this kind of review might be more symptomatic of The American Prospect. When he takes the time to lay out his ideas independently of his direct discussion of the books, his tone stays pretty much the same. This style of writing feels loftier that Steyn's, perhaps written in a middle style. Something about it feels fair, balanced, diplomatic, and neutral (just as plenty of non-fiction/journalism strives to appear, despite ulterior motives), and yet he is expressing his ideas fairly straightforwardly:

"One might even argue that, in today's Europe, the Enlightenment ideal of universal citizenship is already dead. Europeans are becoming increasingly habituated to living in dual states, where "real" citizens live side by side with poorly assimilated immigrants who (in the minds of the majority) will never become full-fledged members of the community. This may not be a clash of civilizations destined to evolve into violent confrontation, but it is a profoundly disquieting moral crisis, which these two original and stimulating books invite us to ponder."

It's so odd reading this kind of polite essay writing after Steyn's punchy piece where he addressed me, the reader, as "you." Now I am referred to as "one," and there's no saying that I am even sure to argue that, in today's Europe, the Enlightenment ideal of universal citizen ship is already dead. I might argue it. It's especially peculiar because this is essay writing of college students; it's reasonable and argues a point without being the least bit presumptuous.