INFANTILE PARALYSIS

Mark Steyn says that a nation

as childish as America cannot last long as a superpower

New Hampshire THE UN troops may be too late to save East Timor but they may yet save the Democrats. Not because Mr and Mrs America give a hoot about turmoil in the Pacific: most Americans couldn't tell you whether East Timor's an illegally seized province of Indonesia or a railroad flagstop in North Dakota. But Pat Buchanan can — and he doesn't think the US should have anything to do with the place. The bipartisan support for UN intervention is the final straw for Pat: he'll bolt from the Republicans to seek the Reform party nomination for president.

God knows why. The Republican estab- lishment may be a bunch of lily-livered pantywaists when it comes to doing any- thing about social conservative issues such as abortion or prayer in schools, but at least they pay lip-service to them. The Reform party, founded by billionaire goof- ball Ross Perot, is openly libertarian: its current darling is Jesse Ventura, the pro wrestler-turned-Governor of Minnesota, who's just brought out an autobiography bragging about all the drugs he's done and fondly recalling some of his favourite hookers. The Democrats would love Gov- ernor Ventura to run for president because he's a hero to beer-drinking, gun- toting, truck-driving, blue-collar white guys, which, when you think about it, is quite an achievement for a fellow who's spent most of his adult life prancing around in spangled panties, body glitter and a feather boa. The Governor seems disinclined to run but is encouraging prop- erty developer Donald Trump to do so instead. Trump would quite like to be president, if only so he can follow his usual practice and rename the White House the Trump White House. The Dems aren't fussed: they'd like Jesse, but, if he won't run, they'll gladly take Pat or The Donald instead.

The reality is that the Democratic nomi- nee wins the White House only if there's a third-party candidate to cream off enough votes from the Republicans. That's what happened in 1992 and 1996: Perot ran and Clinton won. Otherwise, the last Democrat to get to the Oval Office was Jimmy Carter in 1976, under unusual circumstances (Watergate). Discount Carter and you have to go back to LBJ's landslide in 1964. The Buchanan campaign has its work cut out, but Democrats are hopeful it may be able to attract just enough social conservatives to deny George Dubya Bush the White House.

It's the presidential equivalent of chaos theory: whacko wields machete in Dili and Dubya finds himself in a three-way race. There will be many such incidents between now and November 2000. All one can say for certain is this: it's not going to get any better for Al Gore. By rights, he should be cruising to victory: the Dow Jones index has gone through the ceiling, unemploy- ment's all but vanished, as has inflation. Yet in a poll last week 47 per cent of Americans said that the country 'needs a change of direction'. To what? Double- digit inflation, mass unemployment, stock- market collapse and soup kitchens?

Even the social conservative issues should work to the Vice-President's advan- tage: crime is down dramatically, and so are abortions and single teen pregnancies. America may fret about moral decline but that decline would seem to be far less advanced than in other Western countries: 50 per cent of people attend church every week, 45 per cent describe themselves as born-again evangelical Christians. Part of that 'change of direction' vote translates simply to 'Clinton fatigue' — and unfortu- nately for Al Gore he's the guy who's been left holding Bill Clinton's DNA. But it's I say we get him a child psychiatrist.' more than mere weariness with the Clin- tons: there's a sense that, despite massive prosperity, something's not quite right with America — that great wealth isn't enough.

The Vice-President himself recognises that, even after two terms of the Clinton- Gore enlightenment, not everything is per- fect. In a recent speech in New Orleans, he called for outlawing handgun ownership by Americans aged between 18 and 20. `Incredibly, while those 18-to-20-year-olds cannot legally buy a beer or purchase a bottle of wine,' he said, 'they can walk into any gun shop, pawn shop or gun show in America and buy a handgun.'

This may be news to the Vice-President, but what most Britons, Canadians, Aus- tralians and Western Europeans would regard as the incredible part of that sen- tence is that 18-to-20-year olds in America cannot legally buy a beer. It's a fairly recent. innovation. Until 1984, some states had a' legal drinking age of 21, some of 18, and some had no restrictions on alcohol at all. But then some busybody in the Federal Transportation Department decided that she knew better than anyone the age at which people could drink. And, although she lacked the constitutional authority to intervene in this area, she had some finan- cial muscle. She informed all 50 states that she would take away the Federal Govern- ment's highway funding from any jurisdic- tion that refused to raise the drinking age to 21. South Dakota went all the way to the Supreme Court, but the transportation busybody won and took her legal team out to celebrate, presumably with mineral water.

If you're wondering about the busybody transportation secretary who cooked up the 21-year-old limit, her name is Elizabeth Dole. And, 15 years on, as a Republican presidential candidate, she's not happy with it. No, she thinks the legal age should be 24. 24! I'd like to have seen her telling that to young Bob when he was being shot up on that Italian hillside during the war.

But she's serious: in Elizabeth Dole's America, you won't be able to start drinking until you're 24. It'd make more sense the other way round: you'd have to stop drinking when you're 24. You can spend ten years getting rat-arsed every night and then it's time to sober up and start showing up for work. But, come to think of it, that's effec- tively already the case. There's hardly anY drinking in my part of the world — or at least not socially: plenty of people buy cases of Bud, head into the woods, sit on a rock and drink alone. And who can blame them in a culture in which, during 'drug awareness weeks', elementary-school students are encouraged to report on their parents' alco- hol consumption? What's at issue here is the distinguishing feature of American society: its lack of pro- portion. In 'drug awareness' classes, a heroin habit is treated the same as a tumbler of Scotch and a quiet smoke. Passing through Maine on the way back from eastern Quebec the other day, I stopped at a diner and found that, in the week I'd been away, the state had managed to introduce yet another law: they've abolished the smoking section. You can no longer smoke in Maine restaurants, though aggrieved smokers are hopeful that the state will at least partly relent and permit smoking sections as long as they are in architecturally separate build- ings. However, Maine has no intention of relaxing one aspect of the law: it will remain illegal to smoke anywhere in the state where people under 21 are present.

I don't smoke, but my first reaction was to turn round and head straight back to Quebec. La belle province is the highest taxed jurisdiction in North America, it's an economic basket-case, and you'd have to be nuts to invest a dime there, But, by God, it's great to sit in a restaurant sur- rounded by folks puffing away and boozing it up. And no, I'm not worried about pas- sive smoking. If there were any such thing as passive smoking, everyone in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont would have long since keeled over from the fumes wafting across the Quebec border, from the last place on the continent where you can smoke with impunity. True, Quebec restaurants do have non-smoking sections: they're drab, antiseptic rooms tacked on the back. And they're always empty.

In 1903, the state of New Hampshire made it compulsory to attend school between the ages of eight and 14. Harry, an elderly neighbour of mine, was born at the stroke of noon. So, at midday on his 14th birthday, he rose from his desk and told the teacher his schooldays were over. An hour later, his former classmates saw him strolling by the schoolhouse window with a fishing-rod in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Today, the most destructive trend in American life is the determination to postpone adulthood. Instead of until 14, we encourage kids to stay in school until they're 30: it now takes the average Ameri- can student just under seven years to com- plete his degree, though he's unlikely to emerge at the end knowing any more histo- ry or literature than Harry did when he decided to quit his one-room schoolhouse. But Americans now exist in a condition of endlessly deferred adulthood: you can't smoke until you're 21, you can't drink until You're 24. . . . Al Gore's justification for his Proposed handgun law is that, according to him, '18-year-olds commit 35 per cent more gun murders than 21-year-olds, double the gun murders by 24-year-olds and four times the gun murders by 30-year-olds.' But why stop there? Thirty-year-olds commit fewer gun murders' than 40-year-olds. Nonage- narians commit fewer still. Why not just raise the legal age to 89 and clip the wings of all those psycho octogenarians? Personal- ly, I think Gore's statistics are a lot of hooey. There's another set of figures that show that legal gun-owning teens are actual- lY far less socially delinquent — they com- mit less crime, they take fewer drugs — than non-gun-owning teens, I don't claim that as proof of anything other than the dubious value of legislating on the basis of statistics. A civilised society should instead reach a judgment on when a child becomes an adult, and leave it at that.

But America seems determined to be the first society to abolish adulthood com- pletely. Half a century ago, if you'd walked down a small-town Main Street at midday, the sidewalks would have been full of solid citizens in Homburgs and seersucker suits. Now, from the world's richest man (Bill Gates) down, most grown-ups dress like their kids — in baseball caps, logoed T- shirts, baggy diaper-style pants, big, boun- cy, oversized sneakers. They walk along sipping from soda bottles with giant nip- ples. They eat kiddie food: Dunkin' Donuts and McNuggets. And, as a conse- quence of that, they've now taken on the shape of over-sized 2501b kids: America is the fattest nation on earth apart from Western Samoa. But the difference is there's nearly 300 million Americans and only 12,000 Western Samoans: if you stuck the entire population in a New Jersey mall, no one would even notice. When you cross the border from Vermont to Quebec, there's a sign with '65mph' crossed out and replaced with '100km' and the words `sig- nalisation metrique'. Coming back the other way and entering the US, they ought to have a curvy 1201b jolie quebecoise crossed out and underneath a shapeless 2501b north country lardbutt.

But this isn't just an aesthetic complaint. The immaturity of the United States per- meates every aspect of society, not least in the fastest growing disease du jour Attention Deficit Disorder, a child com- plaint that's now running rampant among adults. During Bill Clinton's war on Kosovo, the whole country caught ADD: the TV networks brought Vietnam into our living- rooms and changed the course of the war; they didn't even bother trying with Kosovo — they knew no one would be interested. A country this childish is unlikely to sur- vive long as a superpower.

If Pat Buchanan wanted an issue that might play with the libertarians of the Reform party, he might try the theme of personal responsibility for freeborn citizens. As it is, Al Gore and Elizabeth Dole, the Eagle Scout and Nurse Ratchet, are run- ning campaigns which treat the American people as kindergarteners. If George Dubya really was a coke fiend, he'd get my vote — if only because such a man might feel a little sheepish about being too pro- scriptive. As New Hampshirites know, in Quebec you can drink at 18, the bars are open till 3 a.m., and the danseuses nues weigh under 300Ibs. Under a Gore or Dole presidency, the short drive across the bor- der to Magog or Sherbrooke will start look- ing better and better.