This week, it was
Steyn who became the pop culture, at
least as much as an author published
by America’s self-proclaimed leading
publisher of conservative books
could ever be.
America Alone: The End of the
Word as We Know It, while
published in September 2006, was
lavished with publicity uncommon for
a book that’s been on shelves for
longer than the Democratic
Presidential nominee race has been
running.
“We typically like to
take a blitzkrieg sales approach,”
explains Regnery Publishing
president
Marji Ross.
Their biggest New York Times
bestsellers have included titles
by right-wing talk host
Laura Ingraham, and books
exposing John Kerry’s
service in Vietnam and the biases of
CBS News. Coming next week:
How I Helped O.J. Get Away With
Murder, written by his
former agent. “It’s a direct
marketing approach, maybe even a
guerilla approach, where we’re
convinced that our authors are
passionate enough about the topic
can make it a bestseller.
“Being based in
Washington, DC gives us a different
perspective,” says Ross. “Rather
than talking to other publishers in
New York, we’re talking to our
market.”
Steyn self-published
newspaper column anthologies,
primarily sold through his website,
but the only book he wrote from
scratch was about stage musicals,
Broadway Babies Say Goodnight.
While initially an arts critic for
The Spectator in the UK, a
shift to political commentary made
him a favourite of publisher
Conrad Black — who
naturally gave Toronto-born Steyn
placement in the National Post.
America Alone was actually
commissioned by Ross, who noticed
the growth of Steyn’s online
following — even as his platforms
became more scattered as Black was
gradually indicted out of the
business. Getting into Canadian
bookstores posed a greater challenge
for a publisher specializing in
American patriotism, though.
Maclean’s to the rescue — ex-Post
editor Ken Whyte
hired Steyn as the "books" columnist
to help salvage the weekly, and was
glad to run a
seven-page excerpt.
And that’s how, some
20 months later, Steyn became a real
celebrity for a week.
The main event was an
appearance on TVO’s
The Agenda, where three
of the Osgoode Hall law students —
whose class project evolved into a
complaint with the human rights
commissions — were booked in the
wake of the Canadian Islamic
Congress offer to withdraw
the complaints if Maclean’s
prints a rebuttal.
This was after
Barbara Hall,
former Second City coat check
attendant and mayor of Toronto and
now head of the Ontario
Human Rights Commission,
condemned Maclean’s — while
conceding that the case couldn’t be
legally heard.
Steyn was already
flying in from his New Hampshire
stead to promote the paperback
release of America Alone
(“Soon to be banned in Canada” is
stamped on the cover) and he was
finally wrangled on the show, hosted
by Steve Paikin [and
YouTubed
here].
Problem was, the
students who repeatedly called for a
public debate, refused to appear
alongside Steyn on TVO — an
accommodation he failed to
comprehend.
“I’m just one big,
flabby, overweight Islamophobe and
they’re three fit young people,” he
said in the quasi-Aussie accent that
lives up to the sneering rhetoric.
(It’s a voice that, despite a
hometown following that dates back a
decade, was rarely heard around
here, although Steyn claimed that
he’s rarely been invited.)
But the second half
of the show found Steyn and the
students engaged in that two-way
discussion — a live on-camera
detente detailed by
Paikin on his blog.
The Agenda,
more likely to be taunted by
Steyniacs for the host’s public
sector salary than actually watched
by them, scored a hit. “Two ladies
stopped me in mid-traverse to say
how much they liked the show,”
wrote Steyn. “Appearing on
The Agenda is evidently like
guesting with Uncle Milty in 1954.
I’m impressed.”
Paikin insists TVO
won’t be cranking up the Fox
News-style rhetoric any further, nor
does he believe that he was played
by Steyn for the sake of book
promotion.
“I don’t think that’s
his game,” says Paikin. “I take him
at his word, and he believes the
biggest transformation of our time
is not being debated adequately.”
That transformation
surrounds the fact that birth rates
in multicultural-minded countries
are dropping precipitously, and
immigrants shouldn’t be counted on
to make up the difference. That was
the main topic of discussion at the
Indigo store.
Heather Resiman,
the store’s “Chief Book Lover,”
conducted the interview before a
packed house of the very people who
wouldn’t have been impressed with
her decision to keep the Danish
cartoon edition of the Western
Standard from being sold in her
store, much as she was once revealed
to have banished Mein Kampf.
Steyn delivered nonetheless: “You
can’t be multicultural in Saudi
Arabia. I can’t go to Riyadh and
say, I’m uncomfortable with the
alcohol prohibition here and I’d
like to open a Hooters and hold wet
T-shirt contests on Friday night to
celebrate my culture. They’d say,
‘See you later.’ And chop my hand
off on the way out.”
This sort of “old-timey vaudeville,”
as Toronto Life blogger
Douglas Bell
described it, was accompanied by
Steyn’s desire for more domestic
babymaking. Too much education is
getting in the way of women who
oughta be knocked up.
He points to a cousin of his wife’s
who’s been in university the entire
time they’ve been married, about 15
years. Steyn figures art suffers for
it, too: “If Mozart were alive
today, he’d have never left college
— and never written any symphonies.”
Steyn backs his assertions with a
well-stamped passport: “I’d much
rather be in a souk than a mall in
Hamilton. But the better society —
the one with a chance for
fulfillment, and greater health care
— is the society that built the mall
in Hamilton.
“Just because our
society is wealthy doesn’t mean we
can tolerate unhealthy pathologies,”
he said.
“Not a lot of people
want to go around stirring up
moderation. It’s hard to say what
you’re against until you know what
you’re for.”
But it was Reisman
who ended the show on the hot seat,
explaining her rationale for keeping
certain things out of Indigo, a
right backed by Steyn. After all,
the store is as private a property
as Maclean’s, who refuse to
be legislated into running editorial
content under the guise of being
good for Canadian society. Her
statement on the matter went over
like a lead zeppelin with the
audience, which queued up to books
signed by Steyn — a line that took
him two hours to satisfy.
Tarek Fatah,
the founder of the Muslim
Canadian Congress (a
frequent rival of the CIC) who has
ruffled feathers of his own with his
secular perspective, seemed to enjoy
Steyn’s show. “The diagnosis is
right,” says Fatah. “It’s the
prescription that I disagree with.
“You have this boy
band that initiated the campaign
against Steyn — school kids having
fun, who ended up shooting
themselves in the foot. These twits
have to be confronted and their real
agenda needs to be exposed. The
notions of armed jihad, Sharia law
and wanting an Islamic state weren’t
being addressed, even in the debate
on TVO. As a Western society, we
have no clue what’s happening.”
The law students who
appeared with Steyn — even if they
refused his invitation to go to
dinner, they stuck around the TVO
studio to talk for an extra hour —
are widely seen as just “sock
puppets” of the Canadian Islamic
Congress.
Fatah claims that the
females on the panel,
Muneeza Sheikh and
Naseem Mithoowani, deferred
to their male counterpart
Khurrum Awan when answering
many questions — an indication of
where they were coming from,
religiously. (Paikin thinks any
deference was because Awan was
considered the expert.)
“Steyn can give
credit to the Canadian Islamic
Congress for all the attention he
received,” he says. “Maybe I should
ask them for advice on how to sell
books.”
