The Undocumented Mark Steyn Read Online Free

on the Clinton Apology Tour:
    “The President today apologized to the people of Viagra. ‘The United States has not always done the right thing,’ said Mr. Clinton. ‘We discriminated against the Viagran people for no other reason than that their skin was different—slightly flushed, with a bead of sweat on the upper lip and an agitated look in the eyes. As President, I would be calling for a national conversation on Viagra, if we weren’t already talking about nothing else.’”
    Last week, it was announced that Viagra will soon be available in wafer form, bringing our social evolution full circle. A century and a half ago, Sylvester Graham, nutritionist, reformer and author of The Young Man’s Guide to Chastity , invented the Graham Cracker as an aid to diminishing the male sex drive. Today, the Graham cracker must yield to the Viagra wafer, an idea whose time has come. The Clinton presidency has at last stumbled on its rendezvous with history: While Ronald Reagan and George Bush presidedover the fall of Communism, Mr. Clinton presides over the rise of Viagra. It may not be true that any young boy can grow up to be president. But at least, thanks to Viagra, any young boy can grow up to be this president.
    Graham Cracker, anyone?

DECAFFEINATED
    National Review , July 4, 2011
    T HIS FALL MARKS the centenary of William Mitchell. You may not have heard of him, but in his day he was a big cheese. Indeed, he was a big processed cheese, with what’s now Kraft Foods. Mitchell invented Cool Whip and quickset Jell-O and powdered egg whites for cake mix. He was in the grand tradition of American entrepreneurial energy: Henry Ford made travel faster, Alexander Graham Bell made communication faster, Bill Mitchell made Jell-O even faster. When he died, I wrote an appreciation and noted his one great miscalculation, late in life. He noticed the dahlias growing on his daughter’s land, came up with the idea of roasting their tubers, and created a brown substance with a coffee-like taste that he called Dacopa.
    It flopped. The fearless pioneer of convenience foods had failed to foresee that in his final years coffee would become the ultimate inconvenience food. Where once you’d say, “Gimme a cuppa joe, Darlene,” and the waitress would slide it across the counter, now you stand around for twenty minutes as the “barista” juices the espresso, froths up the milk, lathers on the foam, gives it a shot of caramel flavoring, sprinkles it with cinnamon, adds a slice of pepperoni and a soupçon of aubergine coulis, and instead of two bits charges you $5.95.
    It’s getting on for two decades since I first did a world’s-slowest-coffee routine on the BBC with the great Bonnie Langford, West End child star and Doctor Who’s perkiest sidekick. Jackie Mason was also on the show, and asked me who our writer was. I felt it would make me look like a loser to say I’d written it myself, so I promised to pass on any message. “Tell him he may be on to something,” growled Mason. A few years later, I opened up The American Spectator to find the comic genius had worked up a Starbucks routine all his own.
    At the time, I thought the ever more protracted java jive was an anomaly—the exception that proved the rule. Now I can see it was a profound insight: America’s first slow-food chain was an idea whose time had come. Who knew you could make people stand in line (long long lines at city outlets in rush hour) for a cup of coffee? Don’t tell me it’s a Continental thing. I like my café au lait in Quebec, and it takes a third of the time of all the whooshing and frothing south of the border. Same in a Viennese Kaffeehaus . But I was at a “fair trade” Vermont coffee joint the other day, and there was no line at all, and it still took forever. And, as I began to get a little twitchy and pace up and down, I became aware of the handful of mellow patrons scattered about the easy chairs looking up from their tweets as if to scold: