The Undocumented Mark Steyn Read Online Free Page A

“What’s with the restless energy, dude?”
    I felt like the fellow in Invasion of the Body Snatchers : Everybody else in town had fallen asleep. . . and then stayed asleep. This is a paradox for our times: the somnolent coffee house. I had a strange urge to yell, “Wake up, we’re trillions of dollars in debt! The powder keg’s about to blow!,” but I could feel the soporific indie-pop drifting over the counter, so I took my espresso to go, and worked off my torporphobic rage by shooting iPods off the tailgate of a rusting pick-up in the back field for the rest of the day.
    “You just don’t get coffee culture,” sighed a friend. What “culture”? The coffee houses of seventeenth-century England were hives of business: They spawned the Stock Exchange and Lloyd’s of London. The coffee houses of eighteenth-century Paris were hives of ideas: At Café Procope, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the gang met to thrash out the Enlightenment. The coffee houses of twenty-first-century America have spawned the gingerbread eggnog macchiato and an accompanying CD compilation. Unless, that is, there’s something else going on: One is mindful of Number Two’s briefing (in Austin Powers ) to the recently defrosted Dr. Evil on what he’s been up to while the evil mastermind bent on world domination has been in orbital cryostasis. “I seized upon the opportunity to invest in a small Seattle-based coffee company several years ago,” he informs the doctor. “I believe if we shift our resourcesaway from world domination and focus on providing premium-quality coffee drinks, we can increase our gross profits fivefold.”
    That’s not such a good bet these days—Starbucks has closed a thousand outlets since 2008—but, on the other hand, world domination–wise, the espresso era does seem to have presided over a transformation in the dominant cultural aesthetic. Inertia has never been cooler. It’s seeped out of the coffee house to stalk the land. I mean Barack Obama barely even bothers to pretend he’s got a plan for debt “reduction” or Medicare “reform,” does he?
    I don’t go in for as much pop sociology as, say, David Brooks. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say he got it right on the general sensibility of a decade ago in Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There . Would you put money on his contemporary American elites to rouse themselves before catastrophe strikes? Or is somnolent, myopic complacency unto the end the way to bet?
    Bit of a downer to end on, I know. But have a Dacopa. Unlike a soy peppermint chai frappuccino, it might perk you up.

UNSUNG SONGS
    Maclean’s , October 8, 2007
    WHAT ’ S THE DIFFERENCE between Fred Thompson, actor and presidential candidate, and people fluent in the Amurdag language?
    Well, let’s start with what they have in common: they both turned up in the news cycle a few days ago. National Geographic made the headlines with a report that half the world’s seven thousand languages will disappear by the end of the century. Languages are vanishing faster than at any time in human history. In Australia alone, researchers for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages could identify only three speakers each of Yawaru and Magati Ke. As for the Amurdag tongue, I use the singular advisedly: they were able to find just one man with rudimentary knowledge of the language. On the other hand, given that Amurdag was already thought to be extinct, his lone tongue may portend a stunning comeback for the lingo, the first shoots of a new Amurdag spring.
    For National Geographic types, the tragedy is “the loss of knowledge about the natural world.” “Most of what we know about species and ecosystems is not written down anywhere,” says Professor David Harrison of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. “It’s only in people’s heads.”
    Big deal. The species and the ecosystem will, despite the sterling efforts of SUV drivers, still just about be around for