The Omnipresent Taboo

We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” are voracious readers of magazines. Ebony; Black Hair Care; Vibe; Oprah—these are just a handful of the periodicals we peruse regularly. What can we say? After all, we’re intellectuals.

Amongst our heaping pile of foreign rags one can invariably find The New Statesman. For those of you unaware of this British publication, we think its best described as a kind of United Kingdom version of The Nation, only better written, more charming, and not printed on toilet paper.

Naturally, as a European left-wing magazine, The New Statesman offers all sorts of ridiculous political views. If we remember correctly, we’ve even taken aim at some of these noxious positions in the past. On Israel, in fact, the publication is particularly odious—on par, in fact, with the worst anti-Semitic nonsense one finds on the Continent.

Yet The New Statesman isn’t entirely horrid: Any rag that boasts Roger Scruton as its wine critic can’t be too bad in our book. Accordingly, each week we find ourselves scanning the pages of the latest issue, intermittently smiling and retching.

Ah, and there is so much to induce retching. Take, for example, “The Unmentionable Causes of Violence,” an article in the April 30 number of the rag. Penned by one Andrew Stephen, whose insipid columns on the United States ineluctably feature his unflattering mug shot, the piece is a locus classicus of dimwitted anti-Americanism.

Here, dear reader, is a short snippet from this moronic piece:

I was sitting around a lunch table with a group of [American] television executives a couple of days after the shootings [at Virginia Tech], and the talk centred entirely around whether NBC was right to air Cho’s rants. Nobody brought up the unmentionable subject of the availability of guns, and I chickened out from doing so. The US media (and practically every leading Democrat) have skipped and danced and weaved around the subject, ending up transfixed like rabbits in headlights.

After reading this tidbit, you are likely asking yourself: Has Andrew Stephen ever actually been to America? Does he know even the first thing about the ole’ US of A? Has he ever had any exposure to the mainstream media in this country?

In fact, his bizarrely obtuse article makes one wonder: Does Andrew Stephen even have an Internet connection? We mean, come on: How many milliseconds passed after the Virginia Tech massacre before the mainstream media in the US brought up the matter of gun control? The bodies had yet to be collected before anchors at CNN were portentously braying about the issue.

If, as Andrew Stephen opines, the discussion of gun control is taboo in the United States, it’s amongst the most heavily discussed taboo discussion in American politics. In fact, Andrew Stephen’s article is so dumb that we even wondered whether its author is a real person. (“Andrew Stephen”—sounds like a joke name, doesn’t it?)

Naturally, Mr. Stephen spends much of the rest of his article maligning the horrible gun culture of the United States. And this made us wonder: Why is it that our buddies on the Left chalk up any offensive characteristic of Muslim civilization—say, full face veils and Sharia law—as respectable expressions of a laudable culture, and refuse to offer these sorts of defenses for America’s quirks?

Frontier mythology, after all, is a key part of American identity. Why isn’t this—and its obvious links to anti-gun-control sentiment—seen as a respectable part of our culture? Why don’t we deserve some of the tolerance the Andrew Stephens of the world would blithely shower on Islamic fascists?