This week I'll be live on your TV screens every night with The Mark Steyn Show on the new must-see UK channel GB News. The fun starts at 8pm GMT/3pm North American Eastern - but the show replays at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific, which is possibly more convenient for our US and Canadian viewers.
Either way, I hope you'll dial us up if you are in the general vicinity of the receiving apparatus. Once Big Ben strikes eight, you can shoot me your comments on the show at [email protected], and I'll respond live on air.
You can watch from anywhere on the planet on the GB News home page - or you can click the livestream here (you may have to refresh the page):
If you're one of many who prefer me in non-visual formats, the Steyn Show audio retrospective of 2021 can be heard here.
~A few commenters responded to news of the above by expressing regret that the week's electronic delights would mean less writing from me. To be honest, I am having a hard time finding the right tone in print. Last week's tour d'horizon of America at the end of 2021 was picked up by the one-and-only Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, and the comments below the post - from Glenn's right-of-center readers - are instructive, boiling down to: Steyn's a Canadian who doesn't know America because he spends all his time in New York, and anyway his main expertise is in show tunes. The last of which is the same critique as that of Michael E Mann's doting Mann-boys. As to the second, I haven't been in NYC in two years, and, given that it's now almost as long since I began calling the present crisis "The Permanent Emergency", I strongly doubt I shall ever set foot there again.
But I get the gist: People don't want an immigrant telling them that their country's going down the toilet of history. Even if it is. Writing isn't very satisfying if you can't write about the biggest story, and alas the biggest story of our times is that, after half-a-millennium, the Euro-American geopolitical moment is heading off the cliff - mainly because of what the United States has chosen to do to itself while its enemies sit back and laugh their cheap Walmart socks off.
If you love America, you want Americans to be honest and urgent about the unprecedented debt, the humiliatingly lost wars, the world's crappest and most insecure voting system, the folly of outsourcing the entirety of American manufacturing to a totalitarian dictatorship, the widespread rural despair that is lowering US male life expectancy through fentanyl and suicide, and the urban battlegrounds in which almost every city any foreigner has heard of (ie, not just New York) is being abandoned to dark and feral forces...
In the bigger scheme, Western Civilization is dying on America's watch, which historians of the future would be merciless about were it not that on present course the historians of the future are likely to be chaps who have as much respect for Western Civilization as the average American schoolmarm.
At times like these, you want something more than just the pom-pom girls of Conservative Inc "owning the libs" by pointing out the "hypocrisy" of whatever Pelosi or AOC has done today. But nobody wants it from some ingrate downer immigrant. So, in this climate, I find the telly/radio stuff a little easier to maintain the balance of, because, even in the midst of some doom-laden big-picture thing, there's always a chance a guest will say something funny and my old pre-Covid bonhomie will briefly revive.
~Many years ago, I was preparing a big feature for The Independent in London on Irving Berlin's upcoming hundredth birthday, which involved me talking to a multitude of other songwriters about Irving the man and their favorite Berlin songs. It was an epic production, and my colleague Mark Lawson suggested that, having pulled it off, I should retire. Which advice, with the benefit of hindsight, I should have taken.
In the course of the jubilations, we commissioned a special hundredth-birthday illustration. Our illustrator was a brilliant talent, but prone to get a bit oblique: If you asked him for something to accompany a piece on, say, West Side Story, he'd return with a picture of a chrysalis floating through the galaxies or some such. So I was dispatched to hint that it might be helpful if he stuck a bit closer to the brief. "How do you mean?" he asked.
Well, I said, floundering a bit, how about a rendering of Irving Berlin's head against some sheet music showing the first line of a song?
"What song?" he asked.
So I handed him a folio of Berlin's greatest hits and invited him to pick his favorite.
So he returned the next day, an hour before deadline, with an illustration of Mr Berlin set against a musical stave with the first line of his favorite song, "Cheek to Cheek":
Heaven... I'm in heaven...
"If he dies overnight," said my editor, "we're going to look like cynical sneering bastards."
Well, we ran it, and he didn't. But, on reflection, if one has to tempt fate , I would rather be too right ("Heaven... I'm in heaven") than just plain wrong - as the editors of People, with the usual protracted lethargic lead time of somnolent American magazines, have proved to be yet again:
People EXCLUSIVE:
Betty White Reveals Her Secrets to a Happy Life at 100: 'I'm So Lucky to Be in Such Good Health'
I'm sure Miss White would have found it funny, in a Chuckles the Clownish kind of way. But imagine looking like chumps for a headline that dull.
~We had a busy New Year weekend at SteynOnline, starting with the live Hogmanay edition of The Mark Steyn Show on GB News with Conrad Black joining me to discuss the Maxwell verdict and Zuby checking in to recall his triumph as women's weightlifting champ. I then counted down the final hours of 2021 by counting down a century's worth of New Year Number Ones. On New Year's Day I bade farewell to a few songs of 1921 that echo down the decades, and Rick McGinnis offered his first film pick of 2022 with one of my favorite stars: Gloria Grahame In a Lonely Place. We closed out the weekend by tipping our hat to a few of the musical talents we lost in 2021.
~If you blew Christmas and are wracking your brains as to how to make it up to your kith and kin, don't forget the present that lasts all year: A one-year gift membership in The Mark Steyn Club. Membership in the Steyn Club comes with some unique benefits, including:
~Our monthly audio adventure in Tales for Our Time;
~Exclusive Steyn Store member pricing on over 40 books, mugs, T-shirts, and other products;
~The opportunity to engage in live Clubland Q&A sessions with yours truly, such as last Tuesday's;
~Transcript and audio versions of The Mark Steyn Show, Mark's Mailbox, and other video content;
~My ongoing series of video poetry and other weekend specials;
~Advance booking for my live appearances around the world, assuming such things are ever again lawful;
~Customized email alerts for new content in your areas of interest;
~and the chance to support our print, audio and video ventures as they wing their way around the planet.
See you on the telly tonight - live at 8pm London time/3pm New York.
