Today, Tuesday, is the launch day for The [Un]documented Mark Steyn in my delightfully deranged Dominion of Canada. If you're passing a newsstand from Vancouver to Gander, "Apocalypse STEYN" is plastered across the masthead on the front page of today's National Post, and inside you'll find a lengthy excerpt:
A decade or so back, early in the 2004 presidential election season, a publisher took me to lunch and pitched me a book. She wanted me to write a John Kerry election diary. Easy gig. All I had to do was follow him around and mock him mercilessly. Well, I hemmed and hawed and eventually she got the picture and said, "Okay, what would you like to write a book about?"
And so I replied, "Well, I've got this idea for a book called The End of the World."
And there was a pause and I could feel her metaphorically backing out of the room, and shortly thereafter she literally backed out of the room. But not before telling me, somewhat wistfully, "You know when I first started reading your stuff? Impeachment. Your column about Monica Lewinsky's dress was hilarious." She motioned to the waiter. "Check, please!" And I got the distinct impression she was feeling like the great pop guru Don Kirshner when the Monkees came to him and said they were sick of doing this bubblegum stuff and they needed to grow as artists...
If you're wondering how that Monica column went, well, it was a 1998 piece from the Telegraph, the Year of Impeachment, imagining an interview with the famous dress 20 years on, in 2018:
She is older now, her once dazzling looks undeniably faded, her famous beauty worn and creased.
"Sorry about that," she says. "I was supposed to get ironed yesterday."
Yes, it's "that dress" — the dress that, 20 years ago this month, held the fate of a presidency in her lap. It has been two decades since the day she gave her dramatic testimony to the grand jury and then promptly disappeared into the federal witness protection program. Even as she recalls her brief moment in the spotlight, she looks drawn. But that's because, following extensive reconstructive surgery, she's been living quietly as a pair of curtains in Idaho.
"What do you think?" she says, saucily brushing her hem against the sill as her pleats ripple across the mullions. "It cost less than Paula Jones' nose job."
To be honest, I was lucky to get the interview. The dress was supposed to be doing the BBC — the full sob-sister treatment, Martin Bashir, the works—but, to protect her identity, they wanted to do that undercover secret-location protect-your-identity trick with the camera that makes part of the screen go all fuzzy and blurry.
As I said, that 1998 column was whimsically datelined August 22nd 2018. Here we are a gazillion years later, and 2018 is almost upon us. Ed Driscoll asks "Is Mark Steyn's PR firm accepting new clients?"
Because seriously, I don't know how they do it. The week that After America came out in 2011, the Dow Jones dropped 512 points on Thursday, and S&P shorted America's credit rating on Friday...
Today, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, an anthology of his columns, hits the streets; its introduction is titled "Me and My Little Black Dress..."
Apparently to tie in with his book's launch, somehow Mark's PR people managed to convince Lewinsky to join Twitter on the very same day The [Un]documented Mark Steyn debuts.
Thanks, Monica!
~Also as part of Canadian festivities to launch the book, I'll be reunited with my fellow freespeecher Ezra Levant on the Sun News Network at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. Full details in our "On The Air" box at right. The [Un]documented Mark Steyn is available in hardcover from Indigo-Chapters, Amazon and McNally-Robinson across the Great White North - and south of the border you can find it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Books-A-Million. For those of a digital bent, it's also in Kindle, Kobo, Nook - and, for your iPhone et al, iBooks. In a heartwarming hands-across-the-border, we're already in the Politics Top Ten in both Canada and America.
