Mark Steyn is the Spengler of the 21st Century

Mark Steyn is our hardest-boiled, decline-of-the-West, say-goodbye-to-Europe, America-as-an-underwater-homeowner-writ-large pessimist; he's the Oswald Spengler for the 21st Century, if Spengler had been less of a German mystic and more of a good Anglo-Saxon pragmatist.   (Spengler famously wrote The Decline of the West in 1918, which some Nazis read as a precursor for National Socialism, but he broke with the Nazis in 1933 on the question of anti-Semitism, and was essentially ostracized by the party until his death in 1936.)   Here is Steyn in high dudgeon today:

The American Dream, 2011: You pay four bucks a gallon to commute between your McJob and your underwater housing to prop up a spendaholic, grabafeelic, paramilitarized bureaucracy-without-end bankrupting your future at the rate of a fifth of a billion dollars every hour.

In a sane world, Americans would be outraged at the government waste that confronts them everywhere you turn: The abolition of the federal Education Department and the TSA is the very least they should be demanding. Instead, our elites worry about sea levels.

The oceans will do just fine. It's America that's drowning.

As they say, read it all.   Or, as they might say, read it and weep.