Mark Steyn: DISLOCATED DINING

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Miss Righter was one of the first to experience an admittedly minor consequence of September 11th but nonetheless a widespread phenomenon: dinner party dislocation. Every few weeks in the British press, you could read some columnist or other announcing that he could no longer bear the company of his friends: progressive lefties bemoaning the way old friends had gone over to the side of the Pentagon warhawks; old-school Marxists who’d campaigned for unilateral nuclear disarmament outside US military bases 20 years ago disgusted at the way their pals were now defending regimes that brutalized women and executed homosexuals. I found myself estranged from many friends in London, including most of my colleagues at The Spectator, wary small-c conservatives for whom the Atlantic alliance has always been a mixed blessing and who couldn’t help feeling, faced with all this “axis of evil” business, that maybe in his frightfully vulgar way Osama had a point – the issue was America, nothing else.
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It’s not just who’s pro-war and who’s anti-war: in London and even more so in Paris and Berlin and Rome, there’s a third group fighting vainly the old ennui – they can’t understand why chaps who used to be such amusing company are suddenly so bloody primal all the time. Not long ago I found myself sitting next to a cool Nordic blonde who turned out to be the Swedish Foreign Minister, Anna Lindh. Ms Lindh wanted to know why the Americans present were so “hung up” on war and terror. Why, it was absurd and prevented any normal conversation on the real issues facing the world – welfare, health care, etc. We agreed to disagree. I flew on to Iraq and had a grand old time in the Sunni Triangle. Ms Lindh flew back to Stockholm and was stabbed to death in a department store by an anti-Euro fanatic.
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In the days after September 11th, I ran into no end of college students eager to lecture me on the “root causes” – poverty breeds despair, despair breeds anger, anger breeds terrorism, terrorism breeds generalizations – yet unable to name the capital of Saudi Arabia or find Afghanistan on a map.