The Face of the Tiger

by Mark Steyn

In this collection of essays, Mark Steyn considers the world since September 11th - war and peace, quagmires and root causes, new realities and indestructible myths. Incisive and witty as ever, Steyn takes on "the brutal Afghan winter", the "axels of evil", the death of Osama bin Laden and much more from the first phase of an extraordinary new war.

Genres: Politics, Essays

352 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2002

About the author

Mark Steyn is a Canadian author and cultural commentator. He has written numerous books, including the New York Times bestsellers America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It. Steyn has been published by magazines and newspapers around the world, and is a regular guest host of the nationally syndicated Rush Limbaugh Show. He also guest hosts Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News, on which he regularly appears as a guest.

Steyn lives and works mainly in Woodsville, New Hampshire. He is married, and has three children.

Reviews

[Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Steyn: ascerbic, accurate, fearless, and hilarious (and not in that order!) This is a collection of his various columns over the year following 9/11 in which he proved prescient about the complete lack of change the country and world would make in response to Fundamentalist Islamic Fascism (FIF).

Here's a spot-on and funny except from the book I found just by randomly opening it:

"What worked on September 11th was municipal and state government. What failed--big time, as the Vice-President might say--was federal government, all the hotshot money-no-object sweeping-powers fancypants acronyms: FBI, CIA, INS, FAA... The debate over government is between folks who want a fire chief and those who want a fire chief plus a transgendered cultural outreach officer."

A more succinct statement of what's wrong with our culture I've yet to find. Read Steyn and weep, both with laughter and horror.

[Jerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you learn only one lesson of history, make it this one: history repeats itself until it doesn’t.

If I had known this was specifically a collection of columns from the year after September 11, I probably wouldn’t have picked it up. I still have the CBS book What We Saw, unread with its DVD still in the wrapper. I bought the CBS book because September 11th must be remembered; I haven’t watched or read it because September 11th isn’t something I want to dwell on in its entirety.

It’s not the book’s fault that I didn’t know what I was picking up out of my reading pile: there’s large text at the bottom saying that it consists of “columns and essays, September 11th 2001 to September 11th 2002”. I was, I think, focused on the great title: The Face of the Tiger, which is, of course, in larger text.

Steyn takes the title from a limerick, which he used in his February 25th, 2002, column for The National Post:

There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger.

The column is about how little we, especially the experts, understood about the people who were attacking us, and the poem hits right on target.

This is an amazing book. Mark Steyn provides a unique look at how Americans responded to the September 11 attacks and how the world responded to Americans, written from his perspective as a Canadian immigrant who maintains citizenship in two worlds, New Hampshire and Quebec, and who often travels to London and Europe. He’s able to clearly describe the difference between the American and European worldview, and how that affects our misunderstandings.

Many of the things I learned here I do not remember hearing about at the time, such as the INS approving Mohammed Atta’s student visa, for the purpose of attending flight school, six months after September 11.

How much faith should Americans have that the INS can spot living, potential terrorists when they can’t even spot world-famous dead terrorists?

Or that people saw terrorists performing dry runs of the hijackings, most famously actor James Woods, and reported them to the FAA, who did… nothing.

Besides being critical of sclerotic domestic bureaucracies, Steyn is also critical of the west’s foreign policy toward dictators, which he calls the “SOB system”, the famous line that “he may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB.”

The inverse is more to the point: he may be our sonofabitch, but he’s a sonofabitch. Some guys go nuts, some are merely devious and unreliable, some remain charming and pleasant but of little help, but all of them are a bunch of despots utterly sealed off from their peoples.

It’s a system, he thinks, that is designed to allow terrorists free reign wherever it is applied.

He’s also critical of the way the media, both in Europe and in the United States, seemed to be so ready to go back to their role as partisans. In May of 2002, CBS news reported that:

The Washington Post said Saturday that a top-secret briefing memo presented to President Bush in 1998 focused on efforts by Osama bin Laden to strike at targets in the US.

Mistakes happen; the real issue is the correction. When they were reminded who was President in 1998, CBS rewrote the lede to:

The Washington Post reported Saturday that a 1998 top-secret briefing memo to the President…

And the European press continued to warn us, during the war in Afghanistan, of the “fast approaching… brutal Afghan winter”. And again, it’s one thing not to know what the climate of Afghanistan is (there are a variety of them; in Kandahar it barely hits freezing in the winter, for example), but to keep writing these warnings about “winter approaching” well into a winter that proved them wrong was daffy.

It was even more daffy because there was an important story in the multiple climates of Afghanistan, and how that affected relief supplies, but because the news media focused on the eternally approaching brutal winter that story was never told.

…they seem a little touchy about the fact that among the first food supplies to get through was a fresh supply of egg on their faces.

It isn’t all sarcasm, however. Steyn emphasizes his belief that the key event of September 11 was the passengers of Flight 93 fighting back.

Unlike those on the first three flights, the hostages on 93 knew what their fate would be. They understood there would be no happy ending. So they gave us the next best thing: a hopeful ending.

Everything that mattered after September 11th… was present in the final moments of Flight 93.

From the craziness of equating the burka with the bikini as equally repressive (sadly, from a Cornell University historian) to the long string of failures by Middle East experts, there’s a lot of room here for the classic Mark Steyn snark. But this is also a very serious look at how the September 11 attacks changed us (and didn’t change us) and how it highlighted the differences between the American and European worldviews. Steyn is uniquely situated to provide that very useful service.

It isn’t just September 11 that must be remembered, but now we responded to it, and why.

We may not be asked to scramble up over a trench and across a muddy field in Flanders, but it’s all too possible we may be called upon to demonstrate great heroism close to home, as the firemen of New York and the passengers of Flight 93 were. They are the Dead. They lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, loved and were loved. They did not deserve their premature deaths. But they join the untold legions who helped the Union win the Civil War, the Americans and the British Empire win the Great War, and the Allies the Second World War.

[Mark Antonio Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Warning: do not read if you are squeamish, French, or easily offended. Mark Steyn takes on the diseased state of Western Civilization as it lay in the thrall of Political Correctness after September 11th. Steyn simply has zero problem saying what gives many people the vapors.

With wit and humour, style and rolling logic, this book will have you thinking just as hard as you laugh. You won't be able to put it down.