Month: November 2009

I just got back from two weeks in Spain and one thing I learned is that you can tell a lot about a country from its public bathrooms.

Public bathrooms in the U.S., as compared to those in Spain or the Netherlands, put the lie to what Dick Armey said, as reported in the encomium to his de facto leadership of the tea-party movement in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine:

“Europe is governed by a concern for the collective…That’s what they care about.  What makes us different is that we begin with the liberty of the individual.  We got it right, and they got it wrong.”

Not exactly, Mr. Armey.  Sure some things are better in the good old U.S. of A. than in Europe, but not everything. 

Consider the public restroom.  Now I have been in some execrable bathrooms in Italy and France, but my last two trips abroad were to Spain and the Netherlands, and in both countries the stalls in public bathrooms were almost everywhere individual rooms with real locks and even door knobs; and when they were mere stalls, the stall walls ran all the way from floor to ceiling.  Even in the one or two public bathrooms in which there was wall space at the top or the bottom of stalls, it was never more than 3 or so inches, not enough room for someone with a wide stance to insinuate his foot and calf into his neighbor’s stall.   And in both countries, the toilets were always well stocked and very clean—even in bus and train stations. 

Seems to me that at least in Spain and the Netherlands, there is public respect for the individual reflected in the privacy they give everyone to do what is a very private action for most people.  In fact, most people feel at least some small twinge of humiliation when sitting in stalls with walls shorter than they measure and feet visible just inches away.  Or imagine high school students in so many public urban high schools today, who have to sit there without a door.  Of course, children can avoid the humiliation of no door merely by going to a private school. 

Now what happened in Dick Armey’s land of the individual that has led to our awful small and unprivate stalls?  My hunch is that builders hired engineers to put together standards based on what was the least expensive way to give a wall between people sitting in the bathroom.  That means developers and building operators lowered costs.

In the United States, individuality means “every man (and woman) for him (her) self,” or put more mechanistically, the opportunity to make as much money as possible for yourself by any means possible.

By contrast, the collectives running Spain and Netherlands foster individual self-expression, dignity and privacy. 

I’m not saying that Europe is better in all things, but that Armey is wrong to say that we have a superior society.  We could learn many things from the Europeans, such as mass transit and walking to get around in cities and on-time, high-speed trains to get between cities.  

And one thing that we can learn from Spain and the Netherlands is that individuality is more than a matter of equal economic opportunity.

Recent research has given a more nuanced picture of the decline of the American Indian.  Two facts—and they are facts—seem to have captured the imagination of the reading public and the media:

1. That many American Indian societies in North America were already in decline when the Europeans arrived.
2. That the diseases the Europeans brought with them killed millions of Indians (as opposed to the Indian Wars, economic warfare and the depredations that follow the uprooting of whole nations from their long-time homes).

My evidence is only anecdotal, but my sense is that these two facts are used to the exclusion of all other facts in current discussions in the news media of the decline of Native American civilization.  And while both of these facts are true, writers of all persuasions cite them in a wide variety of contexts nowadays, far more than we hear about racial genocide and property expropriation as causes for the decline of Indian civilization.  By reporting these relatively recent discoveries of historians, the intelligentsia is in a sense saying, “It’s not our fault about what happened to Native Americans.”

The latest example is in Steven Stoll’s otherwise fine piece that opens the November 2009 issue of Harper’s in which he discusses at length William Ruddiman’s demonstration that the Little Ice Age supports the view that man has had an impact on global warming and cooling for about the last 10,000 years. 

Stoll reports that about the time of the Little Ice Age, which took place roughly from 1300-1700 C.E., there was an enormous increase in pandemics throughout the world.  About North America, he says:

“When Hernan Cortes invaded the Valley of Mexico in 1519, his armies brought smallpox, influenza and mumps, setting off among never-before-exposed people a series of devastating infections, that, as the diseases moved north and south, killed between 50 and 60 million over the following two hundred years.  The destruction of life cut so deeply into Indian societies that many never recovered their earlier populations.” 

Note the subtext of the statement, which silently absolves the Europeans of guilt in the decline of the Native Americans and their civilizations.  Afterall, we can’t be blamed for the germs we carry.  (Except of course, for General Lord Jeffrey Amherst, who knowingly gave Indian tribes blankets infected with small pox.)

Interestingly enough, Stoll’s discusses the decline of other nations, e.g., France and Italy, from disease during the Little Ice Age, but reports that all eventually regained their former population.  The reason for the difference in the fates of the French and the Native North American nations is so painfully clear that it makes one wonder why Stoll ever writes the sentence: “The destruction of life cut so deeply into Indian societies that many never recovered their earlier populations.”  The article would have been better without this extraneous explanation, but then it would have been without the important ideological subtext that we’re not to blame for what happened to Native Americans.

In her weekend story about San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s withdrawal from the race for the Democratic nominee for California governor, Associated Press reporter Juliet Williams shows how so-called mainstream reporters confuse the basic terms of political discourse by accepting the long-term labeling propaganda of the Republican party.

Here’s the paragraph I want to analyze:

“The telegenic mayor tried to connect with voters at town hall forums across the state, but never finessed his message.  He excitedly skipped from topic to topic, promising never to blunt his left-leaning positions on gay marriage, the environment, immigration and universal health care to win votes.”

Environmental regulation and universal health care are both left-leaning positions because both involve more government regulation and, in the case of the environment, more constraint on the individual.

But shouldn’t support of gay marriage and immigration rights be positions of the right?  Afterall, to outlaw gay marriage and hamper immigration both represent government interference through regulation plus constraint of the individual, two things that the right-wing vehemently oppose.  In fact, uninhibited individual rights and minimal government regulation are two of the foundation stones of the right-wing.

The third foundation stone of course is promulgation of a certain value system that reflects the aspirations that the religious among the upper classes set for the working classes during the industrialization of the second half of the 19th century, a.k.a. the Victorian value system.  As Paul Starr depicted in detail in “The Social Transformation of American Medicine” some 25 years ago, the Victorian era is also when physicians supported passage of laws restricting abortion as part of a program to drive out the competition.  This value system has no place for gay marriage, even if that means committing the abomination of regulating private activity. 

The New York Times was perhaps more accurate in its version of Newsom’s politics:

“His political views were unlikely to play as well across the far-more-conservative center of the state than they did in the Bay Area.”

To be precise, it’s left versus right, and liberal versus conservative, but the news media throws right and conservative into one pot and left and liberal into the other.  So because right-wingers are swimming in the same soup as conservatives, they are opposed to gay marriage when in fact, they should be in favor of it.