Saturday, August 16, 2003
(12:14 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Behind the Times
One of the benefits of my blog is that if you've missed anything that was bouncing around the blogosphere three days ago, you can read it here. The "it" in question is a brutal editorial in the Washington Post, which I will gladly quote for you now:
TO LISTEN TO THE FUSS Europeans are making about their weather, anyone would think that it was actually hot over there. In Paris, shops have experienced a run on electric fans. In Sweden, a male bus driver showed up for work in a skirt after his company informed him that he was not allowed to wear shorts. In Amsterdam, zookeepers are giving iced fruit to their chimpanzees to cool them off.
Okay, so maybe it's a bit warmer than usual. Temperatures across the continent have shot up into the 90s and once or twice have topped 100 degrees in London and Paris. But is this really hot -- hot enough to close businesses, hot enough to cancel trains (the tracks might buckle), hot enough to wax nostalgic for the summer rain to which some Europeans, notably residents of the British Isles, are more accustomed?
Last time we checked, the weather here in Washington was in the upper 80s, which is average to low for this time of year. Temperatures in Houston and Dallas in the past couple of days have topped 100, as they usually do in summer. Yet somehow, no one's talking about extraordinary measures being taken by Texans or Washingtonians. On the contrary, President Bush, who qualifies as both, by some measures, is currently mocking the press corps by pretending to enjoy jogging in the Texas heat. Not all Europeans may want to go this far -- but maybe they will now at least stop turning up their noses at those American summer inventions they've long loved to mock: The office window that doesn't open, the air conditioner that produces sub-arctic temperatures and the tall glass of water, served in a restaurant, filled to the brim with ice.
I actually just quoted the whole thing, so the link is more a formality than anything. I got this link from Atrios, before "Lambert" unleashed the flood and the site was thrown back into its dogmatic slumber. (As I've noted before, I much prefer the "classic" Atrios format, where he wrote a paragraph at most and then let people dissect the story to death in the comment section. It allows one to immerse oneself as much or as little as one wishes, as opposed to the hundreds of scrolled pages of the average "Lambert" or "farmer" post. I realize it's perhaps hypocritical of me, given that my blog is almost all based on long posts, but whatever. I'm not trying to run the same kind of blog as Atrios is.)
After that long parenthesis, I might note that for all this talk of accusing Europeans of being wimps (so fashionable nowadays), the editorialists do not note the fact that "[t]he office window that doesn't open, the air conditioner that produces sub-arctic temperatures and the tall glass of water, served in a restaurant, filled to the brim with ice" are all operative starting in late April. I personally prefer the European approach. Unless the weather is truly life-threatening, I would not use the air conditioning if I lived alone, and I never have ice in my drinks (except in restaurants, where I don't like to appear picky to waitresses). Certainly the Europeans look a little ridiculous to us for shutting stuff down during a heatwave, but that obscures the more enduring "background wimpiness" of American society -- the reason we're able to bear such high temperatures all the time is that we never actually have to deal with the real temperature outside except for a few minutes at a time, unless we want to. President Bush can jog out in the hot weather because he can retreat back into the air-conditioned "Crawford, Texas, Ranch" immediately thereafter; the natural weather is commodified luxury at this point.
I do have to give the president some credit, though: even if he does retreat back into the air-conditioning immediately after jogging in 90-degree weather, the jogging itself is still fairly impressive in its own way. It's just part of the overall dedication and discipline that makes our president such an amazing person.
Also, now that I'm done bitching about Atrios' other bloggers, does anyone remember back when I used to have co-bloggers? It seems so long ago now...
