In the palmy years between the Great Wars as the United States reached its ascendancy, the British frequently chaffed Americans at their national pride in the impeccable superiority of their domestic plumbing. Americans discerned no irony in this. As far as Americans were concerned, the Brits were content with their damp wc's, hesitant toilets, smelly drains. The Brits could have them. The American bathroom was a point of technological chauvinism. Elger, Standard, Royal, these were the Google, Microsoft and Apple of their day, a veritable Silicon Valley of crappers.
What made the Brits smile at this, of course was a quiet pride in their own cultural high points, not Elger so much as Elgar. Chaucer and Bede, Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, Swift, Sterne and Fielding, Dr. Johnson, Dickens and Trollope, Yeats, all these were a source of their own national pride. Still, they were not far off the mark - there are few proscriptions in the use of the American loo beyond hygiene and general consideration for others. It goes without saying that in the heyday of American advancement, nothing larger than a small dog could be flushed into eternity without incident.
The case is different in Mexico, where the state of the nation's drains can be parlous in the extreme. The passage of a Post-It note into the national acqueduct can still occasion flooding and nashing of teeth across entire municipalities. Every genial host, every luxury hotel, convenience store, gas station, church, museum, music venue, all have their list of proscriptions and procedures on the safe and inconsequential operation of their plumbing. In the United States, these protocols are only matched for their exhaustive and byzantine intricacy by similar signboards stipulating proper conduct and refusals of liability found at public parks, swimming pools and precipices.
None of this should reflect badly on Mexico as a polity. We proscribe behaviors and set protocols where ever they might hinder or help the smooth running of the national gears.
So glad to see "Shooting" and his fly on line again: a favorite, one for whom Sir Thoma (Crapper, of course) is likely a hero for our admiration s=as--well, al; the others. Some years ago we travled to Romania, where as far as I could see the systems were not bad but the slit toilet was standard in horrific train stations and such. My wife discovered that it was a horrid error to wear pants: the errors of Amelia Bloomer and feminist generations to follow punished in the hinterlands. But enough of this stercic message..give us more of Miguel!
ReplyDeleteCec may remember the very loud, pterodactyl-like bird that lived above the outside 'convenience' we encountered when staying with a family in Costa Rica. No one warned me before I precariously negotiated my way there in the dark. As I lowered my nether regions over the commode the bird let out a bowel loosening (mine, not the bird's) scream, much to the amusement of the children of the house.
ReplyDeleteSilicon Valley of crappers... Humorous, profound, and an acute observation of the times we find ourselves in, Chaucer would be hard-pressed to do better. A century later a large swath of Americans still have national pride in what the rest of the developed world would gladly send down it's collective plumbing. Wondering if you'll find yourself south enough of the border in January to observe the operatic hissy fit swirling counter-clockwise in response to the larger swath of Americans exercising their right to flush into eternity
ReplyDeleteTruly delightful observations! Glad to see you back.
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