The Undocumented Mark Steyn (7 page)

In the Seventies, when it was put about that Sarah Miles drank her own urine every day, it got her marked down as a kook. You don’t remember Sarah Miles? She starred in
Ryan’s Daughter
, very memorably, but not apparently as memorable as her formidable urine intake. Thirty years on, it’s understood in Fleet Street that whenever you pitch an interview with Miss Miles to your editor you’ll be expected to bring up the pee-swigging. She usually replies that she hasn’t touched a drop in years.

But après Sarah le déluge. The other day,
W
magazine ran an admiring profile of Cate Blanchett: “Green before it was hip, she cites Al Gore and David de Rothschild as heroes and believes that leaf blowers ‘sum up everything that is wrong with the human race,’” etc. In the midst of these effusions, the elegant Aussie revealed that, in order to give her new mansion as small an environmental footprint as possible, she requested that the plumbing be constructed to “allow them to drink their own waste water.” Miss Blanchett isn’t some dippy loopy Milesy fringe goofball. She’s the most acclaimed actress of her time. She’s the star of
The Golden Age
—no, no, silly; nothing to do with micturition, it’s about Elizabeth I. In November, Todd Haynes’s new film will star her as Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan? “Haynes became convinced that Blanchett was the right woman for the job while watching her perform in a 2006 production of
Hedda Gabler
at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,” writes Jenny Comita. Of course!

This isn’t like the old-school Sarah Miles urine-chugging. Miss Blanchett and her husband have paid their architect thousands of dollars to design a
system whereby the bodily waste goes down the toilet, gets whisked by pipeline through the walk-in closet, over the balcony, down the wall, back in through the rec room, and up into the wet bar directly into the soda siphon. As her fellow Antipodean, the Aussie wag Tim Blair, observed: “Not exactly Pickfair, is it?”—Pickfair being the legendary mansion of Douglas Fairbanks and Canada’s own Mary Pickford. But who’s to say Pissfair won’t become the norm in the new Hollywood?

Sheryl Crow, meanwhile, recently proposed that when it comes to, ah, other waste products, her environmentally conscious fans should use only a single sheet of bathroom tissue per visit. I fell asleep three minutes into Al Gore’s Live Earth extravaganza, so I don’t know whether she turned up to perform some new consciousness-raising song on the theme—sheet music, as they say in Mexico—but a celebrity fundraising cover of “All We Are Saying Is Give One Piece a Chance” is surely a project all Hollywood can get behind.

As it turns out, Miss Crow is a bit of a paper tiger on the eco-bathroom front. In 2005, MTV got Cameron Diaz to host a series called
Trippin’
, in which she and her A-list chums went to Tanzania, Honduras, Nepal, and the like and praised the environmental friendliness of village life. “I aspire to be like them,” Drew Barrymore told viewers after spending a few days in a remote Chilean community unburdened by electricity or indoor plumbing. “I took a poo in the woods hunched over like an animal. It was awesome.” Does a Barrymore crap in the woods? Not in John, Ethel, and Lionel’s day. You can understand why Cate Blanchett’s so opposed to leaf blowers if they’re blowing any leaves from round Drew’s stomping grounds.

By now, you’re probably wondering: oh, come on, Steyn, you’re not going to do lame jokes about modish celebrities’ latest obsession for the rest of the column, are you? Well, I just might. But let me slip in a serious point first: a big chunk of so-called “progress” is, in fact, just a matter of simple sanitation and hygiene.

Take, for example, America’s quartet of murdered presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy. You could reduce that mortality rate by 25 percent just by washing and rinsing. James Garfield was shot at the Baltimore
and Potomac Railway Station on July 2, 1881, and took two and half months to expire, which is almost as long as he’d been in office before he set off to catch the train. It’s now accepted that he died not from the gunshot wound but from the various medical personnel poking around inside him looking for the bullet with dirty hands and unsterilized instruments. Joseph Lister’s ideas on antisepsis had become standard in Britain but not yet in the United States. Within three years of the President’s death, Dr. William S. Halsted opened America’s first modern operating room at Bellevue. So if Garfield was shot today, he’d be home in three days.

But you don’t have to be targeted for assassination to reap the benefits of hygiene. Do you know the expression “getting hold of the wrong end of the stick”? It comes from the public latrines of ancient Rome. They were very agreeable design-wise—marble benches and so forth. And at the end of the bench was a bucket of salt water with a stick in it. On the end of the stick was a sponge. The patron would use the stick to sponge his person in the relevant areas, then put it back in the bucket for the next customer. It doesn’t really matter whether you get the wrong end of the stick: the right end was good enough to spread all manner of diseases.

Almost every setback suffered by man in the next couple of millennia has some connection to human fecal matter: more crusaders were done in by dysentery than by the enemies’ scimitars; America’s Civil War soldiers were twice as likely to die in camp racked by disease as in combat. Today, what Drew Barrymore regards as an “awesome” experience is one reason the teeming shantytowns of West Africa have infant mortality rates approaching one in three. Male life expectancy in Côte d’Ivoire: forty-two. Liberia: forty-one. Sierra Leone: thirty-seven. And the Sheryl Crow one-piece rule would do a lot to help the developed world’s statistics head in the same direction.

But, beyond the data, there’s something very curious about a culture whose most beautiful women, the beneficiaries of every blessing this bountiful society can shower upon them, are so eager to flaunt their bodily waste in the public prints. And even more bizarre is their conviction that one of the most basic building blocks of modern life—hygiene—is now an example of
western consumerist excess. Perhaps it will catch on. Perhaps ten years from now there will be a Peebucks on every corner selling entirely recycled beverages: a venti urinatte for $6.29, but only “fair trade urine,” in which the peasant has been paid a living wage for his specimen, a guarantee symbolized by a logo—a new Golden Arches, say.

And after that who knows where we’ll go? As George Monbiot, the bestselling doom-monger from Britain’s
Guardian
, writes: “It is impossible not to notice that, in some of the poorest parts of the world, most people, most of the time, appear to be happier than we are. In southern Ethiopia, for example, the poorest half of the poorest nation on earth, the streets and fields crackle with laughter. In homes constructed from packing cases and palm leaves, people engage more freely, smile more often, express more affection than we do behind our double glazing, surrounded by remote controls.” In Ethiopia, male life expectancy is 42.88 years. George was born in 1963. If the streets and fields are crackling with laughter, maybe it’s because the happy peasants are reading his syndicated column in
The Gamo Gofa Times-Herald
. No wonder they’re doubled up and clutching their sides. It’s not just the dysentery from the communal latrine.

Every civilization eats its own but rarely quite so literally. The western world worries about “the environment” as if we are trespassers upon it. If so, it won’t be for much longer. On the fast depopulating plains of eastern Germany, municipal sewer systems are having to adjust to the problem of declining use. Rural communities are emptying out so dramatically there are too few people flushing to keep the waste moving, and to get it flowing again they’re having to narrow the sewer lines at great expense. For the demographically dying west, it’s not a question of “sustainable growth,” but of sustainable lack of growth. One can talk breezily about western civilization being flushed down the toilet of history, but it turns out even that’s easier said than done. Long before Sheryl Crow’s celebrity pals have squeezed their last Charmin, it will be clear that the job of “saving the planet” is one the west has bequeathed to others.

DID THE EARTH SUMMIT MOVE FOR YOU?

The Daily Telegraph
, August 31, 2002

“
THE WORLD SUMMIT
kicks off in Johannesburg today, aiming to tackle poverty and protect the environment. . . . It will consume a huge amount of resources and create as much pollution in ten days as 500,000 Africans manage in a year.”—
The Daily Record

“Caviar and Call Girls Find Their Place at the Earth Summit”—
The Times

I’m glad I made the effort to attend the opening gala of the Earth Summit, truly a night to remember. The banqueting suite of Johannesburg’s Michelangelo Hotel was packed as Bob Mugabe warmed up the crowd with a few gags: “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m starving. . . .” Pause. “. . . millions of people!”

What a master of timing! The canned laughter—an authentic recording of happy Ethiopian peasants clutching their bellies and corpsing—filled the room.

After the chorus of native dancers clad only in packing cases and palm leaves, Natalie Cole came on to sing her famous anthem to industrial development, “Unsustainable / That’s what you are,” and sixty-five thousand of the world’s most eligible bureaucrats, NGO executive council members, and BBC environmental correspondents crowded the dance floor to glide cheek to cheek under a glitter ball of premium ox dung specially flown in from Bangladesh. It glittered because of the 120,000 flies buzzing around it, their gossamer wings dappling the transnational activists below in a myriad of enchanting shadows.

And then I saw her. She was wearing a low-cut dress and had the most fabulous pair of melons. “Holy cow!” I gasped, as she approached my table. “They’ve gotta be genetically modified!”

“No,” she said, sliding into the chair opposite and giving me a good look at them. “They’re all natural.” She tossed them to Kofi Annan. “They’re for his organic juggling routine.” I had to laugh. Sabine Arounde is the Belgian delegate to Unescam, the United Nations Expensive Summits & Conferences Agenda Monopolizers, and, lemme tellya, when she’s in a room the rising temperatures are nothing to do with fossil fuel emissions.

“We met at Durban,” I reminded her.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “The conference on world health.”

“Racism,” I corrected her.

“Whatever,” she said. “This one’s more my bag. I’m very into S & M.”

“Come again?”

“S and M. Sustainable Alternative Natural Development Mechanisms,” said Sabine.

We were interrupted by the waiter, as oleaginous as a tanker spill. “Will sir and madam be having the Beluga caviar, foie gras, lobster, and magnum of champagne?”

“Certainly not!” I snapped. “The papers back home are full of stories about how we’re all scoffing the caviar and chugging down the bubbly while just a mile down the road the locals are holding the Distended Belly of the Week competition. In compliance with Foreign and Commonwealth Office guidelines, I’ll just stick with Set Menu B.”

“An excellent choice,” he said. “Would sir prefer the mako shark soup or the black rhino confit on a bed of Amazonian mahogany leaves?”

“I’ll have the rhino,” I said, “followed by the lightly poached panda with a goldenseal salad and two green-cheeked parrot’s eggs over easy.”

“And would sir like to see the wine list?”

“Just bring me a Scotch and humpback whale oil on the rocks.”

As Sabine ordered, she looked coolly into my eyes and Natalie Cole’s voice wafted across the room to capture the moment:

         
Like a cloud of smog that clings to me

         
How the thought of you does things to me. . . .

The orchestra pit had been converted into an authentic replica of a Rwandan latrine and, even as Natalie sang the line, it sprang to life in a hundred dancing fountains of E coli-infected martini.

“There’s something heady in the air tonight,” I murmured.

“It’s the CO
₂
,” purred Sabine.

Four hours later, the exhausted UN lovely, her spent body glistening with the heat of passion, lay back on the shards of her shattered headboard. “Wow!” she whimpered, struggling for breath. “Now that’s what I call sustainable growth. You are incredible!”

“UN seen nothin’ yet, baby,” I said.

Yet, to my extreme annoyance, who should burst through the door but everybody’s favorite
Guardian
columnist. “You know, of course, George Monsanto,” said Sabine, hastily pulling the tigerskin bedspread around her.

“Monbiot!” I exclaimed. “I thought you were running away from
The Guardian
to join the gaily pealing fields of Gamo Gofa, where the rude peasant existence is so much more fulfilling than life in the west.”

“I am,” he said. “I’m on my way to Ethiopia right now. But I just wanted to stop in and thank you for coming here, eating the caviar, drinking the champagne, sucking the praline-flavored centers out of the individually wrapped Belgian chocolates on your king-sized bed, and blowing all the billions of western taxpayers’ dollars. Without your sacrifice, those poor industrialized chumps would have even more money to spend on consumer goods and home improvements, making their pathetic lives even more worthless and hollow.”

“You’re right,” sighed Sabine. “But I don’t know how much longer I can sustain this level of sustainable development conferencing.”

“Then why not come with me?” said George. “Be a happy, laughing Ethiopian field hand.”