Here is Megan's initial response to Maria's comments. Some may believe that it exceeds the recommended daily dose of hyperbole, and I have probably cut her more slack than I normally would because I have read her writings for so long. (For example, she writes about temps in Europe and then accidentally includes Toronto in the list.) Nevertheless, she makes valid points.
September 09, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:
Myth "busting"
Hurricane Katrina seems to have triggered a lot of deep revelations to everyone. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these deep revelations consisted of . . . reaffirming exactly what they had previously believed. A certain stripe of conservative has learned that poor people are animals who can't be trusted to behave. Passionate Democrats have learned that the main responsibility for disaster planning rests with President Bush, who should be impeached. And European leftists have apparently learned, to their vast dismay, that America is a cruel and gluttonous place, building our so-called economy on cheap oil and the shattered lives of workingmen, whom we kill when they become inconvenient.
As everyone knows, I had hoped that people's attempts to use Katrina to prove that they were right all along would wait until the victims were laid to rest. This suggestion has been roundly ignored by all those who feel that their accusations will have more punch if they are made in the face of the nation's shock and horror.
Still, it would be hoped that the message of "Hey, America, you really suck weasels!!!" could have waited a few weeks. We'll still be here, still hosing up Mustela nivalis, after the dust has settled; plenty of time to chastise us for our horrid, selfish ways then. But apparently, our need to recognize that compared to Europe, we're a bunch of racist rednecks with the moral sensibilities of your average sea louse and the competence of Michael Moore performing "Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy" with ankle-weights and a neck brace, was just to urgent to let it go unsaid any longer.
You know, you would think that a large group of people who have all read Guns, Germs and Steel, and taken its message that "geography matters" to heart, would pay just a leetle bit of attention to it when they start chastising America for not being more like Europe.
Item One: The area that was devastated by the hurricane is approximately the size of Great Britain. Tell me again how the EU would have gotten everything under control in a matter of hours had 90% of England, Scotland, and Wales been flattened by an Atlantic storm that also knocked out electricity to Ireland and France.
Item Two: Americans live in a less favourable climate than do Europeans. While I was in London, I was mystified by the number of people who told me "I can't stand it when it gets over 70 degrees fahrenheit!" (well, they said it in celsius, but you get the idea). Having lived through a heat wave in London, I understand it a little better: 78 is kinda brutal if no one has air conditioning. Of course, the reason no one has air conditioning is that it rarely gets above 70. The average temperature in Dublin ranges from 4.8 degrees celsius in January to 15 degrees celsius in July. The average temperature in New York, where I live, which is pretty temperate for America--it doesn't have extremes of either heat or cold--is -1 degrees celsius in January, 25 degrees celsius in July. In other words, while they have a temperature range of about ten degrees, we have a temperature range of about twenty-six degrees. And that's not even a rugged area like Minneapolis (-11 degrees celsius to 24 degrees), Chicago (-6 to 24 degrees), or Kansas City (-5.5 to 24.5).
What does that mean? We use more energy to heat our homes in the winter, and unlike most Europeans, we have to air-condition our homes in the summer. Comparable figures for other major European cities:
London
Paris2.6 to 18.7
Rome7.1 to 24.1
Toronto-6.2 to 20.7
Barcelona9.1 to 24.2
Frankfurt.2 to 19
Stockholm-3.5 to 17.2
Moscow -10.3 to 18.5
As you can see from that list, only in the extreme north do winter temperatures drop below those of temperate New York city, and in those countries; only in Moscow and Toronto have a range bigger than New York. But even in those cities, there is no need to both heat and air condition. This matters, not only because it takes more energy to get your home hot/cold than to keep it there, but because houses can be built to maximize air flow, or maximize heat retention, but not both. That is how Romans get away with not having air conditioning (leaving the city for two months every summer also helps), and New Yorkers can't. And to have someone in Ireland--Ireland!--lecturing us on our energy consumption is just a bit rich. Put me directly in the path of the gulf stream and I won't use all that wasteful energy heating my house either.
Item Three It is a big country, and that means that we don't have the population densities necessary to support rich public transportation networks. Yes, there have also been development choices made, many of which I don't approve of (the interstate highway system, to start with). But Europe hasn't chosen high-density development because of some virtuous public-policy decisions; it has chosen high-density development because Europe, with population densities many times that of the US, doesn't have the land for low-density development. European planners have failed pretty much as miserably as American ones at getting their citizens to choose public transportation over cars.
Moreover, the lesson from America so far is that it is impossible to grow cities with the population densities necessary for successful mass transit from scratch. The only cities where mass transit is successful are the ones that grew around mass transit, notably New York and Chicago, and even in those cities, space constraints (the lake in Chicago, the small size of Manhattan) made a sizeable contribution to supporting the necessary density. Europe has public transportation not because it made the tough moral choices about land-use, but because its cities were largely built up before the car was invented, and because during the fifties, when productivity boosts were putting mass-produced automobiles in the hands of American workers for the first time, Europe's workers were busy recovering from the nasty war they decided to hold in the forties.
As an addendum, I'd like to point out that one of the main problems afflicting those who could not evacuate from New Orleans was that they didn't have a car because New Orleans is one of those old-fashioned walkable cities. (And no, you couldn't evacuate by public transit either . . . especially not if they had to evacuate to France to get out of the path of a hurricane).
Item Four America has a lot more varied terrain, which makes one-size-fits all regulation very tough. Even though most SUV's are undoubtedly driven by chairborne warriors who think it makes them look cool while they haul groceries from the Shoprite, regulators have trouble making a rule that won't force the folks who live in the Wyoming mountains to haul logs up the hillside in a Nissan four-cylinder econobox.
Item Five Y'all don't have storms like we have storms. The Dutch have made much of their fantastic flood preparedness compared to us. Might I suggest that if they were threatened by floods every couple of months, 95% of which did basically no damage, it might be a wee bit different? One of the biggest problems with evacuating New Orleans was simply that residents had been evacuated many times before in recent years, and returned to find their homes untouched.
Item Five Y'all apparently don't even need the "natural" part to produce the disaster. A heat wave that wouldn't even make a New Yorker reach across the sofa to turn up the fan killed as many people in France as the worst-case scenario for American losses to Katrina. They were apparently not saved by Europe's admirably high fuel prices, its finer moral sensibilities about the poor, its stronger committment to taking care of its citizens, or [COUGH] its enlightened attitudes on matters of race and ethnicity.
I say all this as someone who thinks that America's fuel taxes should be higher, its committment to undoing the legecy of slavery stronger, its educational system reformed in any number of ways to equalize the opportunities of the poor with the rich. I say it as someone who thinks that many of those who died in New Orleans did so because they were poor, and lacked the resources to go elsewhere. I say this as someone who is ashamed that America couldn't do better by its citizens.
But I also say this as someone who is sickened by the smug response of some Europeans to this tragedy: their gladness that it has taken Bush down a peg, their overweening belief that this somehow happened because Americans just aren't as nice or as smart as Europeans are. Of course, Europeans have no way of knowing how they'd do in such a disaster, because they have no storms like Katrina, no earthquakes like Northridge, no rivers like the Mississippi . . . but somehow that doesn't seem to stop some of them from being sure that the ability of their police to stop 40 or so football yobs from rioting translates perfectly into an ability to handle the displacement of 500,000 people when even the police have no water, food, gas for their cars or power for their radios.
Overall, these sorts of comments seem to come from a simply overwhelming ignorance of what America is about. I mean, Europeans say they know a lot about us, but you don't learn what America is like by watching our sitcoms any more than I can claim to have truly understood Ireland because I've watched Father Ted--or taken the odd week in Dublin to drink at the Stag's Head and visit the Book of Kells. I have no idea whether the author has lived in America, or even travelled here extensively, but I'd be rather surprised to find that she has. When most people visit a place, even one so terrible as America, they generally find their stereotypes replaced with a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of its realities. Yet the author is attempting to debunk "myths" about America by saying that it is exactly the cartoonish redneck nightmare of the European left's imagination. The goal of myth-busting, particularly among academics, is not supposed to be replacing them with new myths of your own devising.
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