The Undocumented Mark Steyn by Mark Steyn

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 Baltimoreand 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 ofwestern 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