Dying To Be Cool
Europeans are dying of summer.
They do this periodically, in large numbers, with great suffering and considerable dignity, and then they blame Americans.
Air conditioning, they will tell you between heat strokes, is an American vulgarity, a refusal to suffer correctly which, they assert, is cooking the rest of the planet.
The World Health Organization estimates that 175,000 die annually across Europe from heat-related causes, four times more than die from gun violence in the United States. Strip out the self-inflicted deaths and the ratio jumps: ten to one.
Ten to one.
It’s the sort of scoreline you want to see your side put up in a World Cup final, not in a contest of preventable deaths.
When a heat wave hits Europe, people look up, not around. They wait on help from Geneva. It arrives eventually, in the form of a press release, dispensed at a distance by an organization headquartered somewhere with air conditioning.
Open windows at night, close shades in the day. Avoid the sun when sunniest. Wear loose-fitting clothes. Hydrate, but drink water instead of wine, possibly the single greatest sacrifice ever asked of a Frenchman. If needed, spend 2-3 hours of the day in a cool place, such as a supermarket or cinema. Check on your elderly neighbors, a tacit admission that they know who is most at risk.
That last one is particularly cruel because it doesn’t cool a room that, even with the windows open, stays well above 90 all night long. So the elderly get the courtesy of being checked on before they die, and the poor, well, they don’t even get that.
How civilized.
Here in the U.S., when the heat comes, we walk over to the thermostat and flip the switch, because north of 90% of Americans have air conditioning.
If we find an elderly friend or family member who doesn’t, we don’t let them cook to death for the greater good of the planet, we drive to Home Depot, buy a portable A/C unit and a tangle of extension cords, and solve the problem, save the life, because it never occurs to us that this was a decision requiring institutional guidance.
And because we didn’t know we couldn’t do it.
There’s a bit in Dave Chappelle’s breakthrough special, Killing Them Softly, in which he describes driving through Washington D.C., high, with his friend Chip. At one point Chip decides to race another car, then gets pulled over by the police. Chappelle, certain they’re both going to jail, starts freaking out, because he’s high. Chip tells him not to worry, he’ll handle things, and tells the officer, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know I couldn’t do that,” to which the cop replies, “Well, now you know. Get out of here.”
If Chip were a country he’d be America.
America is not the exception to history. It’s a people with a blind spot for history’s rules. What makes us peculiar is not the universal failings all countries are guilty of, but what happens after.
Nobody told us we couldn’t fight a war against ourselves to end slavery, so we did — six hundred thousand dead, brother shooting brother across cornfields and family farms, a country taking a knife to its own body because there was a hidden tumor in its founding document.
Nobody told us we couldn’t take two hundred nationalities and every god ever worshipped — guitar gods included — and put them in the same neighborhoods, the same schools, the same line at the same Walmart, and expect it to hold. Every empire that tried that has a museum where the country used to be.
Nobody told us we couldn’t give every farmhand and factory worker his own automobile, so Henry Ford built one every ninety seconds. Then his heirs, and the heirs to his throne, spent a decade stuffing seven liters of V8 into “family sedans,” naming them after predatory animals, weapons, cartoon characters, and the implements of a street fight.
Nobody told us we couldn’t put a man on the moon with slide rules, short-sleeved button down shirts, and cigarettes, so we did it in eight years.
Nobody told us we couldn’t put a computer in every home, then in every pocket, so we did, and the one riding in yours and mine could run the entire Apollo program with enough power left over to order a pizza, argue with a stranger, and watch someone else react to a video.
And nobody told us we couldn’t feed the world, bankroll its defense, invent its internet, and cure its diseases while it complained about us, so we did that too.
Millions of Europeans who spent the summer here in air-conditioned comfort, marveling at the arrogant abundance of Costco, Buc-ee’s, and Bass Pro Shops, will soon fly home to their shuttered rooms, loose clothing, and pamphlets.
And somewhere, in a dark bedroom still holding ninety degrees, someone will wonder:
“Why can’t we do that?”
Catch up on The Anecdote:
This was fun to read.
Also; America rules.
Fantastic piece, Brian