Comments on: Old and alone

By: Chris

Chris — Tue, 16 Sep 2003 12:16:41 +0000

Yes, I’ll have to hold my hands up on that one – it was, as you say (and indeed as I said first time around) 1 year ago.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 15 Sep 2003 19:02:59 +0000

Sorry to stay on it, but the Guardian article was published in August 2002. I think that was the original reason Crooked Timber picked up on it – it was out a year before the recent unpleasantness. Publication date of the hardback edition was July 2002. I’ll stick with plugging the book as the precipitating motive for the 2002 op-ed. But there’s no reason to doubt he wrote the book because he has something true and important to say. (And boy, wouldn’t the editors have looked perceptive if they had asked if it could happen in Europe?) There’s still an opportunity for a savvy Guardian editor to approach Klinenberg right now and say something like, “You’re the expert on the relationship between social conditions and deaths in heat waves. A month after the crisis, with ca. 10,000 dead in France and thousands more in other European countries, do you see similarities with what you wrote about in Chicago? Do you see differences? Were there lessons that could have been learned? Are there lessons that can still be learned?” Any Guardian editors reading Crooked Timber? p.s. Google up Klinenberg, Europe, “heat wave” and you find that others have been down this road: Philadelphia Enquirer (a little snarky at the beginning, but well sourced), the Hairy Trib (K has much more faith in European governments than American), Boston Globe (K less skeptical of American action), but no UK paper in the first 30 listings. Crooked Timber ranks #10, so congrats on perceived influence as per Google.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 15 Sep 2003 16:44:30 +0000

Come off it Doug! There’s a major heatwave in France, with attendant mortality. I’m an editor and my researchers tell me that a there’s been a major sociological study of a similar episode that came out last year and which has been widely praised. I’d approach the author for an op-ed piece. Wouldn’t you? Anti-Americanism doesn’t even enter the picture as a motivation for that. As for Klinenberg, you suggest he’s moved by a desire to plug the book. But maybe he wants to do that because he thinks he has something true and important to say.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 15 Sep 2003 16:08:29 +0000

Chris, sure, Klinenberg is an American, but shouldn’t the editor at the Guardian have thought about that question? We all know making a daily newspaper isn’t always a pretty operation, but what’s the value for a UK audience of learning about Chicago’s failings seven years later? Given, Klinenberg’s main motivation appears to be plugging the book. (Who can blame him?) On the other hand, there’s at least one paragraph of an attempt to localize the content. Why not another? I think the disdain for the US is so ingrained that editors don’t even know it’s a blind spot. But that second-order question—why?—is what I’m interested in. (Although just between you and me, all the way down at the bottom of the comments of an aging post, the discussion is altogether likely to be just between you and me.)

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 15 Sep 2003 09:55:16 +0000

Doug, like you I find many of the anti-American sentiments expressed in the European media repellent (there was a particularly offensive cartoon about 9/11 in Le Monde last week). But the article to which you refer was written by an American, Eric Klinenberg, from Northwestern University who is the author of the book about the Chicago heatwave to which I was referring. He’s not going to ask “could it happen here?” because, he’s “there” so to speak!

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 15 Sep 2003 09:39:02 +0000

Warning: Mostly off-topic When Chris last wrote about this topic, he referred to an article in the Guardian from August 2002 that discussed (or sensationalized, depending on your point of view) the 1995 heat wave in Chicago. The one reference to Europe is an assertion of superiority, "It was brutally hot in Europe, but there were only scattered reports of mortality around the continent." Appartently, neither the author nor the editor thought to pose the question, "Could it happen here?" And this is very odd, because without that question the article, which appeared seven years after the events is covers, is really only doing two things - sensationalizing a disaster and painting a negative picture of conditions in America. No doubt, as Chris writes, grown-up Europeans have resisted the urge to make sneering generalizations about myriad American misfortunes. I just wonder why this segment of the European population is so poorly represented in the ranks of major European media. Open any serious newspaper on almost any given day, and you will find a story, feature or opinion piece about how awful something is in America. Why should this disgust be so prevalent? And so at odds with the reality that I've known for thirty-some years? I'm genuinely interested to find out if readers here have thoughts about why. I've read a semi-satisfying book on the subject, but the main insight was that the phenomenon was old and unlikely to go away. I'm more interested in why.

By: Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz — Sun, 14 Sep 2003 03:09:42 +0000

And the French have been so sweet to US

By: Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz — Sun, 14 Sep 2003 02:51:28 +0000

Andrew Northrup: Nah Nah Nah pooh pooh soak your head in do do.

By: Andrew Northrup

Andrew Northrup — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 22:48:29 +0000

Robert, shut up.

By: eric

eric — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 20:48:42 +0000

Actually, I wouldn’t be that hard on the French. This time. It appears that this was a ‘failure of the imagination’ so to speak. What would bear watching is if there are any systemic changes to address such a thing occuring in the future.

By: Henry Farrell

Henry Farrell — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 20:34:53 +0000

Robert Seems to me that your post is the answer to your own question – quoting from Maria’s post “But some in the blogosphere have used France’s tragedy to score cheap and nasty political points and trot out the usual old national tropes. As in everything else, I suppose, the vindication of a mean-minded idea is something that can only be felt at a distance.”

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 18:34:28 +0000

Robert, do you think the same kind of thing couldn’t happen in America? It could, and it has, and it will again. When it does, grown-up Europeans will resist the temptation to make sneering generalizations about Americans, just as grown-up Americans have managed to do on this occasion.

By: Ophelia Benson

Ophelia Benson — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 18:31:31 +0000

Not meant to be snarky. Just pointing out some other possibilities. It’s not that I don’t think it’s all sad, of course – more that I think it’s at least partly an unavoidable sadness. People don’t like being a burden, a nuisance, dependent, etc. It’s not even a question of ‘cheerful solitaries’ (not my phrase…) but of people who prefer risky solitude to dependent safety. I certainly don’t mean that covers all the people who died in France in the heatwave, but it could be some of them.

By: Robert Schwartz

Robert Schwartz — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 18:18:49 +0000

How can I dishonor their memory? Haven’t their children already done that. It’s just amazing to watch the French. Just when you think they can’t sink in any lower, they do and in a spectacularly horrible way.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 12 Sep 2003 17:58:52 +0000

Why the snarkiness, Ophelia? I’m not a believer either, but I can appreciate that the fate of many of those who perished was worse by their lights because they died cut off from the church. And the contrast you draw between solitary happy autonomy and being forcibly committed to a home is just much too stark. In the Chicago heatwave, death rates were lower in communities where there were functioning social networks. Many of those who died alone in France died alone not because they were cheerful solitaries, but because no-one cared, no-one watched, and no-one visited. That’s a grim thought to contemplate.