Many complain that America does not do things as well as it might, and yet our toilet paper is superb. I remember, when the German Democratic Republic fell in 1989, seeing on television that citizens of East Germany swarmed over the wall to the West and bought mountains of toilet paper. Years before that, a friend of mine had a girlfriend from Czechoslovakia, who used to say that the great problem of communism was that their toilet paper had the quality of a lunch bag. You couldn’t complain, because the authorities would send you into internal exile. Even pages from magazines were preferable to what you could find on the toilet paper shelf in Czechoslovakia. The only solution was to have friends smuggle in better paper from the West. It had to be done discreetly. The authorities had a toilet paper monopoly. They alone could make it, in government factories, where the better paper used by the nomenklatura was produced in secret amounts. That paper was like silk.
It takes a genius to create good cheap toilet paper such as Scott or Charmin. How does Scott manage to get such soft paper that doesn’t break? Charmin is a true capitalist luxury. I marvel at its luxurious scent and its supernatural softness. Likewise, I can only imagine the toilet paper of Czechoslovakia before the fall of the Eastern bloc. The closest I can come to thinking about Czech toilet paper under the Stalinists is to think of the paper once used at my college. It was a bit waxy, and not as absorbent as Scott. It was, for whatever reason, made in Red China. Students, staff, and faculty complained, and today the paper is better. Capitalism works through competition of goods, and through vocal dissidence. Bad quality toilet paper disappears. In communist countries, there was to be no discussion of the toilet paper.
Capitalism works through competition of goods, and through vocal dissidence. Bad quality toilet paper disappears. In communist countries, there was to be no discussion of the toilet paper.
When COVID-19 hit, I wasn’t surprised that people ran out to get toilet paper. I did, too. It’s something that can’t be talked about in polite society, but our society is dependent on good toilet paper. Otherwise, you can’t even sit calmly in your computer cubicle. Some fold their paper neatly when they go. Some just crumple. Everybody that you see on the street, and everybody you know, uses it, and all have a method of using it. We should be more grateful for our toilet paper and our clean and well-lit bathrooms, as well as soap in the dispenser and hot running water. Most of us do not remember outhouses. When my parents were children, they had to walk outdoors in the midst of an Iowan winter—the US equivalent to a Siberian winter—to go to the outhouse. It was kept a hundred or more feet from the house so the odor wouldn’t travel. They trudged through snow and mud and had to carry a flashlight. Sometimes pranksters would move the outhouse and people would fall in.
Indoor plumbing has not reached the globe evenly, but American plumbing is a marvel. From Peoria to Tallahassee, from Baton Rouge to Walla Walla, one can count on an encounter with a decent toilet. In Baltimore in the 1890s, people drank and “went to the bathroom” using the same wooden pipe. Cholera resulted. No wonder the Baltimore poet Edgar Poe was always drinking alcohol.
India has over a billion people, but in 1993, 600 million of them had never sat on a toilet. They went in alleys and in the fields. Their lakes were full of an unprintable word. In Delhi, India, the smell is dreadful. In Delhi, NY, on the other hand, our waste treatment plant is so effective that the river below the plant is cleaner than the river upstream. Our rivers have gotten cleaner over the last hundred years. In India, “open defecation remains most common among those who do not have a toilet”. India has spent 30 billion dollars upgrading their sewer system, so that now only about 17% continue to lack a toilet, compared to 70% in 1993. This is progress, people!
Compare China. Their rivers are filled with chemical poisons and human waste. The Yellow River is brown. Indonesia, too, is fraught with indescribable filth. Its rivers are piled up with old cars and tires and plastic, in addition to sewage. 90% of Pacific Ocean pollution comes from Indonesian and Chinese rivers. Corruption in these countries makes it difficult to complain. You will be flushed if you try. The problem will remain.
I had a friend who lived in rural Japan in the 1960s. In the night, he had to get up, walk a certain distance to a dump hole, and hold a rope, while leaning his rear end out over the abyss that went back to before recorded history. If he relaxed, he would fall into millennia of the unprintable. He practiced Zen so that he could master the art of remaining awake and yet relaxed. Once a week, he would take a bullet train into a small city and sit on a toilet at the only McDonald’s. For three hours he would go through the Wall Street Journal, and he wouldn’t move.
It was bad enough when I lived in Paris in the 1980s. The toilet down the hallway was one I shared with thirty neighbors. They often missed the hole in the floor. Even restaurants in Paris at that time had a hole in the floor in lieu of plumbing. And their paper? It was a pain in the butt, but not as bad as the paper of the former Soviet Union. It was pink, and very thin, and there wasn’t much on the roll, but it had to suffice. Toilets and toilet paper world-wide are improving, but in my own admittedly anecdotal experience, America still leads the way.
Hurray for the American empire! Hurray for the free market! Hurray for homegrown products! Hurray for Scott! Hurray for Charmin!
Many famous US authors have been communists. It is time for our poets and writers to see once more the innovation of Marcel Duchamp, who put the urinal and bottle racks at the heart of art. Warhol saw the wonderful value of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, Brillo, and Coca-Cola, among other commercial items. Many believe Warhol was in jest. And yet he called his workshop The Factory, and he celebrated our commercial culture via its stars, such as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. Even Chairman Mao became American in Warhol’s hands, after the Chinese leader met with Nixon in 1972. Genius.
Instead of tearing down our culture and trying to replace it with the crummy cultures of communism, we ought to put our shoulder to the giant wheels of profitable business. Our greatest artists are not the poets and writers, but the titans of business such as Donald Trump and Elon Musk and the makers of Scott toiletries and Maybelline.
