SG showed up in the comments to link to his blog. I responded to his specific concern, but elsewhere I found this amusing. Lawrence Auster was complaining about “drinking publicly from water bottles”. Is it a Leon Kass licking ice-cream thing? I suppose I am too young to remember a time when it was “unacceptably rude or low-class” rather than the mark of a yuppie who think he’s too good for tap-water. He also says “Western liberal people have become obsessed with having a constant supply of fluids. The idea must have spread among the politically correct that if you are not imbibing water every minute throughout the day, your free radicals might make you age prematurely or you’d get some dread disease.” That’s a completely separate issue from whether you drink water from a bottle or glass on CSPAN though.
Like SG I have a metal bottle (made in China!) I got from work, though I don’t carry it around and don’t feel like going into why I don’t use cups at home. Growing up my family did eventually purchase some plastic bottles, but we made sure to keep them around so they could be filled from the tap, at least until a dog chewed them up and a replacement was needed.
August 24, 2011 at 8:37 am
Though it may seem strange and anachronistic to us, Auster and Kass are accurately reflecting the pre-1960′s attitude about eating and drinking casually in public that was commonly thought to be a “low-class”, vulgar, and uncouth activity in preceding generations. What HalfSigma might call “prole-drift” – the democratic class-leveling at the lowest-common-denominator – in this particular regard (but also in many other exhibitionist displays of class) occurred sometime during the baby-boomer coming of age era.
This was actually a widespread view held by many many refined and sophisticated world cultures and which remains apparent in areas that didn’t experience the same cultural upheaval as we did in the 1960′s. Japan and certain German areas comes to mind in my own experience, and most of the popular guide books will tell you that it is still considered rude and aberrant by the locals to see someone “eat or drink on the go” in those areas.
This is just one of those “The past is a foreign country” things where we’ve changed so much in such a relatively short amount of time that we aren’t even aware that a change ever took place at all. This is what also gets people tied up in knots when they try to understand past American politics – they just can’t comprehend how everything they know was entirely different back then. The very strange Presidential elections of 1952 and 1956 provide good examples of this, if you’ll permit the digression.
Most people will not even be able to guess how to explain the fact that only the Deep South voted not for the “war hero” Eisenhower, but instead for Adlai Stevenson – the Northern, very culturally Liberal, Leftist-Establishment (Choate, Princeton, Harvard Law) Intellectual who was one of the most vehemently anti-segregation politicians in the country.
He was specifically promoted at the last minute to the Democratic nomination (which he won because of what is widely suspected to be foul play) because of those anti-discrimination views, and in order to neutralize anti-Mafia “maverick” Estes Kefauver and pro-segregation Senate Majority Leader Richard Russel. This strange character won the Deep South and only the Deep South! And despite getting just trounced by Eisenhower in electoral votes 442-89 and being widely unpopular, the Democrats ran him again anyway in 1956, where he predictably lost even worse, 457-73, but again, won the Deep South.
You have to really struggle to come up with innocent explanations for this that incorporate our current modern understanding of the country, until you just realize, nope, things were just very different back then for some reason.
August 25, 2011 at 11:27 am
The constant water bottlers irk me, too. Less common, but similarly annoying is the person who holds a giant mug of hot coffee or tea with both hands, sipping from it every few words or so while talking.
August 25, 2011 at 10:47 pm
I don’t find the 50s elections so strange. Stevenson was from a prominent political family, governor of one of the more populous states, and favored by the outgoing president. Running the same guy twice in the face of failure does seem kind of dumb, but William Jennings Bryan was the failed nominee three times (and Nixon was also a failed nominee, though his comeback is acknowledged as surprising). The nomination I find really strange is Wendell Wilkie. He never held or previously run for any political office, was a former Democrat (only switching parties in the year prior to the election), and his views hardly seemed different from FDR (who he supported in 1932). And of course there was still a “solid south” at that point.
Carter, you could carry around straws and offer one in such an ocassion so they don’t have to use hands at all. The twisty “crazy” straws are amusing (“mildly entertaining” per wikipedia), but more bulky to carry around.
August 26, 2011 at 2:55 pm
That would be fun, though Giant Mug People like having the giant mug next to the face between sips, to hide behind I think, while they drone on passive-aggressively.
October 28, 2011 at 5:28 pm
The types of adults that wear backpacks are the types of adults that carry water bottles and drink from them in public, constantly.
It’s class related along the lines of who would and would not consider bringing one of these or something similar to and from work each day.
It signals a middle class emphasis on practicality, whether for the office worker, student or granola type.
October 30, 2011 at 6:11 pm
I always have a backpack, but not one of those. More like an ordinary school one. I never carry water bottles though. Sometimes beer.
November 1, 2011 at 2:06 am
Me too. The “middle class” emphasis on practicality is a virtue in my book -but I think it’s a huge chunk of modern elites too.