PEOPLE ACCUSE us old liberals of smarmy self-righteousness and God knows they are right. Four of us had lunch the other day and we agreed before we sat down: no politics. We know what we're going to say so why say it? Self-righteousness is a good old American vice, and we have it, and though preferable to cruelty and cynicism and deliberate dumbheadedness, nonetheless remind yourself: you are not so different from the others.
So when we got on to politics halfway through my tuna sandwich, I said a deliberate unself-righteous thing about us being motes of dust on a tiny insignificant planet and whatever we say will not make any difference to the cosmos, so why should we care who wins the election in November.
There was a moment of silence and then somebody said that Barack has a commanding lead in Wisconsin and that McCain is in deep mud in Ohio.
What I didn't get to talk about was my bath last week. Somehow the subject of cleanliness never came up. The closest we got was the swimming in the Olympics.
Back to my bath. (Thank you for asking.) I went to a Japanese spa and sat in a steam bath and after 20 minutes felt some of my liberal smugness drain out of me. Extreme heat breaks down moral arrogance - look at equatorial peoples; do they lecture the rest of us about our duty to the environment? No, they don't - and I sat feeling more and more chastened, and then a stout Japanese woman poked her head in and led me into a tiled room and laid me out face-down on a padded table and sloshed me with hot water and splorted some soap on my back and started scrubbing. She wore rough gloves for this. She rinsed me with pans of hot water and scrubbed some more. My nakedness did not interest her. I suppose repeated exposure to the male form will do that.
It was luxurious, being bathed, all the sploshing and skritching, but also humbling, a naked creature feeling scourged, the sheer ordinariness of it. Here you are, wet and naked, and you are not so different from any other wet naked person. And then came the tiny masseuse with the powerful thumbs, and the steam room again, and a shower, and out into the world I went, cleansed and twanged, somewhat chastened, my neurons trembling. "You look extremely clean," someone told me.
I think I still believe what I believe. Liberals hold that the test of a civilised society is how it deals with the weak, the sick and the powerless. As William Blake wrote: A Dog starv'd at his Master's Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus'd upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Or as Jesus said: "Whatsoever ye do unto the least of these" and so forth. The test of the state is the health of the public schools and the treatment of the elderly, the ill, the demented, the incarcerated. And so the adoption of torture as American policy and loosing the darkness of the soul upon some poor manacled wretch at Guantánamo is no small matter. We are all wretches. But I'll spare you the the sermon.
Let's bring back community baths. I honestly think that if we all got together naked in a steamy room and got sploshed with hot water and scrubbed down hard, we would be more civil people. Cleaner, too. Before the first debate, put the geezer and the skinny guy in a steam room for 30 minutes and see if that doesn't bring out something fine in them, something profound and memorable. It's a great country, no matter what the rich and the privileged say, and the truth, dear hearts, is marching on. - (Tribune Media Services)