Geography 101: Sxxt-Hole Countries
President Trump provoked one of his patented firestorms by drawing attention to the geographic category of “Sxxt-Hole Countries.” Or allegedly he did so, anyway, according to the reports of what he dismisses as “Fake News.”
In any event, it turns out there’s a geographic category that ranks even below such countries: Countries that don’t even have a hole to go in. Dare we discuss such things if even the topic of “Sxxt-Hole Countries” is off-limits? Evidently, we may dare. National Geographic has broached the topic.
In a recent article, the venerable magazine reported that 950 million people globally practice “open defecation.” That’s a substantial number. And a substantial public health menace. One gram of feces (0.035 of an ounce) may contain, it’s said, 1 million bacteria and 1,000 parasitic cysts. Yuk.
Open defecation — especially prevalent in such places as India, Pakistan and Somalia — leads to the death of 1.4 million children annually, says the U.N.’s World Health Organization.
Al fresco squats are reported to be linked to 240 million cases of — let’s see if we can get this right — s-c-hi-s-t-o-s-o-m-i-a-s-i-s. That’s a disease picked up from flatworm parasites infesting polluted water. Yuk again.
Oh, here’s another “SxxtHole Country” geographic statistic: Altogether, 2 billion people drink water at risk of being contaminated with feces, thereby putting themselves in danger of cholera, typhoid, polio, hepatitis A, and a witches-brew of other maladies.
In the mind of today’s “liberal,” however, such exotic lands are pristine places inhabited by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idealized “noble savage,” immigrants-in-waiting uncorrupted by the imperialist taint of America yet determined to move there anyway, with or without documentation, and register Democratic.
The sorry public health conditions of these places could be reversed with longknown, low-cost solutions. We know the cause of the problem. We know the extent of the problem. We know the cure for the problem. We could easily muster the resources to address the problem. Yet we don’t.
Contrast this with the elusive and arguably illusive issue of, for example, climate change. No scientist can tell you with any precision how much human emissions are contributing to global warming as opposed to natural causes. Is it 1 percent? 5 percent? 25 percent? The honest answer is: Dunno.
Well, uh, slight correction. We do know this much: One sure way for a country to lower its global-warming emissions — its “anthropogenic climatic forcings,” to use the preferred fancy term — is for that country to be mired in abject poverty. If you yearn for a country with a low “carbon footprint,” check out, say, the wonderful green, green country of Zimbabwe, annual GDP per capita of $925.
Yet climate change — not fundamental drinking water and sanitary waste disposal — gets the attention and the big dollars. According the Congressional Research Service, from FY 2008-13 the federal government expended $77 billion on the climate-change snipe hunt. Much of this sum was largess dispensed by 18 different federal bureaucracies to fund tendentious university studies in support of alarmist hypotheses.
Some of those globalwarming tax dollars could have financed sanitary toilets and water supplies, averting countless suffering and death. But the truth may be that providing somebody with a toilet or water filtration just doesn’t offer the virtue-signaling cachet of tooling around Hollywood, snoot aloft, in your $97,000 federally subsidized electric Tesla Model S with “I (Heart) Mother Earth” and “Go Green!” stickers attached to the bumpers.
This isn’t to suggest, though, that providing safe water and waste disposal is a challenge without political difficulties. “Sxxt-Hole Countries” is a crude designation. But not a misleading one.
Without reference to the unfortunate inhabitants themselves, the “sxxt-hole” designation fits to a “T,” for example, Somalia, Central African Republic, Sudan, S. Sudan, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Eritrea and many other places, which might more tastefully be classified as hellholes. Such countries are not only economically the most wretched on earth. They are also — according to the ratings of Freedom House — the least free on earth. And that, perhaps, is no coincidence.
On a scale of 100 being most free, those countries
— Somalia and the others
— get an average score of 15 from Freedom House. And those countries have an annual GDP per person averaging a miserable $1,056. (Freedom House, by the way, is a non-partisan effort with bi-partisan founders, Democrat Eleanor Roosevelt and Republican Wendell Wilkie.)
Contrast the abysmal numbers of Somalia et al. with the numbers of the United States, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Their average Freedom House score is 97, their average annual GDP, $55,560.
Freedom House’s scoring system includes points for rule of law and takes into account workable legal and institutional safeguards against flagrant corruption.
In, say, Sudan, with its abysmal score of 4 out of 100
— four! — or Eritrea, even worse with a 3 — three! — there’s a better than even chance, alas, that any aid dollars to upgrade drinking water and waste disposal are going to end up in the pockets of ruling potentates, motoring around in their fleets of Mercedes with pennants fluttering on the front fenders.
Trump, in his own inimical, allegedly boorish way, has given the world a refresher course on geography and its unfortunate realities.
--daveneese@verizon.net