Chapter 4. The Relentless Misery of 1.6 Gallons. January 5, 2010.
My order at my favorite Chinese take-out was taking too long. I stopped into the men's
room. There I witnessed a common scene, the modern toilet disaster. An otherwise clean
business had a restroom calamity on its hands, one so grim that I hesitate to describe it.
The conjectural history is not difficult to reconstruct. The toilet apparently had trouble flushing. There was a plunger by the toilet, of course, as we see everywhere today. The toilet was plunged to get rid of the obstruction, while the obstruction itself spilled all over the floor and stuck to the plunger, too.
The customer probably left the ghastly scene in a rush.
Management knew nothing.
But now customers were coming and going into this bathroom, surely losing all inspiration
to eat or order food.
It would be easy to blame the restaurant owners.
What is with these people and why can't they at least have a clean restroom?
But reacting this way would be unjust.
The hidden hand behind this unsanitary calamity is the U.S. government.
The true origin of the mess was not in the hour before I arrived, but back in 1994, after
Congress passed the Energy Policy Act, passed in 1992.
This act, passed during an environmentalist hysteria, mandated that all toilets sold in
the United States use no more than 1.6 gallons of water per flush.
This was a devastating setback in the progress of civilization.
The conventional toilet in the US ranges from 3.5 gallons to 5 gallons.
The new law was enforced with fines and imprisonment.
For years there was a vibrant black market for Canadian toilet tanks and a profitable
smuggling operation in effect.
This seems either to have subsided or to have gone so far underground that it doesn't
make the news.
I've searched the web in vain for evidence of any 3.5 or 5 gallon toilet tanks for sale
through normal channels.
I wonder what one of these fetches in the black market.
This possible source has no prices and an uncertain locale.
The toilet manufacturers meanwhile are all touting their latest patented innovations
as a reason for the reduced hysteria surrounding the toilet disaster.
I suspect something different.
We have all gotten used to a reduced standard of living just as people living in the Soviet
Union became accustomed to cold apartments, long bread lines and poor dental care.
There is nothing about our standard of living that is intrinsic to our sense of how things
ought to be.
Let enough time pass and people forget things.
So let us remember way back when toilets did not need plungers next to them and thank goodness
Used plunders are nasty, disease-carrying and filthy.
It doesn't matter how cute the manufacturer tries to make them or in how many colors you
can buy them.
In the old days, you would never have one exposed for guests.
It was kept out in the garage for the rare occasion when someone threw a ham or something
stranger down the toilet.
Toilet paper was super-thick in getting thicker, none of this one-ply nonsense.
You never had any doubt about the capacity of the toilet to flush completely, with only
one pull of the handle.
The toilet stayed clean thanks to five gallons of Russian water pouring through it after
each flush.
These were great cultural and civilizational achievements.
In a state of nature, the problem of human waste and what to do about it is persistent.
Do the wrong thing and you spread disease and misery.
Indoor plumbing since the time of the ancient world has been a sign of prosperity and human
well-being.
Indoor toilets that flow into a sewer have been around since 1500 BC, but every new settlement
of people in a new area presents the problem anew.
In rural America, indoor toilets weren't common until the 1930s.
That today everyone assumes them to be part of life is a testament to the creative power
of economic progress.
What we have in these regulations passed since the 1990s is therefore a step backward from
a central aspiration of mankind to dispose of human waste in the best possible way.
We have here an instance of government having forced society into a lower stage of existence.
Government has reduced us as people to the point that we either have to enter the black
market to get good sewage or come to terms with living amidst periodic spreading of human
Today, every toilet company touts its latest innovations to overcome the problem.
There are high-pressure blasters that run off electricity designed to force a poultry
1.6 gallons of water through fast enough to make the difference, they are shockingly loud
and scary.
There are new shapes of tanks and new flow mechanisms that are said to compensate for
the calamity, but this works only some of the time.
Each of these innovations is patented, meaning that a successful project cannot be copied
and improved by other companies.
So even if these are improvements, their distribution is limited and the successful aspects of them
are not extended by others, for fear of patent lawsuits.
The entire market is hobbled.
The result is an entire society of poorly working toilets and the life of adjustment
to the omnipresence of human feces, all in a short 15 years.
Thanks so much, Congress.
Of course the environmentalists are in on the whole project.
They started telling us back in the 1970s that our large tanks were sheer waste.
We should put bricks in them to save and conserve.
If you didn't have a brick in your toilet, you were considered irresponsible and a social
misfit.
Eventually, of course, the brick became, in effect, a mandate, and finally toilet tanks
were reduced to one-third of their previous size.
Back then, it was just assumed that toilet manufacturers cared nothing at all about wasting
water.
Surely, there was no rationale at all for why they consumed five gallons per flush as
opposed to 1.6 gallons.
This is just capitalist excess and down with it.
Well, think again.
There was wisdom in those old designs.
The environmentalists didn't account for the present reality in which people typically
can be easily flushed twice, three times or even four times during a single toilet event.
Whether this ends up using more or less in the long run is entirely an empirical question,
but let us just suppose that the new micro-tanks do indeed save water.
In the same way, letting people dive infections conserves antibiotics, not brushing teeth
conserves toothpaste, and not using anesthesia during surgery conserves needles and syringes.
Here is the truth that environmentalists do not face.
Sometimes conserving is not a good idea.
There are some life activities that cry out for the expenditure of resources, even in
the most generous possible way.
I would count waste disposal as one of those.
It is also possible that some people just like to get their kicks out of spreading misery
and making it impossible for us to enjoy a clean and prosperous life.
Like Puritans of old, they see virtue in suffering and would like to see ever more of it.
It sounds perverse, but such an ethos does exist, and clearly, government doesn't care
in the slightest.
There are many tragedies associated with the toilet calamity.
There are private embarrassments at guest houses and disgust at every turn.
Many of the customers at that Chinese takeout probably blame the owners, who themselves
are probably misdefined as to why toilets in communist China probably work just fine,
but in capitalist America are throwing filth all over their restaurant.
It's the hidden hand of government that has mandated this leap back to barbarism.