August 16, 2003
I was shocked to read this smug Washington Post editorial mocking the Europeans and their heat wave. Also surprising is that very few people seem to have jumped on this embarassing bit of transatlantic schadenfreude from a major daily - although to be fair, it was probably published Thursday morning, ie before the French government's announcement that as many as 3000 deaths in that country may have been caused by the heat (previous estimates were somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 heat-related deaths).
As lame as that was, it didn't compare with the terrible hatchet job they did on Gore's speech in an editorial from this past Sunday. Maybe they have an unannounced policy of guest editorials from the Wall Street Journal.
I'm reading a book on the 1995 Chicago heatwave that killed 500+ (750 by one estimate).
I wouldn't be surprised to find that France suffers from many of the same bad policy decisions that led to the high number of deaths in Chicago.
I wonder how many of the dead lived alone, were elderly, and were Algerian or other non-"French" ethnics.
Yeah, I'd be very surprised if France didn't make a lot of the same policy mistakes as Chicago, but I think in the case of France it might be more excusable, because temperatures there are generally lower. For some reason the WP folks seem to think the French should be better prepared for temperatures they rarely get just because we get them.
Yes, I found that a bit offensive, along with the right-wing blog mockery that followed it. Given that Paris is at the same latitude as Winnipeg, Canada, you could hardly expect them to have the AC facilities of Washington. It's a little like Buffalo natives mocking Atlanta for not having sufficient road equpment to deal with a freak snowstorm.
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