Malthus and the Stink Years
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in Drafts - Program & Lobby Essays Published: Friday, 16 March 07 - 12:56 PM (GMT) Last Updated: Friday, 16 March 07 - 01:04 PM (GMT) |
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HAIL MALTHUS
At the end of “Urinetown” Officer Lockstock leads the cast in a salute to Malthus. Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was one of the first political economists to study poverty. In 1798 Malthus predicted that human overpopulation would exceed natural resources, particularly the food supply. Malthus argued that human overpopulation was kept in check by cataclysms such as natural disasters, war, epidemic disease and famine. For Malthus, God allowed devastating natural catastrophes to regulate the human population. As Officer Lockstock – the voice of Malthus in the musical - states, “Dreams are meant to be crushed. It’s nature’s way.”
Malthus argued against public assistance for indigent people affected by famine because the poor would not be able to sustain their families, thus weakening the population. Malthus characterized the poor as preternaturally lazy and prone to vice, and believed that exposure to middle class values (such as universal education and hard work) would motivate individuals out of penury. Malthusian theories were used to justify the denial of famine aid to India and influenced British relief policies during the Irish potato famine.
In “Urinetown” Malthus is more than a ironic punch line. The salute to Malthus returns the audience to real social issues, the ecological undercurrents in the bubbling froth of musical comedy. Although Malthus is faulted for his unsympathetic views on poverty and suffering, his work posed enduring questions about the sustainability of a growing global population. For Malthus, cyclical miseries would only be prevented with a substantive change in human nature. In “Urinetown” the heroic characters cannot accept that the future of Gotham depends on restraint of human rights and desires. Hope and Bobby’s idealistic notions of freedom cannot be survive in a world of enduring drought. As Officer Lockstock quips to Little Sally, “Don’t you think people want to be told that their way of life is unsustainable?”
- Julie Vogt
THE STINK YEARS
The Urine Good Company of “Urinetown” is a comic depiction of unregulated monopolies and free market privatization. The audience is prompted to laugh at Hope’s description of UGC as “the private company that controls these public bathrooms” because one rarely thinks about the water bill when the toilet is flushed, or consider it a privilege to use our own bathroom. It is easy to forget that we do in fact, pay to pee. A public service is provided to our private homes. The municipal infrastructure that keeps our cities clean arose from failures of early urbanization. Gothams such as London and Paris stank for most of the nineteenth century. These cities were epicenters for cholera, a deadly disease transmitted by contaminated water.
In the recent bestselling book “Ghost Map,” Stephen Johnson chronicles an outbreak of cholera in London in the summer of 1854. (Over ten thousand people could die in one week in a cholera epidemic. The 1854 Chicago outbreak claimed 5% of the population). Johnson graphically describes nineteenth century London with rising overpopulation and a poor sewage system. Although toilets had come into vogue, the water closets flushed to a basement or backyard cesspool. In Victorian London, it was very expensive to hire men to collect the “night soil,” so many landlords chose to ignore the waste. Johnson cites a civil engineer who found basements three-feet deep in night soil. When sewage contaminated urban water systems, fatal cholera spread quickly through the population. The stink years were a dangerous time to live.
The regulation of bodily functions in “Urinetown” may seem oppressive and absurd (Or, as Little Sally suggests, terrible subject matter for a musical). But the interconnections between personal health and public policy are a matter of life and death.
- Julie Vogt
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