Iraq, Dean's Electability, Toilets in the Czech Republic

There seems to be a change of mood in Iraq. Yes, there are still terrorist attacks and Baghdad looks like a miserable place to live. But, it’s getting better. I am genuinely convinced that is one of the reasons that Howard Dean lost Iowa and, compounded by the now famous yell, will lose New Hampshire. Just as well, we have to find someone who will win to challenge Bush. Special interests are simply too powerful today in America. Dean is a luxury we cannot afford, better Kerry or Edwards who just might succeed in unseating Bush and the heartless, arrogant automaton who is Vice President. Wesley Clark must not get the nomination because with him we might well combine the arrogance of a Bush with the naiveté of a political novice, giving us a completely unproductive presidency, something we can ill afford in the 21st century.

And now I’ve seen Prague and, over the past several days, a great deal of Moravia and Bohemia. I’m impressed. I travelled with a group of Czechs and foreigners round small villages searching for places to build new, environmentally friendly projects. We ate at restaurants tucked in the basements of large, Soviet-era public halls near the centres of small towns. We stopped at remote petrol stations at the edges of villages where everyone but a rather sad cashier was at home, throwing lignite into their boilers to fight the cold, the thermometer was at minus 14 Celsius yesterday afternoon.

The country is clean; there remains much impressive architecture from both the Austro-Hungarian period and before, when these lands at the very heart of Europe were a power in their own right, and, pleasant surprise, there is not an overwhelming amount of ‘sock in the eye’ stuff from the Communist period although there is still too much.

For me though, having now travelled nearly constantly for much of my 52 years (today is my birthday), one great measure of the relative progress and ‘civilisation’ of a country is the state of its toilets. Those in the Czech Republic are, generally, very clean. This is not because they are serviced more often than in other countries; indeed, in some of the places I visited, I’m quite convinced that the cleaners don’t come too often. As much as anything else, the users of these toilets seem to be aware that someone else, another human being, will be using the toilet after them and they try to leave it as clean or cleaner than they found it.

This toilet cleanliness thing is something important. I have sampled them around the world: in China, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Venezuela, Spain, Mexico, Australia and many more countries. It has proven to be one of the most accurate measures of how strongly the rule of law prevails in a particular place. For instance, cleaners in many pubs in Britain have, I believe, disappeared years ago but the toilets remains useable – just, mind you – because of the basic decency of the patrons. This latter, of course, is only true of rural pubs, not those cosmopolitan, rude places that are more ‘bars’ than places for congenial congregation, the true definition of what a pub ought to be.

But, as usual, I digress, this was to be about the Czech Republic I think. Nice place, visit it if you can.