Reading Mr. Cox’s jeremiad, one might almost be tempted to suspect that, just maybe, his concern for the environment cloaks a cultural and political agenda.
A few years ago, Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini recounted his adventures in the U.S. in the book “Ciao, America!” in which he offered up humorous musings on many of the standard European complaints about the American way of living. Mr. Severgnini allows that he rather admires the Yankee “urge to control the outside world,” whether that means sending planes off an aircraft carrier or sending out technicians from Carrier.
He notes that the refusal to suffer the sweaty indignity of equatorial heat is “the antithesis of passive resignation,” and thus a perfect expression of the can-do American character. “In America, air-conditioning is not simply a way of cooling down a room,” Mr. Severgnini writes. “It is an affirmation of supremacy.”
That notion, I suspect, is at the heart of Mr. Cox’s overheated complaint.
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