Outhouse Nation

24 January, 2018:

Recently, our president was alleged to have used the word “shithole” (or arguably “shithouse”) as an adjective for dysfunctional nations whose residents might wish to migrate to the United States. I’m not going to use either word again but they will inform this essay.

The first word was frequently used by my father and others of his generation for the hole in the toilet seat of an outhouse. It should be no surprise that the second word was often used for the enclosing structure. Both terms were pragmatic and accurate for the time and place. Germanic variants include: Scheißloch, scheißhaus, skithuset, and skithĺl.

I grew up using outhouses (uthus in both the Norwegian and Swedish tongues of my grandparents), both at our own home and next to the first school that I attended – a one-classroom country township school. Even though our family house was plumbed in 1965 – when I was sixteen – I still used our fresh-air commode frequently because it could be preferable to waiting in line. (There was 13 in our family!)

My ancestry is diverse: German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, French and American Indian. With the exception of my indigenous predecessors, all others came from places that could have been called outhouse nations at the time of their arrival in our Republic. Suffice it to say that none of those nations currently earns my modified epithet, but history informs us that each wave of nation-specific immigration to this country was driven by area-wide civil unrest, economic uncertainty and a quest for greater freedom.

I grew up on the Northern Great Plains where many German immigrants came into the country from Russia. Their ancestors had moved to those regions on the behest of the German Empress of Russia (Catherine the Great). Once there, they were never truly at home, but always strangers in a strange land. Other Germans came from Northern European states that were in turmoil as Otto von Bismarck consolidated power and unified Germany.

In a similar time period, Sweden and Norway had consolidated under one government, then separated and fought numerous wars. Despite the mayhem, the population was mushrooming and outstripped agricultural production. Consequently, many like my Scandinavian paternal grandparents sought opportunity in a country where one could claim land by living on and improving it (the Homestead Acts of the latter 19th Century).

Denmark and Sweden united under the Kalmark Union, then broke apart and fought each other at every chance. Denmark was constantly threatened by the intrigues of Germany. Schleswig-Holstein (the origin of one of my lineages) was part of Germany at one time, a division of Denmark in other periods and a separate Duchy for a while. Such volatility must have made it a real outhouse (in Danish: udhus) of a place to be in.

The French revolution prompted mass migration to America. The same potato blight that devastated Ireland drove a second wave from France in the mid-1800s.

Today, these countries are all prosperous democracies with a lower infant mortality than the United States and very good health care. The pressures that drove immigration in earlier centuries and spawned my mongrel pedigree are for the most part gone.

The new outhouse nations are in Africa, Central and South America and the Middle East. No wonder that many of their citizens consider our great country such a beacon of opportunity. Our President’s remarks have a great deal of truth to them. However, as is often the case, the manner in which the truth is told makes all the difference in how it is received.

As a certain motto declares, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The corollary is that dressing a president’s statement in scatological hyperbole doesn’t make it false – just vulgar and unbecoming of that great office.

It is my hope that individuals with a grasp of civility, morality, tact and a usage of language that rises above the level of the barnyard will contribute constructively to the conversation about immigration.

So: don’t be a dummkopf!