Dear Tim,
On the sleepwear question: The one clear lesson to be drawn here is a conservative one to the effect that safety regulations are unsustainable in the absence of a popular mandate. In this case, cotton garments really are nicer, especially in an age when there’s a huge trade in high-end children’s clothes made of natural fabrics. (They might as well call the current, liberalized flammability standards the Baby Gap Rule.) When our kids were tiny, I had a marked preference for cotton, flammability be damned. But I remember puzzling with my friends over this issue: Why were the stores so full of gorgeous little cotton thingummies clearly designed to put our infants to sleep in, with tiny notices printed on the inside labels, Not Intended for Sleepwear?
What’s at issue here is an attempt in Congress to push the Consumer Product Safety Commission into re-adopting the all-polyester safety standards it enacted in the early ‘70s, at the high-water mark of its powers. This was a big issue at the time. (I remember an especially devastating Saturday Night Live skit, of the mid-’70s, involving Dan Ackroyd as a thuggish maker of flammable baby clothes.) Interestingly, the Commission itself doesn’t advocate a return to the stricter standard, which it relaxed in 1993: Its point of view is that if you don’t allow people to buy cotton sleepwear, they’ll just put their kids in loose-fitting cotton T-shirts. Although the Post story doesn’t give us much help figuring this out, the clear implication is that the threat to children in fires is not that their clothes will catch fire while they’re sleeping (because by the time the flames are lapping at their cribs, what they’re wearing may not matter?), but that they will somehow set their own clothes on fire while in the presence of an open flame. In other words, yes, it’s worse to be wearing cotton than polyster when your clothes go up in flames. But the best way to handle this is not to wear clothes so loose they’re going to catch fire. Now: Where does all of this leave little girls who wear nightgowns?
It makes no sense that we should have to puzzle this out by ourselves. So here’s what you should think: Don’t force the re-adoption of strict flammability rules. But goose the CPSC to frame the problem clearly, as a matter of public education.
Did you get to the Washington Post’s Metro section? Its lede is a nervous little piece noting that the company that made the scaffolding for the Conde Nast skyscraper is slated to do a big job, starting in about three weeks, here in D.C. The assignment? A 555-foot scaffold for the renovation of the Washington Monument. Apparently the company, Universal Builders Supply, Inc., is the firm of choice for big scaffolding jobs; they also did the renovation of the Statue of Liberty.
Finally, be sure and catch the news, released yesterday by Britain’s Public Records Office, of “Operation Foxley,” the Brits’ apparently extensive plans, in 1944, to kill Hitler. T.R. Reid of the Washington Post writes up the story as something close to comic opera, with Britain’s Special Operations Executive pondering means that ranged from sniper fire to anthrax-laced tea. Ultimately, the British concluded that Hitler’s increasingly erratic military leadership made him more of an asset alive than dead. But in the meantime, they conducted plenty of surveillance. “SOE Operative in Germany also compiled dossiers on reported orgies involving German leaders,” Reid writes, “evidently hoping to… embarrass the Nazis. Among much else, the files report that the Nazi party chairman in Munich enjoyed having naked women on horseback circle him to the music of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”
I love the smell of bratwurst in the morning.
Love, Marjorie
