Lice! In Bel Air!

Demonstrating that there is, in fact, nothing too small to serve as fodder for monied obsession, New York Times Sunday Styles correspondent David Hochman conducts readers behind the front lines in the upscale war on lice.

The hair-nesting pests typically send upper-class parents-already notorious for the suffocating anxiety they incur at the first sign of any faint tilt toward normal (let alone irregular) symptoms and behaviors in their otherwise radiant spawn-into over-corrective frenzies. Hochman sits in on a home-delousing session at the house of an Angeleno mom who is “clearly mortified” at the discovery that her three kids re harboring the little mites-”which probably explained why she insisted on anonymity,” he stipulates. “We thought we would be the last people on the block to get lice,” the shaken mom explains-and just as firmly, she stresses that “I certainly wasn’t going to pick them out myself” after her nanny had seen a tiny wriggling lice hive in her eldest daughter’s hair.

No, that is the work of the roving delousing contractor business, a sector that “even in recessionary times… appears to be thriving,” Hochman notes. There are on-call home delousing services from Dallas to Los Angeles to New York, who pick through the hair of afflicted children-sometimes using a heat-based suction device called the LouseBuster-for a cool $300 to $500 per visit. (And with rich parents being such reliable reserves of hair-trigger anxiety, it seems rare that a single home delousing visit is enough to allay their alarm over the Enemy Within.)

In medical terms, this is all of course much ado about extremely little. Lice have posed almost no serious health threat, at least in developed countries, since the introduction of a successful vaccine for the spread of infectious typhus, the killer plague that had been transmitted via lice-borne bacteria, and claimed millions of lives in past epidemic outbreaks. “There are very few health consequences associated with head lice beyond the ick factor,” Barbara Frankowski, a pediatrics specialist at the University of Vermont explained to Hochman. “If anything, having head lice is really just a hassle.”

But obviously the pest’s historical associations resonate in a far more powerful fashion at the upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum, if news of a lice infestation on a tow-colored privileged young head is enough for “otherwise sensible, composed parents” to be “reduced to panic,” as Hochman observes. That’s not because of the rhetorical “no” invited by the piece’s typically skylarking Sunday Styles lead query: “Is there any creature less sexy than a louse?” (an especially inapt bit of faux-sophisticated skylarking, by the way, in reference to an affliction that principally affects young children). No, the reason that lice can plumb such deep-seated anxieties in the clucking parental overclass is that throughout history, they have spread in conditions of poverty-an association that’s never mentioned in the Styles dispatch, which instead just gins up a vague sense of generic distaste in expressions such as “ick” and “gross” to characterize the head-inhabiting critters and “repulsed” and “alarmed” to depict their disorienting impact of the heads of well-to-do households.

You get a much stronger sense of the social stigma that has long accompanied lice infestations by glancing at the popular terms for typhus outbreaks throughout history. There was the neutral-enough “louse-borne typhus,” to be sure, but the more vernacular terms for typhus pointed up where the typhus bacteria bred most freely-in the kind of close-quarters institutional settings disproportionately populated by the lower orders. Hence “jail fever,” “hospital fever,” “ship fever” and “camp fever” (as in military encampments) all served as shorthand expressions for the disease. Indeed, typhus was so widespread in past military campaigns, where sanitation was poor and living quarters extremely close, that the disease claimed more lives in Napoleon’s failed 1812 offensive against Russia than were sacrificed on the field of battle. (Indeed, since lice bred freely in Russia’s pinched peasant economy, typhus also served as a critical line of defense against Hitler’s foiled Eastern Front offensive during the Second World War, as Time magazine explained in its colorfully titled contemporaneous account, “Death Rides a Cootie.”)

So today’s upper-crust cootie anxiety reflects more than just the “ick factor” that comes with a close encounter of the louse kind-or the invidious smugness conveyed in the notion “that we would be the last people on our block” to incur a lice infestation. It partakes of a much broader sort of race memory of our ruling class: the alarm that, in the crush of modern urban congestion and casual contact with the strange new immigrants from Europe who made up much of the merchant and servant class in the nation’s great metropolises, rich families might not only meet with serious health hazards, but could also suffer the unbearable stigma of a disease that signified fraternization with the poor. (Much of this anxiety was conveniently distilled in the figure of Mary Mallon, the 19th-century immigrant Irish cook who may have helped trigger a stateside typhoid epidemic, and thus came to be known as “Typhoid Mary.”)

This association took on its most toxic form in Nazi Germany, where propaganda campaigns identified Jews directly with lice, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler famously defended the Final Solution by proclaiming that “antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing.” (In an odd turn of events, Holocaust deniers have taken to claiming that gas chambers at several Nazi concentration camps employed Zyklon-B only for delousing their inmates-one of countless claims these moral imbeciles have aired in defiance of a mountain of contradictory evidence: namely, that many camp inmates died of typhus associated with the inhuman conditions they endured, Anne Frank among them.)

None of this is to equate the rich American rage for lice-scoured youth with Nazi extermination campaigns, of course. It is, however, to note that we often harbor instinctive revulsions for reasons far more complicated than finding their sources to be “gross.” And it’s also worth bearing in mind that hypersanitary moral panics of the privileged orders can be quite destructive epidemics in their own right.