The misanthrope's corner.

IN the past, whenever Europeans made fun of our provincialism and lack of culture, we could always salvage our egos with tributes to the "American standard of living."

It referred not to individual incomes but to what made us all rich, even the least among us. Merely by being Americans, we enjoyed an unprecedented degree of personal cleanliness and hygienic protection made possible by what advertisers proudly called "modern conveniences." Thanks to the ASOL, we could get even with our foreign critics, as H. L. Mencken did when he said, "I'd trade the whole Acropolis for one American bathroom."

To anyone raised in the ASOL heyday, seeing lice treatment kits on the shelf of a suburban drugstore is traumatizing. I spent 12 years in the D.C. public schools and never heard of anyone being infested, but now more and more schools are lousy in the literal as well as the figurative sense. Even more shocking, no one seems horrified. Newspapers report the problem with cute headlines about "nit-picking" and parents take it in stride, like the mother who told my local paper: "When I grew up, it was the poor, dirty kids who were thought to have it. That's not true at all. Anybody who comes in contact with someone who has it can get it."

But of course. No American louse would dare discriminate, but that still doesn't explain how it knew where the nice, clean kids were, or why the interviewed mother reacted with such nonchalant fatalism. My own mother would have gone to pieces.

The fact is, we're not nearly so clean as we used to be. The ASOL has taken some big hits in the past few decades. The Sixties gave us dirt and called it "authenticity." Manic individualism proclaimed a "right" to be dirty, incense replaced ammonia, and thoroughness was renamed "uptightness." The Age of Aquarius was in fact the Age of the Missed Corner, and we're still in it.

The ASOL took its next hit from feminists. Housework, said the Marxists, was a propaganda tool of male capitalists, who invented labor-saving, push-button machines so women would think of themselves as "domestic engineers" instead of the unpaid scullery maids they really were.

Housework, said the doctoral candidates in etymology, was an arena of sex hatred because dust balls under the furniture were called "slut's wool" in seventeenth-century Yorkshire.

Housework, said Betty Friedan, was driving women crazy. Housework, said Gloria Steinem, consisted of saying, "Pick it up yourself."

It worked. Women exchanged brooms for brief cases and we got a revised ASOL tailored to the needs of the working wife: Complaining about dirt is sexist.

The last hurrah for the old ASOL was sounded by Jimmy Carter, of all people, when he paid an inadvertent tribute to gringo plumbing in his "Montezuma's Revenge" speech at the Mexican state banquet. Shocked commentators professed not to know what came over him, but it's not hard to guess. Sick and tired of being made fun of by foreigners, he had a sudden unconscious urge to get even.

He was in fine philistine fettle that day; if his wife hadn't flinched he might have gone on to the Elysee Palace and told the one about the midget and the bidet. That was how Americans talked in the golden age of the ASOL; in epitomizing what was assumed dead, Carter became his own Dracula, driving in the stake until it was really dead this time, once and for all, forever.

The ASOL was replaced by the American Standard of Coping, a friendly defense mechanism free of imperialistic overtones and guaranteed not to offend anyone. Fierce displays of disgust are not permitted. If we are faced with a bare homeless bottom positioned over a curb, or beset by someone who gets more sensual pleasure out of saving water than using it, we must do as the Lice Moms do: take precautions, follow the directions on our treatment kits, and never get mad --just "concerned." Above all, we must never blame others.

THE American Standard of Coping would fascinate Henrik Ibsen. In his play An Enemy of the People, Dr. Stockmann discovers that his town's water supply is poisoned, but when he tries to warn the townspeople, they turn on him. The mayor, who happens to be Dr. Stockmann's brother, sides with the people; assuring them that their water is safe, he blames "progressive" science for spreading the poison of doubt. Having heard what they wanted to hear, the townspeople ostracize Dr. Stockmann.

The play as rewritten by the ASOC opens with a chorus of Education 'n' Awareness, i.e., ten tips on water safety proffered by the perky chemist on Good Morning, America. This starts a ratings war and a search for perky chemists ensues. Once every network has one, the burning question is not water but who will become the Greta Van Susteren of the test tube.

The second act is about Coping Chic. Kitchens fill up with countertop distillers and filters -- already available from catalogues for people who cope with crime by shopping from home. Soon there are three filters on every faucet to go with the three locks on every door. Meanwhile, when bottled water is found in a construction worker's lunchbox, offended yuppies buy $500 divining rods and ABC manages to find and hire the country's only perky dowser.

Sensing that his point has been lost, Ibsen's ghost comes out on stage and recites the moral of the play as he wrote it: "You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth."

Obviously, he didn't know Americans. Bombarded for years with warnings about everything we put in our mouths, we have developed a masochistic need to hug the messenger. In the third act, the ASOC's Dr. Stockmann is lauded as a "whistle blower" and gets to spend weeks on TV saying, "I was just doing my job" and "Larry, I thought about all the kids."

I would drink from the Ganges just to see Ibsen's face.