Boardwalk Empire and Philosophy by Richard Greene

Author:Richard Greene [Greene, Richard; Robison-Greene, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812698398
Publisher: Open Court

1 I would like to thank Tony Doyle, Richard Greene, James Mahon, Kay Mathiesen, and Dan Zelinski for many helpful suggestions.

Part III

Fortified Wines

9

Nucky Cleans Up

WIELAND SCHWANEBECK

When it comes to personal hygiene, you’ve got to hand it to Uncle Nucky—the man is thorough! Although Boardwalk Empire teaches us time and again that booze-trafficking is a dirty business and that it’s very hard to keep your hands clean (not to mention your shirt, which is likely to catch bloodstains), Nucky Thompson usually manages to look spick and span and to cut a dashing figure. He even reminds Margaret’s kids of the importance of personal hygiene by reciting a little poem:

There are germs of every kind

in every food that you will find,

in the market or upon the bill of fare.

Drinking water’s just as risky

as the so-called deadly whiskey,

and it’s often a mistake to breathe the air. (“Home”)

Then again, we might ask ourselves whether Nucky, though he may look immaculate, is really the most suitable teacher to give lessons to Emily and Theodore. It is, after all, in Nucky’s house where Emily contracts Polio, in spite of his poetic lessons, and Nucky also plays a major role in providing Atlantic City with what the Women’s Temperance Union sees as the major poison threatening American health: “Liquor, thy name’s delirium!”

Occasionally, Nucky’s insistence on cleanliness clashes with the dirty business he gets entangled in. Nowhere does this become more evident than when he explains his personal policy: “One hand washes the other and both hands wash the face” (“Anastasia”). This raises the question of whether it’s really possible to remain free of germs and bacilli when you’re not quite sure where that other hand has been before, and whether the hygienic issues affecting some of Atlantic City’s inhabitants don’t indicate threats to the American nation at large. For Nucky’s lessons on hygiene and his struggle with the temperance movement show an ancient philosophical concept in practice: the idea of the body politic and the various threats leveled against it.

The Body Politic and Its Various Parts

The idea of referring to the nation and its sovereign by using the image of the body dates back to ancient philosophy. Nowadays, expressions such as head of state or member of parliament seem so self-explanatory that they’ve become so-called dead metaphors, that is: metaphors which are used so often that we don’t recognize them as metaphors anymore.

Some of the earliest written records of the body politic date back to Ancient Rome. Cicero (106–43 B.C.) talks about the body politic in some of his letters and in his defense of the consul Lucius Licinius Murena (Pro Murena). The philosopher Seneca (4 B.C.–A.D. 65), on the other hand, whose work mainly dealt with moral issues, used the body politic image in order to teach the future emperor Nero (37–68) a thing or two about virtue. Since Nero enjoyed a reputation for having a bit of a temper, Seneca was well-advised to write a little essay called De Clementia, reminding his boss of the

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