Coprophobia

Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody (photo: Roy Erickson)

There are people who don’t like talk about their bowel movements and others who go on about their diarrhea and constipation, as if they were talking about the election. Generally the people who don’t like to talk about bowel movements find it repugnant to talk about them at dinner and make irate remonstrative comments like “this is not dinner conversation” when they're eating with someone who starts talking about Ex-Lax. There are a whole class of people who find it so impossible to talk about excrement that it’s as if this venerable old product of the digestive tract didn't exist. Such unfortunates won’t even use that old-fashioned euphemism for shitting, elimination, and they have such a problem with bowel functions that even in a moment of anger they won’t call a person “a piece of shit.” This self-same crowd do not get the pleasure from the smell of their own shit that most normal people do. While no one likes it when somebody has stunk up the bathroom most human beings experience their own fecal odors as a kind of sublime perfume. From an olfactory point of view this is significant and could easily be the subject of a study. A sample title for such a paper would be  “Narcissistic Defenses Against Self-Created Fecal Odor.” "Shit or get off the pot" might be the subtitle. “Doody” is a word that children use for excrement. Only the most precocious child will use the word bowel movement (though irritable bowel syndrome will undoubtedly be something they'll face as grown-ups). Children and even teenagers refer to bowel movements as “doody,” using the expression “I have to make a doody” (a usage that undoubtedly became more widespread due to the l950's television show, Howdy Doody.) Of course they may simply say “I have to go," when it's time for #2,  a more demure locution that's often inculcated in children by coprophobic parents (who have overdosed on Pasolini's Salo).

Howdy Doody: Gunslinger, Warmonger, Imperialist

Reading the obit of Edward Kean, the creator of The Howdy Doody Show, one can’t help thinking how much the show was influenced by many of the Westerns that preceded it, like The Lone Ranger during the Golden Age of Radio, and how much the show would go on to influence television Westerns like Gunsmoke, Have Gun-Will Travel, Bonanza—shows that would be watched a decade later by the same generation that had grown up with the experience of Howdy as their first cowboy. If you talk to women who grew up in the ‘50s and loyally watched Howdy Doody, it becomes apparent that many of them still have a crush on the puppet, and even harbor sexual fantasies about what must have been, for a young child, a swashbuckling male figure. But in terms of genre art, where would Gunsmoke’s Chester, Matt and Miss Kitty be without Phineas T. Bluster, Dilly Dally, Flub-a-Dub and Princess Summerfall Winterspring, who was indubitably the model for a number of barroom gals who would appear in the burgeoning genre of adult westerns? We think of Howdy Doody as a program epitomizing the innocence of early television, with its Edenic setting freed of horror and consequence. But Howdy Doody was first and foremost a Wild West show introduced by one Buffalo Bob—a hegemonist if ever there was one—who, if we were to research his backstory, probably got his soubriquet and earned his stripes by murdering bison and colonizing Indian lands. In this regard, Howdy Doody was a piece of indoctrination. Its subliminal message was Manifest Destiny. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Create a feeling of harmlessness and innocence to camouflage the aggressive desires that are holding sway. Would it be a stretch to see Howdy, the brave puppet on a string, as the model for the Raymond Shaw character played by Lawrence Harvey in the John Frankenheimer adaptation of Richard Condon’s Manchurian Candidate?