Diasporic Dining XXXXI: When the Shit Hits the Fan

chemical toilet in Baghdad (photo: Chitrapa)

Have you ever pulled into a roadside stop and faced the dreaded, “restrooms are out of order” and advising you to use the portable potty out back. That’s what drivers who sought refuge at the Cumberland Farms off exit 70 on the LIE faced on a recent summer’s afternoon. Remember the most horrifying scene from The Shining when Jack Torrance is axing through the door behind which his wife and children cower. The terror, drivers who had seen the film experienced, was probably a little less than the sight of the angry piles of shit, steaming amidst a heatwave, that covered many toilet seats outside. They undoubtedly felt a little like Alice searching for rabbit holes, but without success. Where was the portal that would finally provide relief? Actually, the shit (and other waste) on the seats in many of the stalls, which management had shown scant effort in having removed, was a little like the intractable problems of the world. Terrorists left scores killed in Nice and 140 dead in Baghdad. The coup in Turkey had failed. Police officers had been killed by snipers in Baton Rouge in vengeance for the killing of an innocent black man, Alton Sterling, and then, of course, there were the killings of policemen in Dallas and the killing of an another innocent black man Philando Castile, in the suburbs of St Paul, by police. There were undoubtedly motorists who felt a thank you was in order to Cumberland Farms. No headline could have been as powerful as the statement on the seats of those portable toilets. Is the sewage problem outside of Cumberland Farms more indefatigable than the problems facing our world? Hopefully not.

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).

The Church of Shit: All Welcome

WPA poster by John Buczak

Get in touch with your inner bowel movement! That's where truth resides. Don’t be offended when someone tells you you’re full of shit. Embrace it with the ecstasy accorded revelation. They may think they're cursing you for some infraction, but they're really offering a friendly reminder, rising you from your sleep, and exhorting you to meet your maker—which in this case happens to be you. Yes when it comes to shit you shouldn’t have trouble experiencing the oft touted sense of agency. Did you ever think you would welcome being called a piece of shit? But when you think of it, what else are you? Though few people acknowledge the fact. Shit is what defines you. It’s your one creative act of the day provided you don’t suffer from irregularity. Laxatives and anti-diarrhetics like Imodium are the altar boys, the acolytes of your church of shit. There should be a prayer that begins “Our shit who art within us, hallowed by thy name…” It is one of the  perversities of civilization that shit lies at the bottom of the food chain and that toilets are looked at as the lowest rung on the hierarchy of household appliances, when, in fact, a toilet should be accorded the status of a bible. You may not be able to keep one by the side of your bed, but you're likely to need one when you seek to lighten your burden. Push to pray. That’s the catechism. Lord, free me to get it out!

George Carlin’s 7 Words Revisited

Photo by Bonnie from Kendall Park, N.J.

George Carlin did a famous routine in which he talked about “Seven Words You Could Never Say on Television." They were “shit, piss, cunt, fuck, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits.” Tout ca change, tout c’est la meme chose. That was back in l972 and you can hear all of them on public access and on  cable, but maybe only one on the networks or anywhere else for that matter--the lonely “piss.” You’d be hard put to find much push back about a cop telling his partner he has to take a piss on Law and Order: SVU. Motherfucker is not popular amongst classicists since what Oedipus did is still a touchy subject. Proctologists find shit offensive since it’s dismissive of an activity they’ve spend a lifetime studying, defecation. Cocksucker is disliked by its practitioners since it takes an activity, fellatio, which is considered to be an expression of love, and turns it into an expletive. Fuck is still a hard one to sell. How many times have we heard “is all he or she does is want to fuck?” as if he or she are doing something bad. It’s rare to hear a male or female complaining about their partner and saying “is all he or she does is want to have sexual intercourse.” Tits is another one. “Sweetie, you have really nice tits” is offensive to some woman who find tit to be a fetishistic objectification of the word breast which they deem more noble. Naturally the best is saved for last. Cunt is still the mother of all offensive words, despite its superiority to the often wrongly used vagina. Cunt encompasses the whole female genitalia while vagina, for example, really just refers to the inside. Even though pussy was not on Carlin’s list for the obvious reason that the networks could never have taken a word referring to an infant cat off the air, only pussy creates as much controversy. Prick didn’t make Carlin’s list for the same reason, but you’re better off calling a guy a cunt rather than a prick, if you really want to be insulting.

Sub Feces Aeternitatis

Why are feces considered bad? Why have they not participated in the sexual revolution? Why are they  not considered appropriate dinner conversation? Why are feces at the bottom of the food chain of bodily processes (when they are actually no worse than food), below burping, coughing, belching, even farting. Yes a fart is to a shit what Trotsky was to Lenin for those who are equally adverse to excrement and Communism. Why is shit diametrically opposed to the king of all bodily processes, mentation and eons from copulation (which has made great progress in coming out of the closet), even when it occurs in the orifice out of which shit resides? Must shit and love remain antonyms? You’re a piece of shit is widely looked at an insult, but if we change our view of this untouchable of bodily excretions (below sweat, semen and urine) it might be looked at as a form of flattery. Still considering shit’s bad name, proctology is not a field lacking in practitioners, although there are not too many movies where a blond blue eyed Cybill Shepherd type runs off with a Jewish proctologist. Proctology is a practical field of endeavor for a young Harvard med graduate and one which will guarantee plenty of patients, but it’s not exactly a glamour profession like neurology. Shit is dark and mysterious and emerges from the bowels of the body, the roaring Inferno of the G.I. tract. You would rather tell someone you were going out with a brain surgeon than a proctologist and you would rather brag about the size of your brain surgeon's member than the stool which you produced when your proctologist liberated you with Metamucil.