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Dave Praeger - Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product

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Book:
Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product
Author:
Dave Praeger / Paul Provenza
Publisher:
Feral House
Genre:
Books / Romance novel
Year:
2007
Rating:
5 / 5
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Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product: summary, description and annotation

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Is The Origin of Feces a Darwinian concern? Perhaps not, but it is the title to the preface of this tongue-in-cheek and unexpectedly revealing exploration of human behavior by the webmaster behind the popular PoopReport.com.

This book is not a history of poop, but a study of today. Its goal is to understand how poop affects us, how we view it, and why; to appreciate its impact from the moment it slides out of our anal sphincters to the moment it enters the sewage treatment plant; to explore how weve arrived at this strange discomfort and confusion about a natural product of our bodies; to see how this contradictionthe natural as unnaturalshapes our minds, relationships, environment, culture, economics, media, and art.

Paul Provenza, the director of The Aristocrats, says in his foreword: Its shocking to think that a book about poop can be considered an act of courage. But it is. Most of us have knee-jerk responses to the topic that we are not even aware of. Attitudes that, like the awful stench of poop itself, permeate all of society and culture. This book has some very profound and beautiful things to say. It takes a dirty, smelly, unpleasant subject like shit and brings forth ideas that are empowering, dignifying and life affirming.

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Table of Contents

FOREWORD BY PAUL PROVENZA

WHY ON EARTH would anyone buy and read a book about poop? Why the hell would anyone write a book about poop?

Because poop is the very essence of being human. Try as mankind has, theres just no denying the universality of poop. As one of the most successful childrens books in publishing history says right in its title, Everyone Poops. I myself am working on turning that unlikely source material into a feature film. Call me crazy, but Ive given poop a lot of thought.

There are those who think this speaks to some prurient interest on my part. Or that it suggests a state of arrested development or some such pseudo-Freudian nonsense. In fact, my interest in the subjectlike that of Chaucer, Swift, and the author of this fascinating bookcomes from a deep, heartfelt interest in all aspects of the human condition. How poop affects us all is downright operatic in its scope. It informs history, culture, and entire social structures. How we deal with emptying our bowels impacts everything from our most intimate relationships to revolutionary upheavals of powerful empires and the ecological balance of the earth. In ways big and small, poop really matters.

Early on in my career as a comedian and actor, I was called in to meet with one of Hollywoods most influential and powerful movers and shakersa meeting that, if all went well, could change my life. I arrived at his office early, growing increasingly nervous and jittery in the reception area as my appointed time drew nearer. My anxiety and tension grew stronger and stronger, until it gripped me deep within, quite literally wrenching my gut.

The pressure grew too intense to bear, and I quietly requested the mens room key from the receptionista degrading ritual perfectly engineered to intimidate and demand supplication from those who await an audience with the high and mighty. Any suggestion of discretion on my part vanished as she bolted out from behind her desk, handed me a key chained to something roughly the size of a zeppelin, and proceeded to mime an elaborate Kafkaesque labyrinth to the bathroom. It was an ostentatious semaphore instantly decoded by everyone in the reception area and the offices along the way. I felt a palpable and knowing disdain as, dead man walking, I passed each of them on my unambiguous walk down The Long Brown Mile.

After a torturous journey through a tortuous gauntlet of humiliation and self-consciousness, I finally reached the glowing fluorescent heaven. I sighed a sigh of impending relief and rushed into a stall, dismayed to discover that I would not be alone in my revelry.

I have no background whatsoever in the field of forensics, but to even a casual watcher of CSI it would have been clear that whoever inhabited the black and white wing-tip shoes in that stall next to mine had been there for quite some time, and had been eating very well for much of his life. Whatever self-consciousness I may have felt at allowing my gut to unwrench in the presence of another human being disappeared as my companion wrestled through a complicated labor to birth to his own unwanted offspring.

Something truly epic was taking place next door. Primordial sounds, much like the earth made while cooling, rumbled through already thick, fetid air. Waves crashed against porcelain shores as Zeus himself hurled mighty comets into a humble sea beneath him, lashed by mythic winds and terrifying thunder. An undulating swirl of stench snaked itself almost visibly over the partition in an otherworldly manifestation of everything evil that resided within man.

This was cataclysmic. The effects of this event were vast. Californias fault lines, I feared, will shudder from the pressure. Weather patterns, I was certain, would be shifting. Milk must be curdling all around the world. The Kennedy assassination may need reinvestigating. And there I sat, a canary in this poisoned gastrointestinal coalmine.

My five senses struggled to survive this bio-terrorist attack, and only an inch of stainless steel panel separated me from ground zero. Yet I had only compassion and respect for this mans heroic struggle. His tortured grunts and agonizing groans moved me empathically, and I was relieved that my relief came more effortlessly. With all the urgency befitting a hazmat situation, I quickly evacuated both myself and the area.

I went back to the receptionist, heaved the key and its anchor back over the desk, and tried to recover. I sat for a while considering grief counseling when an assistant finally came to bring me in to my meeting.

I rose a bit wobbly, and followed him into a huge corner office. Vast windows framed a stunning vista of the city far below, further increasing my unsteadiness. This was the office of a man who, like the view, overlooked all of Hollywood. The height of this office and the prominence of the man inhabiting it were equally dizzying. He came from his desk to greet me and offer an insincere generic apology for the late start of our meeting, when all of Hollywood suddenly disappeared as my eyes whip-panned, rack focused and zoomed in on his black and white wing-tips.

This proverbial Hollywood mover and shaker had been literally moving and shaking Hollywood right next to me.

The meeting unfolded very differently than I expected as all my humility, subservience and deference were overcome by the fact that I had shared with him the lowest common denominator of every living thing in existence. His status, wealth or influence no longer held sway over me, for I had been present as he purged his filthy, stinking colon of the vile detritus of so much overpriced Mortons cuisine. I could not have been more comfortable or at ease in his substantial presence. The biological reality, necessity and inevitability of poop was the great equalizer.

While at first glance poop and its culture may seem like a silly subject for a book, I assure you its not. Everyone Poops. And everyone knows they poop. But everyone also has an attitude and a perspective toward poop, too. And most people arent even aware of that part. And thats where it gets really interesting.

The taboos, the sophomoric jokes, the schoolyard giggling that accompany the subject and act itself of pooping are all part of a cultural and social construct that somehow has framed that most vulnerable, intimate, and equalizing fact of daily life for us all with inexplicable shame, guilt, fear and anxiety for a very long time. Why? How? By whom? Is it possible that when the subject is brought out in the open and its universality acknowledged as inevitable and human, the mighty fall? Or is it that the ordinary are raised up higher? Either way, an imbalance tips. Poop is power.

Our conscious and unconscious attitudes toward the fundamental, necessary, life-sustaining biological process of elimination are remarkably similar to the squeamishness, fear, anxiety and morality ascribed to another basic human imperative, our sexuality. Is that a coincidence? An accident? Cultural evolutionary progression? Is it simply confusion resulting from the close proximity of pertinent external organs? Perhaps theres something else going on.

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