On Shit

Or rather, its absence, as our great nation suffers an epidemic of constipation. Your correspondent finds political meaning in this.

Claus Oldenburg, Soft Toilet, 1966. Whitney Museum of American Art.

I try not to be a word snob, but there are some words I just can’t abide. One of these is “icon” when used to describe something that is neither a devotional painting nor a clickable doodad on your computer. It is, I think, symptomatic of a degraded culture that we go around likening all sorts of people and things to Eastern Orthodox portraits of Jesus Christ just because they happen, like the King of Kings, to be famous. I won’t belabor the point because I wrote about it elsewhere, 10 years ago in fact, and since then its usage has only spread further.

Another word I can’t stand is “poop.” I don’t mind when it’s used by, to, or about a small child, but somewhere in the last couple of decades “poop” insinuated itself into the adult mainstream. I suspect it was an attempt to keep “shit” from gaining traction in the pages of the New York Times and among other arbiters of good taste. For awhile “shit” was on its way to becoming the new “damn” or “hell,” a word no country parson would even pretend to blush at. But it never quite completed the journey. “Shit” remains out of bounds; even I don’t like hearing a child say it. Instead the preferred term, especially in print, has become “poop.” I first noticed its adult usage a dozen years ago, when the late David Carr, defending the honor of the New York Times, used it to dress down Vice magazine’s Shane Smith (“Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop doesn’t give you the right to insult what we do”) Carr probably wanted to say “shit,” but cameras were rolling for a documentary (Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times), and probably he didn’t want to compromise his position as representative of the gray lady by loading two cuss words into a single sentence. So out popped “poop” instead. Alternatively, maybe he said “poop” to trivialize Vice’s scoop (about a Liberian beach covered, disgustingly, in human feces).

It drives me nuts when I see grownups use “poop” in the absence of children because, well, it’s infantilizing. Grownups don’t refer to urine as “wee-wee.” Why must we call bowel movements poop when there are so many other perfectly acceptable synonyms (ordure, excrement, feces, scat, solid waste, Number Two, etc.) that aren’t swear words at all? Why does an everyday fact of biological existence make us retreat into childhood?

I bring this up because I just wrote a whole New Republic piece about constipation (not mine: I don’t suffer it; the country’s) without once applying the P-word. Not that it was difficult, but I feel unreasonably proud about this. My essay argues that a nationwide constipation epidemic that, per the Wall Street Journal, has rendered laxatives scarce on pharmacy shelves, is a pretty good metaphor for our political epoch—the largest fecal mass we can’t expel being, of course, Donald Trump. I also apply this coprophilic metaphor to gerontocracy, the filibuster, the deficit, the lack of gun control legislation, and other social ills. Yes, it’s a little bit Freudian. You can read the piece here.