In 1999, Dave Praeger founded his cyber (ad)venture known as PoopReport. Comfortably seated upon his editorial throne eight years later, Praeger now offers his crowning intellectual achievement to date: Poop Culture: How America is Shaped by its Grossest National Product [1] (Feral House, 2007, 232 pages, $14.95).
As a regular contributor to the site, I needed no introduction to the concept of this substantive and well-researched treatise on the role poop plays in today's culture, and the conflicting attitudes swirling all around it.
Praeger opens his historical and cultural presentation with one of the most compelling hooks I've ever encountered in a published work, fiction or non-fiction. I quote: "With enviable ease, poop slid out of the mechanical anus and onto the conveyor belt below." Science fiction, you say? No -- the end result of Belgian artist Wim Delvoye's Cloaca: New & Improved, a "thirty-five-foot long steel and glass technological replica of the human digestive system that functions just like yours."
Pictures of Cloaca and details of how it processes food into poop provide an entertaining and memorable opening for what proves to be a superbly documented journey into a subject that is at once as deep and dark as a cesspit, but well-deserving of airing out in the light of day. "Five thousand years of history records the struggle of people and governments against ever-higher mountains of poop," Praeger declares. In the preceding pages, he thoroughly documents the evolution of waste disposal from the days of the earliest human food-gatherers who just let the stuff lie around, thus inviting disease; through cesspits and privies; and finally to a sewer-system infrastructure and the beginnings of the flush toilet we know and use today.
Praeger then demonstrates his penchant for playfulness when he segues effortlessly into a clever recasting of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve, using poop and shameful shitting -- rather than a bite from the apple of the Tree of Knowledge -- as a metaphor. "Twenty-four hours out of the Garden, Adam and Eve were humanity's first shameful shitters," he advises us. This leads inevitably to the introduction of the Victorian mores which tirelessly promoted the concept of shame regarding bodily functions and which inculcated reluctance to use public toilets. It is no exaggeration to say that those shameful attitudes and behaviors persist today amongst a generous percentage of the human population, though varying from culture to culture. Says Praeger, "Only when we understand the toilet as a sanitary, not ideological, apparatus, and poop as a physical, not moral, threat, will society be freed from the tyranny of the bowel."
A significant discussion of the origins of that profound sense of shame ensues, covering such topics as improper toilet training, fears of vulnerability while using the toilet, mysophobia (fear of germs), early psychological trauma, and the checkered proposition -- replete with bullies and lack of privacy -- that constitutes school bathrooms. All of this material is offered with a certain clinical, yet evangelical, bent, encouraging the reader to rethink his or her positions and join what Praeger calls "the Brown Revolution".
Praeger also offers both historical perspectives on the subject itself and practical suggestions on the actual procedures. Diagrams demonstrate the pinching effect on the rectum of straining while seated conventionally on the toilet versus the relaxed, natural squatting postures that were utilized by our food-gathering ancestors. They would certainly have regarded porcelain as worshipfully as the apes gathered around the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. A myriad of other rarely-discussed topics such as wiping techniques, toilet paper choices, and public bathroom etiquette are presented as openly and helpfully as a housewife conducting a Tupperware party. Normalizing the discussion of bodily functions in the popular culture is very much a stated goal of this book, and the thoughtful narrative everywhere reinforces that objective successfully with nary a hint of sensationalism.
Speaking of popular culture, Poop Culture documents the increasing frequency of the inclusion of pooping scenes in modern cinema, referencing the mundane approaches used in Fight Club and American Splendor, in which Ed Norton's character and Harvey Pekar are both shown reading catalogues and letters on the toilet. Decades ago, even the mention of women being pregnant or a couple sharing the same bed (such as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy) was verboten. Both television and the movie industry meticulously avoided depictions of bodily functions and graphic sexuality in general for decades, and even mentions were rare. Today, Hollywood and cutting-edge visual and performance artists alike can routinely engage in a no-holds barred approach to sexuality, language and now, finally, depiction of bodily functions in their work.
Poop Culture offers illustrations of some of the most controversial artworks, including Santa Chocolate Shop by Paul McCarthy, Shit Faith by Gilbert and George, and, most notably, Piero Manzoni's exhibit of ninety cans of his own poop in an art gallery in Albisola, Italy, in 1961. The popularity of such TV shows as the scatologically-liberated animated series South Park also illustrates that at least part of our American culture is amenable to leaving doo-doo behind as a no-no (Mr. Hankey, of course, is a large, talking turd full of satirical sarcasm and not just kernels of corn). As Praeger suggests: "Mr. Hankey is poop that is redemptive... he is poop, but he is not negative.
Poop Culture later invokes literary and religious arguments as it moves toward its measured, Utopia-envisioning conclusion. The not-so-heavily-veiled satire of Gulliver's Travels is referenced, pointing out that "for three hundred years, critics have derided Swift's 'excremental vision', describing his poetry and prose as 'an extreme of vulgarity and obscenity' {...} Aldous Huxley accused him of having a 'hatred of the bowels.' Such criticism, of course, directly complies with civilization's mandate to reject poop."
And then there are the ultimate religious questions the book poses: "Christians believe that God created man in His image; and while that does not necessarily mean that God poops, He at least is responsible for our doing so. Why do we find uncivilized the bodily functions that He created in us? Do we believe that He created us in an unacceptable manner?"
Praeger's visionary parting shot is one that summarizes his great attention to detail and passion in chronicling the progression of attitudes toward bodily functions, techniques and waste disposal throughout recorded history in this volume. "The next step is to rehabilitate the Victorian infrastructure with the Galenic outlook: to apply our enlightened society to the betterment of the manifestations of poop. To improve the infrastructure as we abandon its ideology for a new one in which pooping is not a filthy act, but a cleansing ritual. You enter the bathroom with the impurities of your body gathered in your rectum, you poop those impurities out, and you exit the bathroom at your cleanest, purest and most civilized. Pooping as a cleansing ritual: this is the truly the triumph of the carnivalesque."
In this his first major work offered for national consumption, Dave Praeger has effectively argued his case for bringing pooping out of the closet and elevating it to mainstream discussion status that is both healthy and enlightening.
