A month or two ago I was filing down I-75 on the way to work when I saw a dark red billboard to the left bearing only the words, "I pooted." Maybe someone felt so ashamed to have tooted during a Sunday service that they decided to go beyond the confessional and take out a billboard on the interstate? More likely, though, some sort of commercial product would be announced to go along with "I pooted" in a few weeks, and we would finally know who was so desperate to sell their product, and thought so little of our minds, that rather than sell it on merits they're selling it on methane.


Now moving up Peachtree Industrial I saw a similarly-colored billboard off in the distance that announced "My boogers itch." So now I've got poots for one-half the drive to work, and itching boogers for the other half. Wow, someone's a real whiz. While other people think up catchphrases, expensive product photos, hire models, someone is finally just cutting to the chase and trying to attract us with poots and boogers.

Curiously, everytime a strip club puts up a billboard of a woman in a bikini we have the customary TV news report about the local league of concerned mothers who weep that their kid's school bus drives by there every day, and their children's minds will be soiled when they find out women have breasts and buttocks. But there has been no outcry that the Cartoon Network, who puts up these billboards, is aiming their poots squarely at their children.

Few people over the age of 30 are bigger fans of poots and boogers than me. When I was about 13 my masterpiece drawings were of one of a guy blowing his nose all over his hands under the heading "Boogers," and another guy happily blowing a brown cloud under the heading "Farts." These hung on my bedroom wall next to Eddie Van Halen and U2. But poots and boogers are now mainstream entertainment, and I think it's wrong. It's part of a larger trend that always occurs until it's stopped and a more restrained, or backwards, period sets in, and then the journey starts again.

For instance, the cell phone company I work at sells ringtones. When a customer calls in to complain about the $150 download bill their 11 year old has ran up I'm amazed at some of the song titles, and that you don't have to go through a "click here if you're 18 and up to enter" box or anything. Now back in my day, when we had rotary-dial phones and at least one 8-track in easy reach, there was a single dealer in this kind of music and that was Luke Skywalker and 2 Live Crew. And a Luke Skywalker tape was contraband; one guy got the tape and made copies for other people. There was even a phone number inside to book Luke for your house party! Shortly after Luke's appearance they started putting 17-and-up stickers on things and you had to show ID to even buy it. Now, Luke Skywalker's lyrical stylings are the norm, except when the song is about shooting someone dead or smacking your bitch.

Likewise I can remember sitting in the rumbleseat eating moon pies and listening to Eddie Murphy comedy cassettes. Eddie Murphy was the king of the dirty comedy hill, and we tittered at routines like "Faggots" and "Doodoo." If you had a Eddie Murphy cassette, or in my case copied one from your friend with more lax parents, you had something forbidden, bold, on the edge. The same applied a generation earlier to George Carlin. (I've got a 2-CD set of Carlin's `70's material and for all its blue reputation he says "shit" and "fuck" maybe once in an hour's time. I was so disappointed I contemplated returning it for a refund.)

But when HBO and Showtime started running away with the ratings the networks have had to start catching up on edginess, and now my mom said she even heard Rachel Ray, a cooking show host, say, "After you put this in the pot you don't want to fuck with it." Uncensored, on a cooking show!

So am I just an old prude who can't get with the times? I'll bet you my last jar of Pomade I'm not! I firmly believe in the right of 12 year old boys to blast their poots into tape recorders, laugh at the latest nasty comedian and sneak peeks inside Penthouse at the book store. However, I believe they also should have as much trouble getting to these things as I did. Because at least a corner of the appeal was that it was the unknown, the beyond. Your every day life was a plain poundcake and seeing Apollonia's boobs in Purple Rain was the delicious frosting that was hidden behind signs and stickers saying "must be 17 or accompanied by an adult." And because hearing Eddie Murphy talk about his dream that, "I went to Hollywood and found out Mr. T was a faggot!" was over-the-top in my mind, I am not on oxycontin today.

The "my boogers itch" billboard points to something more profound than that adolescent boys have easy access to fart humor. It means we're truly approaching our end as a prominent civilization. Greek civilization, the Roman Empire, progressed and progressed until they had such wealth and leisure that it took more and more unusual pursuits to entertain them. Then here came the barbarian German tribes to level it all and we were plunged into hundreds of years of darkness, stunted intellectual growth. The flower blossomed, wilted and fell to the ground only to re-grow, taking eons to burrow back up through the dirt towards the light.

So it is with our civilization. Maybe history will record that before the Arabs toppled us and plunged us into hundreds of years of hiding ourselves under togas, wasting our days chanting to Allah, we rode our fiberglass-adorned chariots past billboards that said, "I pooted."

2 Comments:

 Mr. Radio said...

I didn't get to see the "I Pooted" billboards first-hand, as I'm rarely on I-75, but a client of mine mentioned that she saw one in Rhode Island, and she was as aghast as you and I were that "poot" has slipped into the daily discourse (she's 32).

However, I did see the ads for Cartoon Network on Boomerang (old cartoons for us old farts and my 4-year-old) and I have to admit, when I heard "I pooted" on national TV, that was side-splitting to me, yet somehow some of the magic and mystique of the word immediately went out the window.

I'd LOVE to hear Rachael Ray say "fuck," particularly if it was followed by "me," and especially if she were takling to me as she did so. A fine piece of ass, Ms. Ray is.

6:14 PM, August 20, 2006  

 Arthur Willoughby said...

Great post.

I agree wholeheartedly that our culture has become embarrassingly coarse.

My rule of thumb is, "Would I be embarrassed if my parents saw it?" The answer is increasingly a resounding "Yes."

My favorite are the myriad t-shirts and bumper stickers using the f-bomb. Nothing is off limits. We have confused free speech and responsible speech, to our own detriment.

A fellow columnist at my college paper loves to pepper his columns with f-bombs, just for shock value. Thousands of words in the English language and we still have to use "fuck" 10 times in a college newspaper column. Brilliant.

I love vulgarity when it adds to humor, the Onion being a wonderful example. I'm not above liberally using the f-bomb in conversation and don't mind hearing it periodically in art or music if it helps make a point. But when it becomes a part of the lexicon with nary a batted eyelash, that makes me worry.

7:14 PM, August 20, 2006  

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