Secret Still

Since Beijing is hosting the Olympics this year I keep seeing more and more protests calling for the freedom of Tibet from Chinese rule. I agree. What’s more surprising to me, however, is the abundance of Chinese nationals around the world holding counter-protests. Maybe surprise is the wrong word. Incredulity is probably better. How, China? How can you possibly imagine that Tibet is yours? It would be the same as Germany still claiming Poland. Just because the people that occupy the country can’t physically fight back doesn’t mean that you can take it. I know that these kinds of actions go on all over the world, and they have for thousands of years, but proliferation doesn’t make something right. Especially not in a world that is becoming an unbounded global economy (or should be at any rate). National Geographic, in an effort to not let China’s actions be forgotten, have reprinted the essay of Heinrich Harrer, a German living in the sacred city of Lhasa in the middle of last century. Harrer’s story, which you might know as Seven Years in Tibet, is probably one of the best accounts of the Chinese invasion of Tibet. He was an Olympian who later became the tutor of the current incarnation of the Dalai Lama. I can’t imagine a more fitting Olympic protest than the tale of an Olympic athlete who witnessed the horrific actions of this year’s Olympic host not so long ago.

My Life in Forbidden Lhasa

This morning I was taking part in a daily ritual that usually occurs after I brush my teeth but before I put in my contact lenses and it struck my just how odd it was for me to be doing it at all. Not the act, that would happen whether I wanted it to or not, eventually. It was the manner of it.

I’m talking about using a toilet. I think it was my dog’s presence in the room that made me think about just exactly what I was doing. He had just been outside where he just let’s it go on whatever he sees that needs some marking. And then we come inside and I waste all that good pee by aiming it directly into a small water-filled bowl that leads to a large water-filled (some of it is water anyway) pipe underground. I wondered how crazy he thought I was. Not crazy enough to avoid licking my eyes whenever I get within range. But seriously why is it that we all do this?

Sanitation is the first and most obvious reason. The first modern toilet that wasn’t ridiculed out of existence was created by Alexander Cummings in the 18th Century, it was an s-bend toilet so I will consider it the first modern toilet. There are several variations of a flush toilet that date back as far as 2600 BC. Don’t even ask how hilarious I find it that Jews fleeing Egypt might have stopped somewhere to have a nice movement on an early flush toilet. That’s just my sense of humor. But even before the modern toilet a lot of people were just going in chamber pots or, lacking one of those, on someone else’s shoes if that person was unfortunately close. You can imagine that this led to pretty serious sanitation problems and that whole plague thing probably wouldn’t have been so bad otherwise. It’s hard to heal people who have shit on them.

But our actions are even more strange when you consider that after we place our waste in this nice little bowl for delivery to the underworld we then pull sheets of various textured paper off of a roll and use it to rub off any remnants of excrement. I’m surprised my dog will come anywhere near my crazy ass. No other animal that I know of has ever used some bit of something to remove any dingleberries. It’s never been a problem for my dog as far as I can tell. In some Asian countries they use water rather than paper and generally apply it with their left hand, which is why they don’t shake with that hand if they like you. Taken out of context of our species something like this seems like the most amazingly strange thing to do. My dog uses the water he has readily available on his tongue.

I’m certainly not saying that I would rather lick my ass clean. I love the toilet. If I could I would tuck the load in with a nice little blanket before I let it join with the muck of the whole city. It’s just that there must be some reason beyond sanitation. If we were just trying to be sanitary we would have invented a laser to carbonize it by now.

“Yeah, man, hang on, I just need to put my dook in the vaporizer.”

So why is our bodily waste so terrifying and hilarious to us? Why does it seem like such an foreign substance? There are more euphamisms for waste, it’s egestion, and the device utilized for it’s removal than there are disesase that you could get if you were covered in it. Why? I don’t pretend to have the answer to such a large question. I’m sure that several mores and taboos have built up over time in our society.

I’ll leave you with this idea. Waste and the toilet are one divider of socioeconomic class. Low-brow humor is known as toilet humor. And as the price of the toilet goes up it’s name gets change to a commode. Which word do you use? And where do you live? Notice any correlation?

For more information you can read the exciting Wiki Article on ‘toilet’.