Struggle Sessions in the Toilet

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, October 14, 2021

 

If the Right’s great fissure is between libertarianism and nat­ionalism, the Left’s great fissure is between the clinical and the filthy.

 

The old Marxist-Leninist Left understood itself to be at heart a scientific vanguard, and its hallmark images were well-scrubbed laboratories, spick-and-span factory floors, and sterile committee rooms — even its political prisoners were to be thoroughly hosed down. But the countercultural Left has always been something else, Dionysian in character. Its key images are a series of squatters’ camps — Woodstock, Occupy Wall Street, CHAZ. Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky didn’t talk about the people’s revolution over dinner — as our old pal Gore Vidal reports, they preferred to talk about their toilet habits. Orlovsky would go on to publish a book of verse titled “Clean A**hole Poems & Smiling Vegetable Songs.”

 

So of course their spiritual descendants would chase Kyrsten Sinema into a toilet.

 

And, of course, the well-scrubbed Left justifies this tactic. Writing in New York magazine, Sarah Jones explained the technique of filming political opponents in a public restroom as merely “inventive” and insisted upon Senator Sinema’s “own complicity.” (Senator Sinema’s critics often focus on her clothes, and, in this case, they have essentially told her: “You had it coming, because your skirt was too short.”) You will recognize the sophomoric rhetorical gambit when Jones waves her hands and declares the episode to be a “symptom of a much larger problem,” a phrase that corresponds very strongly with imbecility. Jones’s analysis, if it can be dignified as such, doesn’t stand up to a second’s scrutiny: Jones complains that Senator Sinema’s tormenters are driven to extremes because they “are shut out of a supposedly democratic process,” but, in fact, Senator Sinema and her staff already had met with members of Living United for Change in Arizona, the organization in question, on more than one occasion. The only thing anybody tried to shut them out of was a toilet stall.

 

And that is the one place they most wanted to be.

 

If this seems perplexing, then we ought to consider the possibility that staging toilet stunts does not serve any political interest and isn’t meant to, and that instead political interests are used as a pretext for staging toilet stunts, for which some people have a bizarre but documented enthusiasm. This sort of behavior is much more comprehensible when understood that way. It is the sort of thing that Sigmund Freud might have had something interesting to say about if he hadn’t been such a thoroughgoing intellectual fraud.

 

The programmatic filth of the 1960s counterculture was intended — and functioned remarkably well — as an assault upon the dignity of institutions. If a university administration or a city government wanted to deal with hippies squatting in campus buildings or in public parks, then they and their agents had to descend into the muck, which has a leveling effect.

 

Where physical filth won’t do, there are less dramatic means, such as the use of theatrical profanity. In fact, the American Psychological Association links the two, defining “scatophilia” as “sexual interest and arousal derived from talking about excrement and using obscene language.” It is obvious enough that what we see here is the substitution of political gratification for sexual gratification. The chants of “F*** Joe Biden” one sometimes hears now at public events are one of the many ways in which the 2020s Right has come to resemble the 1960s Left, as is the Right’s new penchant for staging spectacles outside the homes of local school-board members. It is a ritual of obscenity, and politics is only incidental to it.

 

Profanity, in both its linguistic sense and its broader sense, can make for a useful political weapon: When President Bill Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice, Democrats’ first line of defense was insisting that this was a matter of sexual prurience, painting independent counsel Kenneth Starr as a kind of 1990s Roger Chillingworth while Michael Moore installed a video camera permanently pointed at the bedroom window of Lucianne Goldberg. Mrs. Goldberg responded with great Republican aplomb, selling advertisements to be placed on her window for $1,000 a week, but it was the response of her neighbors that really tells the horrifying American story: These nice, progressive New Yorkers offered up their own residences for the installation of additional cameras, so that all of Mrs. Goldberg’s windows and her front door would be placed under surveillance. In the end, Mr. Moore’s lethargy got the better of him, and Mrs. Goldberg was deprived of the additional revenue.

 

For a certain kind of person — and this kind of person unhappily is not rare — there is great pleasure in joining a mob of the sort that chased down Senator Sinema. Modern technology makes participating in such a mob easier — as was true even back in the 1990s with Mrs. Goldberg — but what happens on Twitter increasingly happens in real life. We have seen mobs target the homes of New York City financial professionals, elected officials across the country, and media figures such as Tucker Carlson. Kat Timpf, at that time a National Review staffer, was famously chased out of a bar in Brooklyn because she appears on Fox News. The scatological is never far off: Protesters have taken to attacking police with urine-filled balloons and bags of feces.

 

In recent years, there has been more than a whiff of the scatological in the culture. In the television series Hann­ibal, a vindictive psychiatrist threatens the titular asylum inmate: “I’ll take your toilet. You’ll have nothing but indignity.” In the 2020 Benedict Cumberbatch film The Courier, the excretory realities of life as a Soviet gulag prisoner are pointedly acknowledged, an echo of similar scenes in stories ranging from Battlestar Galactica to Liao Yiwu’s memoir of life in a Chinese prison, For a Song and a Hundred Songs. The infamous punk singer GG Allin, whose stage act was violent, sexual, and, above all, scatological, continues to be an item of cultural interest decades after his death: As other critics have noted, Todd Phillips’s recent film Joker has more than a little in common with his 1993 documentary Hated: GG Allin & the Murder Junkies. An essay in The Atlantic dedicated nearly 1,000 words to Donald Trump’s scatological political insults, and the topic was far from exhausted, even if the reader was.

 

But this isn’t all Freudian fun and games. The essence of totalitarianism is the abolition of private life and privacy. In the modern, capitalist world, we have seen a merger of politics and lifestyle: If you know two Americans each following an unusual diet, one vegan and one paleo, you can reliably guess how each one votes. Same for a yoga enthusiast and a hunter. Same for a resident of Tribeca and a resident of Lewis County, Tenn. This isn’t entirely new, of course: As former Ayn Rand disciple Ellen Plasil noted, when Objectivism was riding high in the 1970s, it not only was a school of politics and morality but also imposed tastes in “music, painting, interior design, dancing, party decorum, party guest lists, therapists, . . . books, plays, records, and movies.” Her observation is reported in Jeff Walker’s The Ayn Rand Cult, and, even in the zany 1970s, most people recognized a cult when they saw one. Objectivism was hardly the first cult to disguise itself as a political movement. At a sufficient depth, the absolutism of a cult and the absolutism of totalitarian politics are the same thing: a thimble in which all life must be contained and lived.

 

Chasing Senator Sinema into a toilet or screaming obscenities outside Tucker Carlson’s house is unlikely to accomplish anything of any consequence in practical politics. In fact, it is likely to hurt progressives’ chances of bringing Senator Sinema around to their point of view. But practical politics is beside the point here, just as nobody at Occupy Wall Street really believed that conducting a circus of filth in Lower Manhattan was going to change U.S. economic policy in any meaningful way. (Nobody who wasn’t drooling and in need of medication, anyway.) The purpose of these acts is not to move legislation forward but to publicly demonstrate that there is no space outside of politics, and no space outside of the demands of political activists, no matter how infantile. The more infantile, the better, at least from that point of view.

 

Properly understood, there is no better or more fitting theater for contemporary mob politics than a public toilet. For once, the mob has arrived at just the place it belongs.