With Fart And Poop Comments, Trump Campaign, Ted Cruz Usher In Feculent New Era Of Rightwing Discourse

A New World Ordure, if you will.

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“The body discloses its essence as a principle of growth which exceeds its own limits only in copulation, pregnancy, childbirth, the throes of death, eating, drinking, or defecation.” — Mikhail Bakhtin, on the grotesque.

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It was a good week for postmodernist fans of what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called, in Rabelais and His World (Wonkette cut link), “the Carnivalesque,” the discourse of a temporary, topsy-turvy world in which the social order is temporarily overturned and a brief, sometimes terrifying glimpse can be had of the possibilities inherent in anarchy and disorder. The grotesque, concentrated in the “lower bodily stratum,” is an emblem of the body’s urges triumphing over the staid, “normal” state of things supposedly ruled over by the brain and rationality. Reason all you want, have a Renaissance that demands “beauty” and “proportion,” but you can’t escape the fact that everyone poops (Gomi, 1977).

Which is to say, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) insisted Tuesday at a Turning Point USA event that President Joe Biden isn’t merely old and feeble (when he’s not a mad dictator controlling every last aspect of Americans’ lives), but that he is literally no longer able to control his bowels:

We have a president of the United States who, his team carries extra pairs of pants with him when he travels in case he has poopy pants!

Cruz’s joke, with its Carnivalesque imagining of the supposedly most powerful man on Earth going around with a load of poo in his pantaloons, was a hit with Republicans online, a veritable turd de force. Like the proletarian crowds of old, they roared with the spirit of lèse-majesté, offering their own variations like “Big and stinky if true,” and “a crappy situation for our President!” Others voiced their willingness to accept the entirely speculative enspatterment of the presidential breeches as an obvious fact, agreeing that it was “embarrassing and pathetic in the eyes of the world,” and calling for “term limits and age limits to be passed in Congress,” because obviously a man who’s incontinent should not be entrusted with the codes to intercontinental ballistic missiles. Or should that be encrusted?! We kid, of course. No one should fear that Mr. Biden will unleash an attack of Icy BMs.

Others repeated the spurious rumor that Biden once crapped his pants during an audience with Pope Francis, ruining a chair if not the actual seat of pontifical power. No matter that the claim started with a trolling Xweet by Nevada Republican Party Chair (ha! ha!) Amy Tarkanian — again, the notion of a president losing his fudge before a Pope was simply irresistible, a veritable shitstorm of the sacred and profane, with Biden the (leaking) butt of the joke. Given the proclivities of rightwing Americans to embrace anachronistic, even atavistic Catholic dogma, the rumor is almost too perfect, staining the reform-minded Francis with the foul excrescence of the hated Democratic president. Gonna need some serious cleanup of the Papal Throne.

Adding to this cloacal political clamor, former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, functionally expelled by the party faithful after serving on the House January 6 Select Committee, took to Xitter to suggest that Donald Trump has his own stinkiness issues, writing

I’m genuinely surprised how people close to Trump haven’t talked about the odor.

It’s truly something to behold. Wear a mask if you can

To be sure, Kinzinger didn’t specify whether the alleged Trump-whiff was related to sweat or to the lower areas of the lower bodily stratum, but it hardly matters, since like a rose, a stank is a stank is a stank, and the object here is again to associate the disfavored former president with bodily unpleasantness and uncleanliness, even potentially the tang of disease. Or as The Independent daintily put it, to “insinuate that the former president possesses a strong smell.”

Asked for comment, Team Trump, which knows more about playing in the gutter than most alleged “moderates” but far less than the average university Rhetoric department (and I mean that as flattery), provided a statement simply saying,

Adam Kinzinger farted on live TV and is an unemployed fraud. […] He has disgraced his country and disrespects everyone around him because he is a sad individual who is mad about how his miserable life has turned out.

Like Julia Kristeva playing Ace Attorney, we can only shout, “ABJECTION! That wasn’t even a good fart joke!”

Also, we couldn’t find any record of Kinzinger being accused of farting on live TV; perhaps the Trump spokesperson was thinking of Eric Swalwell, who in 2019 denied that he had farted during an interview with Chris Matthews.

We will leave it to the reader to wonder at the achievement here: With that puerile retort and false claim that Kinginger was prone to putting on airs, the Trump campaign actually managed to write about farts without being funny. So much for American Excretionalism.

They’re just full of surprises. Like your pants when you thought you only had to fart but there was an excess of Carnivalesque exuberance going on down there.

[Daily Dot / The Independent]

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