Everything Comes Down To Poop

Now, I was going to finally write something about Oroonoko (which, for some reason, sounds like a girl's name to me....but that's not what I was going to talk about...I promise), but our discussion about the various excrement in Gulliver's Travels just made me laugh so much that I had to save my depressing Oroonoko blog for later in favor of this one about, you guessed it, POOP!

Hahaha! College sure is great, isn't it?

Leave it to Jonathan Swift to answer life's most meaningful questions: just what can we do with an area that is overpopulated and starving and how does one dispose of poop when stranded on an island anyways? Gotta love that crazy Irishman, right?

Now, other than being incredibly funny, the description of the disposal of the poop actually makes a statement. Well, actually, since every reader sees different messages in the same work of literature, the poop actually makes multiple statements! I'm just gonna write mine down here, though.

It takes 300 Lilliputian tailors to dress the gargantuan Gulliver. It takes 300 Lilliputian chefs to feed him. And it takes 300 Lilliputian...excrement evacuators to dispose of the waste that Gulliver produces.

It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. And I think that is exactly what Jonathan Swift is saying through his extensive description about the disposal of poop. During Swift's time, as well as our own time, there were people doing the dirtiest and seemingly most meaningless jobs. These people receive little to almost no recognition as to their contribution to society. They might sometimes feel as if their contributions to society are meaningless and wonder why they bother to wake up each morning to do it day in and day out.

However, consider if you were a Lilliputian with the giant Gulliver on your island home. This behemoth is excreting tons upon tons upon tons of waste almost on a daily basis (that is, if he's regular of course). If those 300 people in charge of the poop disposal suddenly woke up and decided not to bother taking care of the poop, the results would be catastrophic. Poop would be everywhere. Your once idyllic homeland is now overflowing with stinking shit. Your water is contaminated from the excrement. People die every day from the effects of the shit. There is no escape. You are only left to wonder when you will be next.

All because those 300 excrement evacuators decided that their job was not worth doing.

So, I think that Swift is saying that in order to have a functioning society, every cog, gear, nut, bolt, etc. no matter how small needs to do their part. Some parts may seem unnecessary or insignificant, but without that one part, your world could suddenly be overrun with shit. Because...as many Scrubs fans may already know:

 

Also, I would like to point out that using shit as imagery, as many of you may know, is not just something Jonathan Swift did once and was never spoken of again. It has been used in modern day media as well. Yeah, it is under a different context and expressing a different meaning but it is still there. My personal favorite example is from South Park. If you're a fan of the show, then you know what series of episodes I am talking about: the ones concerning Stan's cynicism.

For some reason, I couldn't find the link from the video uploader, but the link below should take you to one of my favorite parts of the series of episodes (and maybe even the entire show).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdD3hSW1UpM 

 

Anyways, just wanted to shoot the shit with you guys for a bit (haha...get it? Shoot the shit?...no? Damn.)