Please Advise! Public Feces Flinging Shows BC’s Civility in the Dumps

[Editor’s note: Steve Burgess is an accredited spin doctor with a Ph.D in Centrifugal Rhetoric from the University of SASE, situated on the lovely campus of PO Box 7650, Cayman Islands. In this space he dispenses PR advice to politicians, the rich and famous, the troubled and well-heeled, the wealthy and gullible.]

Dear Dr. Steve,

There was a disturbing incident on the streets of Victoria last Saturday. A video seems to show an altercation between a motorist and a cyclist who had been knocked down. The cyclist dropped his pants, defecated, and then flung feces onto the windshield of the vehicle.

Is this what our society has come to?

Signed,
Pooped

Dear Pooped,

Is this what we’ve come to? It’s certainly what we’ve come from. That was an aspect of the “Planet of the Apes” films that always bothered me — the apes are talking and riding horses and so on, but where is the poop flinging? Where’s the respect for tradition?

Anyway, the practice survives. This is the second recorded poop-flinging incident in B.C. this year, and those are just the ones caught on video. There are no cameras recording the current Canada Post negotiations, for instance, so we don’t really know how common such events really are.

On a practical level one ought to overcome the initial sense of disgust to offer some grudging admiration for that Victoria cyclist. Talk about being able to produce content on demand. Regularity is always healthy, but until now it has offered few other practical benefits. Of course it is to be hoped that this sort of fecal conflict does not catch on, but if it does not many combatants will be able to restock their ammunition with such alacrity. More likely they will rely on outside sources — pets and such. Owners of large dogs could do a brisk business. Every war has its profiteers.

Former Vancouver mayoral candidate and bike lane opponent Wai Young must be pretty upset right now. Imagine the political payoff if this incident had happened during the election campaign. Look, she could have said, the government is building bike lanes so that self-righteous lunatics can literally throw crap at ordinary, hard-working people. Will B.C. cities soon give out free T-shirt cannons that fire shit balls at helpless commuters? No more capitulation to the two-wheeled terrorists!

Perhaps this sort of incident deserves a new kind of Darwin Award. The existing Darwin Awards are an unofficial salute to those whose misadventures offer negative reinforcement of Darwin’s law of “survival of the fittest.” But a new version could recognize the ways in which our behaviour still reflects that of our evolutionary antecedents, whether it’s chest-thumping, hooting, or curling while drunk.

Indeed, there is an anthropological study waiting to be done here. Do modern urban humans fall into different subspecies — motorist, cyclist and pedestrian? Or are we simply different tribes, like warring groups of chimpanzees? Is inter-breeding between groups possible? Some sources say no, citing, for instance, the Dodge Ram commercials that say, “For truck guys, the truck is everything.” That suggests no contact with those who wear bright, stretchy, skintight cycle wear will be tolerated.

Others argue that this is too bleak a view and point to the existence of bike racks on motor vehicles, devices that suggest the possibility of switching from one mode of transport to another. But some have theorized darkly that the bikes being carried on the backs of cars are merely trophies, like deer carcasses tied to the roof after a successful hunt. More study is needed.

In the meantime, what lessons can we draw from these scatological skirmishes? If politics is a guide, very little, except perhaps that some people will always take metaphors literally. In behavioural terms there’s not much daylight between species.

Perhaps we should stop worrying about ape-like behaviour and start worrying about even more dramatic evolutionary backsliding. Our future may be represented by the wombat, which is capable of producing elegant cube-shaped turds. Humans, with their more aggressive tendencies, might someday crap out ninja throwing stars. And feces flinging might only be a way station on the path to further devolution, a rapid regression of the species until at last we are all happily eating koi from decorative garden ponds. Considering the current cost of living in Vancouver, I expect that particular development in about two weeks, tops.