The farty’s over down south
Mississippi School District Declares “Butts Are Not Funny”
Aristotle says, “Who let these morons near children?”
A school administrator in Mississippi was fired recently for reading a book to second graders. The book was I Need a New Butt! by Dawn McMillan. One scandalized administrator — he came to the meeting with his own smelling salts and fainting couch — asked the libidinously literate lower grade leader, “Is this the kind of thing you find funny?”
Butts? Funny? The answer is always, “Yes!” And when I say “always,” I mean always. Butts are funny! And very important!
Here are what some of the great minds of history had to say about butts.
Socrates, the Lenny Bruce of 5th century Athens, famously said, “The unexamined butt is not worth sitting on.” He also admonished us all, “Be kind, for everyone you meet has a butt.”
His student, Aristotle, writing on education, said, “Knowing your butt is the beginning of all wisdom.” He followed this up with, “Educating the mind without educating the butt is no education at all.”
Having a perhaps more severe outlook, St. Augustine of Hippo connected our butts to God. His most important lesson is, “It is pride of their butts that makes Angels into Devils; It is butt humility that makes humans into Angels.”
St. Thomas Aquinas made the first rational argument proving the existence of butts. Thomas Hobbes treatise, The Leviathan, was the first serious work extolling big butts in the English speaking world. One of John Locke’s earliest works, establishing his method, was A Letter Concerning the Butts of Englishmen. Both of these had a profound effect on the drafters of the Declaration of Independence, especially Benjamin Franklin, who said, “They who can give up essential liberty to save their butts deserve neither liberty nor their butts.”
Transcendentalists didn’t delve much into this discourse. Emerson was thinking beyond the butt. Thoreau, in the second chapter of Walden Pond, lists the costs of provisions for his cabin. On that list is “six roles of commode foolscap” costing “7 and a half cents.” He doesn’t attribute any specific meaning to this fact.
Karl Marx was a huge fan of butts — or a fan of huge butts, depending on the translation — because, according to his theories, butts are the means of production for all farts and poop. Industrial workers, he wrote, “own the means of production” of most of their fart and poop output, thus setting an example that could be applied to industry in general. He argued with liberals, social democrats, and trade unionists, who said that abundant bathroom breaks were all workers needed to thrive. Lenin also condemned this “bourgeois butt accommodationism” and wrote in What is to be Done with the Butts, “They can either get their butts behind the machine guns, or we can stand their butts up in front of the machine guns.”
Note that butts are proportionally more likely to become trained Marxists or labor agitators than any other body part.
It is a tense time for butts.
In an early draft of his essay, The Butt of Sisyphus, Camus writes, “The only serious problem facing philosophy is that of butts.” He deftly tied butts into both Existentialism — do butts even have a meaning? — and Absurdism. It’s important to note that Camus wrote on all aspects of butt philosophy, not just butts per se. He viewed butts, farts, and poop as a single magisteria, rather than as separate phenomenological events.
In the 21st century, ecological philosophers have built on this, arguing that all butts aren’t just to be thought of as One, but actually are one. All individual butts, according to Morton, cohere into a larger thing, a hyper-object, which — like the biosphere or air pollution or the solar system — is unknowable at a human scale and can only be grasped in part.
Thus the 21st century affirms Socrates other dictum, “The only thing I know about my butt, is that I know nothing about my butt.”
Amen, brother.
Thank you Amy Sea for making this better!
This is my SEVENTH response to Sarah Paris’s amazing butt prompt.
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