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by Christopher Ketcham
"Razing Jerusalem, Mecca! Free holy land in Baja California! Get it while it's cheap!"
 I came across this real estate notice in a copy of Take a Shit, an odd little zine published out of Brooklyn that proselytizes (if we can call it that) the notion that human beings aren't shitting enough — backed up too much with meat, Jello, the Internet, suffering from the peculiar condition that doctors identify as scatalitosis, wherein the compost trapped in the intestines actually produces a kind of bad breath. An ex-girlfriend had this condition: common constipation brings it on, too. Extrapolate to human history, the zine argues — we aren't shitting out the past fast enough: our acculturations, tribal fealties, land fetishes.
Idea for a world-historic laxative: Behold the slavering idiot
tribes of Jehovah and Mohammed vying for the high holy ground in
Jerusalem. Solution: Deploy the unipolar dominance the U.S. claims so
loftily is a force for good and issue, ex nihilo, ultimatums to
populations of all sacred sites. Use the traditional caress of American
diplomacy, e.g. gunpoint. Proceed to bomb out of existence Mecca,
Jerusalem etc. — wherever God has been fattened on the ground in the
Middle East. Confiscate oil for the continued profligate
porno-consumerist existence of Americans. As suggested by Take a Shit
magazine, launch wide-ranging advertising campaigns for travel to a new
Holy Land in far-off inhospitable places. Mars will do, so will the
craters of the moon. Barring that, we can offer the bottoms of the
oceans or active volcanoes. If things get out of hand, the U.S. can
sacrifice Texas, parts of Arizona, and most of Florida for the purpose
of welcoming the billions of insane-person believers to the batism of
this new "holy land." Another solution is the mobile Jerusalem model
wherein the Holy Land becomes a sort of traveling freak show; the
floating fortresses of the U.S. Navy could be accommodated to this
effect (better this use than bombing) and keep the holy rollers
guessing.
Ultimately, however, this may prove a draconian effort with the
usual blowback effects wherever military power is wielded with "good
intentions." Indeed, historical patterns suggest that the effort may be
in vain. Several thousand years can pass and entire new strata of
sacred zones will obsess the human race. Consider the once holy sites
throughout the Mediterranean that today are meaningless for
contemporary religionists. The island of Samothraki near the
Dardanelles, for example, where for ten centuries until roughly 300 AD
the mystery cults, heirs of Phrygian custom, convened to worship
eunuchs and oaks and waterfalls, where even Philip of Macedon was drawn
and where he met his future wife, Olympias, who would bear him a son
named Alexander, who went on to be a psychopath (sacred child!). In
that tiny space of ten centuries, the superstitionists at Samothraki
understood all that was needed to know — and, of course, they knew
nothing. The point is this: Even at gunpoint we may never shit out all
the any inherited compartments of acculturation, the weight of
superstition, never look into each other's eyes from the base of our
humanness. It is the bad breath of history’s scatalitosis.
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