I have always been a bit squeamish, and it’s getting worse.  I’m probably not the first person you want to call if there’s a wound to dress, though in an emergency I will try very hard to help. I lose my appetite easily, for example from an insect, or a sneeze. (The sneezing insect will make me fast all day.) “Scatological humor” is an oxymoron, and the last thing I want in a book or TV show is a scene involving vomiting.

Which is exactly what I got in the HBO version of Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies. I don’t believe that was in the book, but it’s de rigueur for modern entertainment.

In an interview, George R. R. Martin (the author of the Game of Thrones books, for those of you just emerging from a cave you entered in the late 1990s) bragged that his characters were more real than those of his alphabet namesake, J. R. R. Tolkien, because they use the bathroom. I disagree. A description of a run-of-the-mill visit to the toilet should not be read by anyone except the editor, unless the character is going to do something interesting like be killed by a crossbow at the same time.

(An editor, for those of you born after 1985, was someone who altered unpublished books to eliminate repetition, improve structure and flow, and monitor plot and style consistency, as well as correct grammar and serve as a wordsmith. Often he or she removed all parentheticals. Some book marketeers today continue to claim the ancestral title.)

Anyone who has had, known, loved, minded, observed, or been a child knows that Everyone Poops, though for your sake I hope you have not had to read that horrifyingly literal book. (I just had my day ruined by finding out that it was turned into a movie. I’m trying not to think about that.) The point is, this activity is banal, so why is it a fitting aspect of entertainment? We wouldn’t want to watch a show or read a book about someone eating a meal, would we? (Watching My Dinner With Andre was a patience-tester. I mostly failed.)

The creators of the 2006 movie Idiocracy are on record as being astounded that America reached the state described therein in ten years rather than the predicted 300. It’s got a high gross-out score, so I haven’t watched it recently (although I predicted its Nostradamus-like accuracy, yes, I really did). In the era of Trump, it probably views like a documentary.

Not that I’m blaming Trump for ubiquitous appearance of substances-nature-teaches-us-to-shun in mainstream entertainment. I think as a nation, our descent into crudity of all sorts paved the way for him, not the reverse.