Vladimir Poopin'
Protecting the dirtiest secrets of the Russian state requires highly specialized skills.
Bob is taking the week off, so please enjoy this column from June of 2022. It’s worth rereading even if you caught it the first time!
Once upon a time and far, far away (Pittsburgh), I had a sister-in-law with an interesting job. Not, like, mayor or anything. She also wasn’t a nail-polish namer, a pickup-artist instructor, a fragrance chemist, a hippotherapist or any of the things that come up online when you search “most interesting jobs.”
No, obviously, she was a cow inseminator. The primary tool of the trade was a turkey baster. Here’s how I learned those facts:
ME: So, Mary Ann, what do you do?
MARY ANN: I inseminate cows.
ME: (pause) I see.
My thoughts went every which way — beginning with ascertaining that she was indeed speaking of her employment, not her hobby. Roger on that one; she was a professional cow inseminator. But, as I say, the whole concept unleashed wonderings I’d never wondered before, such as, if there are cow inseminators, presumably there were also bull jerker-offers.
I mean, it’s not like the bull goes to the bovine sperm bank and gets sent into a curtained-off area with a specimen jar and a copy of Cattle Sluts. So, therefore …
If I’m being honest, that’s a job I wouldn’t wish to have. For one thing, it would have to be quite dangerous. For another, I’d be concerned about that thing psychotherapists have to deal with: transference and counter-transference, where either the therapist or the patient gets emotionally involved.
But, actually, no. It turns out there is something called an AV (artificial vagina) that the randy bull is tricked into penetrating. More details on this process than you could ever wish for can be located here.
This all comes to mind because of something I read over the weekend involving another unusual job description: mad dictator stool wrangler.
According to Regis Gente and Mikhail Rubin, writing in Paris Match, Russia’s Federal Protective Service security detail assigned to Vladimir Putin must — when he travels abroad — harvest his excrement, bag it, and return it to Russia. In a suitcase. As passed along by Insider:
Such excrement collections happened during Putin’s visit to France on May 29, 2017, and during his October 2019 trip to Saudi Arabia, the reporters wrote. A video, taken during a Putin trip to France in 2019, showed six suited men in Putin’s entourage accompanying him into a bathroom. One of them was seen exiting the bathroom holding a small briefcase, though it is unclear what it contained.
One might wonder: Why would Putin wish to have his own bowel movements spirited from France to Russia? If he simply wanted a souvenir of his trip, those little Eiffel Towers are sold practically everywhere.
I must confess I asked myself a similar question. But we are so naive, suffering from failure of imagination. I mean, think this through: What if the DGSE (Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure) — France’s top intelligence service — were busy intercepting the feces of visiting foreign leaders to assay the waste for biological evidence regarding the leader’s health? Duh.
That also would be a rather curious subspeciality of intelligence gathering — requiring patience, vigilance and the ability to maneuver in tight quarters. (I’m thinking again of Pennsylvania, where, back in the 1970s, police arrested a Peeping Tom in a state park. He had secreted himself, in a poncho, beneath the latrines to catch intimate glimpses of female campers. So perhaps something along those lines.)
Again, neither France nor Saudi Arabia has confirmed such intelligence capabilities, but one can never be too careful.
Especially if one is a Russian dictator. Because, according to reports, an ex-Soviet agent claimed in 2016 that Joseph Stalin had ordered the interception of Mao Tse-tung’s stool — which means such techniques are in the Russian spying playbook. And so, as long as I’m in a wondering mood, I wonder if the so-called Steele Dossier, about the alleged kompromat the Russians had on Donald Trump, maybe focused on the wrong excretory function. The whole world obsessed about a purported “pee tape.”
But we’ve taken shit from that asshole for years. I’ll bet Putin has, too.