The Gloucester Clam

The up-and-coming Pants Shitting Party met at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in the nation’s Capital this week to devise strategy around key issues facing trou-crapping voters.

Gonna wanna have these steam cleaned

Heading up the docket were Ebola, immigration, ISIS and the report from a highly reliable cousin of a customs officer that ISIS agents agents are smuggling Ebola-carrying immigrants over our borders. Besides these hot topics the over 2,000 attendees from around the country also sat in on seminars to hear speakers freak their motherfucking shit out over bullshit like GMOs, vaccines and teens getting hooked on ‘Krokodil.’

Stacy McGee who had driven 18 hours from Benton Minnesota in order to avoid airplanes where she fears sitting next to someone with the deadly hemorrhagic Ebola virus which has here at home thus far infected two health care workers in Texas out of 316 million total Americans. She says at the conference she’s found some terrific new ways to be irrationally terrified by absurdly remote, essentially non-threatening or entirely fabricated dangers.

Pants-shiitting or just a shart in the shorts? A panel debates.

She explained how she’d found her way to this growing movement:

“I was raised in a solidly Democratic household where we’d regularly drop a bomb in our hiphuggers over this or that. But as I got older I found myself more and more identifying with the specific elements of the Republican platform that made me scream at family members about the existential peril supposedly posed by gay marriage and Fox News fabrications like the ‘Knock-Out-Game.’ But even then I felt some party leaders like Mitt Romney weren’t fully pandering to my deeply unreasonable concerns. One day I heard Pants Shitting Party founder Newt Gingrich describe as real and probable a wholly concocted figment of his imagination regarding Iran disabling the entire United States with something called an electromagnetic pulse bomb. Since that day I’ve been a full-on Pants Shitter in mind and soul. It’s been so liberating to find an ideology that only requires me to become inconsolably terrified and then lash out without ever having to worry about solving real but boring challenges like our crumbling infrastructure or ballooning student debt.”

Pants Shitting Leaders say trajectories like McGee’s are common as the almost exclusively white, downwardly mobile, formerly middle-class membership flail impotently at dealing with the all-too-real perils of a complicated world.

“It’s much easier to blame brown people or convince yourself medical professionals are lying for some reason than to actually demand change from cultural monoliths like the financial industry,” said Pants Shitting Party Chairman Bud Radcliffe. “To do so would be mean seeking impartial information sources, demanding accountability from institutions that hold the public trust and other hard things. There is also the massive inconvenience of developing appropriately scaled responses, modifying damaging behaviors and realizing there is no such thing as a risk or harm-free life. No thank you!”

“We Pants Shitters have simply come to grips with the fact that it’s simpler to glance uncritically at something on the Internet, crap your khakis, and then generate enough hysterical online activity to cause any rational person to beg for the sun to go nova in order to burn  the stupid off our planet in a massive purifying barrage of powerful gamma radiation. We think of ourselves as pragmatists.”

Radcliffe pointed to his his lapel pin featuring the Pant’s Shitting Party logo, a keyboard caps lock button with the green light lit. “Caps Lock or Get the Fuck Off! Also: Benghaaaazi!” he shouted to cheers from around the crowded conference hall.

Media outlets have been quick to cater to this expanding demographic. No end of television segments, blog posts, social media engagements and a near epoch of talk radio time has been dedicated to help Pants Shitters take the massive drawer-dumps for which they’re known.

Attendees walk the floor between Docker Dookies.

“We used to mostly cater to bullshit addicts,” said CNN Senior Executive and conference presenter Jordan Walsh. “But there are only so many royal weddings and disappearing planes, know what I mean? With Pants Shitters we can cram weeks worth of airtime full of vapid speculation and hearsay without fear of the audience getting bored and changing the channel. They’re like rats in a food pellet experiment. Better, even.”

Kiosks around the hall offered a variety products for committed Pants Shitters. At one sat sixty five year old former industrial arts teacher Gregg Gains of Shreveport Alabama, who cheerfully reports he’s been deucing in his relaxed-fit Levis since the attempted introduction of the metric system in the mid 1970’s. Arrayed on the folding table front of him were souvenirs tracing the entire history of the Pants Shitting movement from axes with “Anti Saloon League” burned into the handles to Y2K-themed hats and shirts. Anti-fluoridation souvenirs were his most resilient product line, with 60’s-era anti-communist “fluoride information” pamphlets selling as briskly as “NO!” buttons shaped like teeth, popular with activists who pooed in their skinny jeans all over Portland Oregon just this past summer.

Why do you think they called him “Goldwater”?

Experts note that as the challenges facing our nation and even species demand a level of heightened consideration and subtly beyond what a significant portion of the electorate is willing to commit, we should expect Pants Shitting to offer an ever-more attractive alternative to constructive attempts at problem solving for the indefinite future.

This observation was borne out by this years schedule of events, which had originally included a truly chino-packing presentation from leading climate researchers. Conference organizers, however, elected not to allow it in a last-minute vote. From a prepared statement a spokesman revealed global climate change was not in the realm of Pants Shitters’ typical concerns and was at best something for their constituents to mire themselves in via a cockamamie blend of denialism and absurd, hastily-concocted conspiracy theories.

“That climate shit has real-live scientists soiling themselves all over the fucking planet,” the statement read. “It’s way out of our league.”