The Work of Hoarders Explains America

Sister Wives won't tell you about the US of A. The Candy Crush-addicted rabbit guy defecating in a bucket while his toilet works fine will

What’s it all mean?

The woman on Hoarders has three bathrooms in her house. All of them are filled floor to ceiling with junk, but one of them still has a toilet you could reach if you tried. She uses none of them anyway. Instead she hunches over a five-gallon bucket in the kitchen, right next to the refrigerator that stopped refrigerating a couple years ago. The plumbing still works fine, though. She tested it last week when the city inspector came by. But she prefers the bucket. If the bucket’s full, she opts for diapers. Says it feels more natural this way.

Monica Hesse at the Washington Post thinks Sister Wives explains America. She wrote 1,000 words about polygamists in Arizona learning communication theory and dealing with grief on camera. She thinks that watching a couple Mormon MILFs argue about property division with a paterfamilias who looks like an aging 90s butt rocker reveals something essential about our national character. She calls it "the most American show on television."

Monica's watching the wrong channel.

You want to understand America? The real American show airs on A&E, not TLC. It features people like the aforementioned bucket woman, who has a master's degree in library science and once ran the reference desk at a third-tier state university. Now she lives among Collyer brothers-grade towers of newspapers dating back to 1987, paths carved through the assorted Smaug mounds of debris like switchbacks leading to the peak of a mountain. She could clean it up. She has the money. Her pension checks find their way into her bank account every month. But she won't. She likes it this way.

Then there’s Gary and Kathy, the rabbit hoarders who turned their rental house into a warren. The rabbits chewed through the drywall, burrowed under the bathtub, tunneled behind the hot water tank. The animal control officer found them coming in and out of the walls like it was a director’s cut of Watership Down. You’ve heard this song before: Gary's unemployed and spends all day playing Candy Crush, Kathy's on disability, and they didn't build rabbit hutches today because that would happen tomorrow, always tomorrow. When the landlords finally saw what they'd done to the house, they realized the whole place would have to be gutted. Gary, who has some good size on him, signed the eviction papers with an X and told everyone to do their f[ing] jobs. Big Gary knows the score.

Or consider Mark Redwine, who decapitated his thirteen-year-old son after the boy discovered photographs of dear old dad eating feces while wearing women's underwear and then confronted him with the evidence. This happened in La Plata County, Colorado, where the boy found the photos on his father's laptop while on a bonding visit with the old man. The prosecutors had to explain to a jury of Redwine’s La Plata peers what coprophilia meant. They had to show them the pictures. You can imagine the confusion: here’s one of your peers, ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

Meanwhile, the lady from Chimp Crazy kept a 150-pound ape in her basement, feeding it a steady diet of Xanax and McDonald's Happy Meals. When animal control finally came, she had already moved the chimp to a new location, part of an underground railroad for exotic pet owners. She treated the chimp like a son despite having an actual son who is by her side for much of the story. She's not mentally ill, the PETA folks keep reminding viewers of the Tiger King director’s latest documentary. She knows exactly what she's doing, and what she’s doing is jonesing for those apes.

Many such cases: the monkey torture community that flourishes on Telegram and Discord consists largely of middle-aged Americans with jobs and clean criminal records. These somewhat well-adjusted people commission videos from Indonesia and Cambodia, paying cryptocurrency for footage of baby monkeys being hurt in extremely specific ways. They have favorite torturers. They discuss preferred techniques. In the BBC documentary, we learn that users watch these videos to relax, to unwind, to take a load off. Some have children and volunteer in their local communities. Few among them seem able to grasp the contradictions.

These are the real American tales. Not a whimsical Jewish mouse hoping that there are no cats in America or four wives becoming three becoming one, learning about boundaries and “Daring Greatly” with Brené Brown along the way. The real story, the story that’s going to send us back into the dark ages without passing go or collecting $200, is people deliberately choosing dysfunction when function remains readily available. Choosing the bucket. Choosing the crinkled diaper. Choosing a chimp’s limb-rending embrace.

The Flatlanders sang about Dallas, that sprawling monument to American sameness where the "peace-in-our-time" dream of Kennedy died and hundreds of justifiable conspiracy theories were born. They call the city "a rich man with a death wish in his eyes, steel and concrete soul, a rich man who tends to believe in his own lies." They could have meant almost anywhere in postwar America, any suburb stretching for miles of flat brown nothing or any inner city awash with the flotsam and jetsam of a thousand failed renaissances and urban renewals, any place where people have everything they need and choose degradation instead. Such people don't want to be better and don’t need to be worse. They've found what they're looking for.

The Sister Wives are performing for cameras, constructing narratives about growth and healing and family bonds that transcend traditional marriage.¹ Or so the marketing pitch goes. What they’re really doing, after years on the air, is putting on a show about putting on a show. They know you're watching, so go ahead and put on your thinking cap. Map their political affiliations onto your flawed understanding of flyover states. Write a banger post or two about it.

The poop bucket and rabbit people aren't performing. They're American dreamers, sleepwalking through what’s left of the empire. The cameras are an intrusion, not an opportunity. When the cleanup crews arrive, when the psychologists ask questions, when the adult children beg them to use the toilet like normal people or the landlords beseech them to get rid of their warren, they dig in deeper. On some basic level, they love what they've created. They wouldn't change a thing.²

The real ones aren't on TLC learning about healthy boundaries. They're on A&E explaining why they haven't thrown away a newspaper since H.W. Bush was president. They’re writing out callsigns and safe words for their captive chimpanzee operation. They're in court explaining why they had no choice but to save those photos to the computer. Could they have done anything else, anything at all, such as not taking them? “No, that’s not an option!” as Deadwood actor William Sanderson screams when urged by a friend to get a new job in Tim and Eric’s mock advertisement for "H’amb," a discount ham-lamb combination meat product.

According to Monica Hesse, Sister Wives asks whether a family can heal after betrayal. Whether people can find new ways to love each other. Whether unconventional relationships can work in conventional society. These are interesting questions if you're a communications professor desperate to push a quickie book for tenure, an op-ed writer looking for an easy-mode column, or a podcast host who needs some digestible content to fill a quick thirty minutes.

Hesse ends her op-ed on the possibility of redemption, which is what you want to do it you’re hoping the piece reaches a wide audience. She should’ve ended by changing the channel. Surf a bit and you’ll come across a dental hygienist explaining why she needs to watch monkeys suffer. The nurse telling us why she has to get her mitts on a chimpanzee. The feckless stay-in-bed husband explaining why the rabbits can’t be stopped.

These people are done, finished. They can put down their Phone Hands and Goon Hands in extreme fatigue. They’ve had their vision. Now they can live it every single day, squatting in their kitchens or crinkling their diapers, right next to the rabbits and the guest bathroom, doing exactly what they want to do.

A hand goes up in the back of the lecture hall. "But why?" asks that eager-beaver student. "Why would they choose to live like this? How can this possibly be okay?" Elementary, my dear Watson(s): It’s okay by them, because they're doing it for the love of the game.

1. To be fair, polygamous marriage is the most traditional marriage of all — freeing up marriage partners to prevent the formation of vast, seething underbellies of male incels/NEETs is a fairly modern innovation.

2. Nor would the nostalgie de la boue-afflicted voyeurs who consume that content, myself (and possibly yourself) included.