Seeping effect of toilet humor

Super Diaper Baby, meet Captain Grandma! If you thought that the evil Deputy Doo Doo was a formidable adversary, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Unlike the odoriferous Doo Doo, Captain Grandma! is clean, well-intentioned and probably smells just fine. I say probably because I haven’t actually smelled her, but she sounds like a nice-smelling lady to me. And she’s tough!

I am referring here to the battle underway in the Riverside Unified School District over the presence in its libraries of a kids’ book called “The Adventures of Super Diaper Baby.” He’s a tot energized by super-power juice who flies and smashes bad guys everywhere. That includes Deputy Doo Doo, a giant piece of excrement. Yep, poo poo.

The illustrated book is part of the “Captain Underpants” series created by Dav Pilkey for children who enjoy reading about their bodily functions. The series also includes such characters as Professor Poopypants and the Wedgie Woman. No Pee Pee Power yet, but the day is young.

I had no idea these books, if one can call them that, even existed until Captain Grandma! brought it up before a school district library committee. Her real name is Pam Santi. She’s a 55-year-old businesswoman who is raising four grandchildren and who feels, in so many words, that the Super Diaper Baby book is a piece of, well, garbage.

She objected because her precocious second-grade grandson was able to find it in his school library and seemed to actually enjoy it! That transformed a mild-mannered owner of a store that makes and sells garden fountains into -- flash! boom! -- Captain Grandma!

Faster than outrage, more powerful than an angry moralist and able to leap tall bureaucrats at a single bound! The library committee voted against banning the book, but Captain Grandma! isn’t done yet!

OK, enough of the metaphoric hoo-ha. Santi isn’t going to settle for the 5-2 decision that allowed “Super Diaper Baby” to remain in the school libraries. She plans on appealing the committee’s decision to the Riverside County Office of Education, and beyond that if necessary.

“The book is degrading our youth,” she said in a phone conversation the other day. “I began reading it to my 7-year-old grandson. It was OK until I got about halfway through and then I said, ‘Wait a min-ute!’ ” That’s about where Deputy Doo Doo came in. Later, she found the boy drawing the deputy or, as she put it, drawing “poop!”

So Captain Grandma! went to war, crying, “Somebody’s got to have a brain!”

A committee member who voted to oppose the ban on Super D.B. was Betsy Schmechel, an educational specialist, who sees the right to read a book about doo doo as a personal-freedom choice. “There are some areas in the book where I could say this doesn’t belong in a school library. But it’s not overall offensive enough to say this doesn’t belong in a school library.”

One who did find it offensive and voted to ban it was Sue Tavaglione, who teaches a course in good manners at Riverside City College. Things like shaking hands and smiling and which fork to use and sending thank-you cards and how to conduct yourself on the telephone. She doesn’t normally want books banned, she says, but “this drags the kids down. It’s not an uplifting book.” She also worries about what its creators might come up with next. In the kingdom of scatology, anything is possible.

What all of this involves is a trickling down, so to speak, of toilet humor to the level of children. Once confined to adult fans of Howard Stern, it made its way into movies intended for those who enjoy comedy based on bodily sounds. And now the Super Diaper Baby book proves that the Age of Flatulence has discovered a market among the little ones too. How’s that for good old American enterprise?

The downward slide is part of a slow cultural devolution to a level of existence that celebrates thievery, crudity and stupidity. If presidents can lie and CEOs can steal and television and movies can market sex like it’s a new toy, why not children’s books that offer flying excrement as a theme? It’s the old struggle between good and evil, you might say, placed in contemporary terms.

I’m against banning books, but I do understand Captain Grandma!’s objections. I also understand the school district’s refusal to unleash a process that could be damaging in so many more profound ways. I nevertheless long for the society that once celebrated Winnie-the-Pooh and Cat in the Hat, and found beauty in the triumph of good taste over commercial gain.

Will we ever be that way again?

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.