I heard a report recently that well over one-third of the
adults in the United States are obese and that number is climbing rapidly with
no end in sight. Twenty percent of
children are obese. My first thought on
hearing this, was, “What the hell is wrong with us?” Twelve states have obesity rates over 30% -
in the year 2000, none were that high.
How in the world have we let this happen? It’s inexplicable, as if 40% of adults were
still smoking. But obesity will kill
you just as surely as smoking will and maybe more. Relentless and mostly government ordained
education about smoking has resulted in the number of smokers in the adult
population being cut in half since the 50’s.
Maybe that will happen with obesity too.
But being fat is so obviously a bad thing that it still begs the
question; why is this happening?
My own opinion – ungrounded and pure speculation – is that
modern life has become so complex, and the volume and velocity of information
so completely overwhelming, that average people trying to confront those
complexities just shut down. They resort
to the simple things in life, the things that are cognitively economical and
physically rewarding. They eat, they
shop, they grab on to a religious belief like grim death, they work, if they
can, and they go to bed at night exhausted, dazed and satiated. When they get up in the morning, the world is
still the same fucked up place and their life is still careening out of
control. But eating feels good,
especially sugary, fat-loaded clusters of empty calories, so they eat their way
through a day that is filled with blasts of random and non-stop information, a
thousand decisions that amount to nothing, a shitty job – if they have a job –
and emotional whiplash at every turn.
Then they turn on the TV and see Orwellian political
gibberish coming out of multiple media outlets whose own 24 hour new imperative
demands that they “update” and report every garbled utterance of the
professional political class to these weary souls all day every day. What do they understand and believe? What do they take to be real? Who do they believe? I say
they eat a big greasy cheeseburger of simple political thought and wash it down
with a 40 ounce Big Gulp of comforting nonsense they want to hear and finish it
with a few doughnuts of scantily disguised hate speech and racism. Bob’s yer uncle, they’re as mentally obese as
they are physically.
It doesn’t help that news outlets beat to death anything
that remotely seems like news. For
evidence, take stock of the coverage of Obama stating the obvious; that he is
in favor of gay marriage. I mean, c’mon;
who is surprised by this? No one. Is it surprising that he said it without equivocating
or detailing a dozen caveats? Yeah, probably. Since no politician does something like this
without carefully doing the math as to what it means, you can bet that the
Obama camp thinks it helps more than it hurts and it was pretty clear anyway from
the man’s overall policies that this would inevitably be the end game.
But now that he’s being criticized by everyone from Romney –
who can’t seem to quite decide how he wants to frame the criticism – to goof-ball
Howard Stern to Rush Blowhard to Meagan McCain to Billy Graham’s son, Franklin,
it is THE story everywhere you turn.
Somewhere some overweight dimwit is probably having a second
cheeseburger just because he’s so upset about the whole story and trying to
reconcile his own confused feelings for that tall guy who stocks shelves at the
drug store. Is there anyone who was
going to vote for Obama who now isn’t?
Maybe, though for the life of me I couldn’t describe them to you. It seems to me far more likely that progressive
independents who were considering sitting it out in disappointed protest now
feel like maybe he has enough balls to vote for after all. I know it made me happy for that very reason. It’s as if he finally said, “Fuck you back-ass
mouth breathers. This is right and that’s
what I think. Let’s move on to something
important.”
But back to the central thesis of this post – and there is
one: when potential voters, who have mentally shut down and refuse to process anything
more complex than who should get thrown off Dancing with the Stars, hear the
garbled rants and bug-eyed screeds that Romney has been frantically tossing off
for the last two weeks, it’s, "Honey, get me another plate of ribs and mashed
potatoes."
He takes credit for the resurgence of the US auto industry after
being boldly and with great certainty on record as saying they should all go
bankrupt and that would fix what ailed them.
It takes guts to try to pull that off but he’s counting on that guy on
his couch with the TV tray believing him just because he’s so god damned
earnest about it. He totally sounds
like he believes himself when he excoriates Obama for his tragic mishandling of
the concerns of small business, evoking the magic voo doo doll of Jimmy Carter
to measure the extent of Obama’s failure.
I’m sure couch guy doesn’t think twice when the republicans
propose a defense budget larded with even more unnecessary shit than the Pentagon
wants and say it’s absolutely critical to build a missile defense capability
on the US east coast in case the Iranians somehow overnight roll out some nukes
that could reach that far before the Israelis bomb them into oblivion.
I’m sure he’s bedazzled by the reptilian charm of Paul Ryan
and his “let-them-eat-cake” budget and believes that if we just kill more poor
people and give rich people more money he can get off his couch and head to
Wal-Mart with a full wallet and a shopping list two feet long.
To me, the same I-don’t-give-a-shit-anymore attitude that turns
ordinary people into heart attack prone diabetics gives license to the Super
PACs to spew their toxic swill with impunity too.
And you don’t have to be Ivan Pavlov or even Karl Rove to know that
endlessly repeated lies become the truth if for no other reason than ubiquity
to a certain portion of the population.
How has our country come to this?
How did the ferocious hatred for “the other” become institutionalized? I wish I knew. For now, I’m need to go out and get some
chicken wings…
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