Fat like me: the new demons of American culture

7 April 2005

I'll bet no one will be shocked to hear that large people -- the "obese" to the media -- are more apt to be treated rudely and with disdain when they shop.

I'm betting that because, right alongside the article containing that report from researchers at Rice University in Houston, were hyperlinks to three related stories about large people.

As you can see from the graphic above, each of the headlines is negative about a large person's size.

Zooming obesity rate has chunky price tag

State getting fatter fast, study says, and costs are piling up

... screams the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle

Study: Obesity Costs Calif. $21.7B Yearly

... reveals the Associated Press

Study finds that overweight Californians are costing state

... is the dire warning from the Sacramento Bee

I can just about guarantee you that if the networks or local tv broadcast stations aired this report, the view would be the obligatory file footage of the back end of a large man or woman walking headless down the street. That's what the local tv stations in Baton Rouge do, as do the network news programs. Every once in awhile they zoom in on a belly instead of an ass. And I can just about guarantee you that the Sacramento Bee, the Associated Press and the San Francisco Chronicle do not employ "the obese" -- at least in the editorial section. I doubt if the New York Times does either. Or even SpikeTV.

I wonder how much "small-sized" people are costing the state of California? They must be free. What about so-called "normal-sized" people? How much do they cost the state of California? And just what the hell is normal? I'm 6'4" tall, a white male with blond hair and blue eyes. I'm 50 years old and I weigh 330 pounds. I have size 14 feet. I can easily lift 100 pounds and, with a strain, 150 pounds, and my resting heart rate since I've quit smoking is 54 beats per minute. (I'm slightly pissed after having read the "obese" articles, which has got me thinking about the publicly acceptable discrimination of the kind that led to Terri Schindler Schiavo's condition, so my blood pressure and heart rate as I type this are probably higher than "normal.")

But this is me. And, to me, I'm normal. At 20, I was 185 pounds and boxing in the "light heavyweight" weight class at the U.S. Naval Academy. I was rail thin then and that was normal then. Normal now is me with a belly like Homer Simpson. I'll live longer if I'm thinner? If I live longer, I'll cost the state. The state ought to pay me for being large. I'm descended from Irish farmers, English aristocrats, Scottish warriors, German peddlers and Nordic raiders, among God only knows who else. My parents were large. I'm large. And don't forget APES. My ancestor was a big hairy ape that could kick the ass of the smaller monkeys. (Which may be why their ancestors probably want to get back at me and my "normal" kind today.)

For some reason, the culture pundits of today -- hoping to sell diets, fashion, infomercial snake oil and exercise machines -- want us all to be the same size. Different sexual preferences are okay, just so long as we're the same size. The airlines love that approach, because they can make the seats smaller and sell more seats. Who cares if a passenger dies of a blood clot. Detroit loves it because then they can make a smaller car, use less materials and make a bigger profit. The Japanese are small. Caucasian Americans are not. FACT OF LIFE. FACT OF GENETICS. And don't get me talking about toilets. A toilet built for a 10 year old child is NOT built for a 50 year old man -- and why they put them in truck stops with the assumption that everyone who uses the toilet will be a 10-year-old in a wheelchair is beyond my understanding.

Now I could get out and exercise after I get back from driving at 3 a.m., but I live in the poorer section of Baton Rouge. There is no YMCA in north Baton Rouge. You could drive the Martin Luther King Jr. Expressway, connect in to Scenic Highway and travel it all the way to St. Franscisville 35 miles up the road and not find a YMCA. All the Y's are in south Baton Rouge where the money is. But if there were a YMCA in north Baton Rouge, it wouldn't be open at 3 a.m.

I could jog. But no one jogs in my neighborhood. I've got bars on my doors and windows for a reason. Even Slick Willie Clinton wouldn't jog in my neighborhood without a phalanx of security. Chances are that if you run in my neighborhood -- at any time of the day -- someone will think the cops are after you, someone else is after you who thinks you just stole their dope, or there's a pit bull chasing you seconds from taking your leg off. Any of which could be correct. Baton Rouge Recreation has a number of great parks for exercise, not any of which are near my neighborhood. Yep. Right again. South Baton Rouge. That's where all the cellular towers are as well.

Diet would help. But the less you get, the more it costs you. Ask anyone who's purchased Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, or any of the other myriad "diet" meals. Carbohydrates are the sustenance of the poor. Rice. Spaghetti. Potatoes. Loaves but not fishes. But it's also sustenance I like, which is a good thing my tastes and budget merge. Thanks to Atkins, I can get 20 pounds of rice for $5. Chicken is cheap because everyone loves wings and that leaves the rest of the bird. It's filled with growth hormones to make the chicken grow faster but that doesn't have any effect on humans ... or does it? It must not, I haven't read it in the New York Times. I could eat salad. A lot of salad. I actually love salad. But I'm telling you now that if you drive a truck for a living in Louisiana where Democratic Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco has closed nearly all the rest areas and you eat salad, you'd better bring several pairs of "Attends" or "Depends" undergarments with you and leave your shame at home. Because what goes in, must come out. Tourists be warned.

Drugs. I could do drugs. Cocaine maybe. Or Heroin. Nah. Too expensive. Then I'd have to get a better job, get more drugs, get a better job, get more drugs. All one vicious circle. Ask Hunter Thompson. That was one skinny man. He cost the state nothing. Right? The kids can find on the web just how many Sudafed tablets they need to take and get high. I could do the same thing. Because it's like legal amphetamines. In fact, pseudoephedrine is a main ingredient in making methamphetamine. I'd have no finger nails because I'd chew them off. Not a problem. I'd cough up loogeys constantly. Coughing up loogeys is cool, right? I'd be up until all hours of the night and manic. But I'd be thin. And then I wouldn't cost the state anything, right? Right? RIGHT???

If you believe the mainstream media, only the "obese" cost the state anything.

Someone in Terri Schindler Schiavo's life convinced her she wasn't normal. The tv? Her magazines? The hometown newspaper? Her friends at school that got the lead from the tv, magazines, hometown newspaper that the "obese" cost the state? Whatever it was, and there were probably several culprits of culture, they convinced her she had an eating disorder problem. They probably repeated it often enough that she eventually believed the criticism and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Comments some unknown editorialist from the Boston Globe writing about (shhh!) "Terri Schiavo's affliction":

"Schiavo was an overweight kid who reportedly wept when she bought clothes, fearful of being teased about her size. After high school she lost weight, dropping from over 200 pounds to 150. When she was 26 she weighed 110 pounds. On Feb. 25, 1990, less than three months after her 26th birthday, she collapsed. Her heart stopped, depriving her brain of oxygen and causing severe physical damage. Doctors say the cause was a chemical imbalance that had been triggered by an eating disorder."

Well, maybe the medical cause was linked to low levels of potassium. But the real cause of her death was something else entirely.

Some kids take automatic weapons to school and terminate their tormentors with extreme prejudice. Terri Schindler Schiavo was so convinced she was a demon, she turned the weapons of fad diets on herself.

Michael Daly of the New York Daily News says Terri Schindler Schiavo "learned looks can kill":

Your straphanger's eyes go from a grim newspaper report about Terri Schiavo and the feeding tube to a subway ad for TrimSpa diet pills featuring an ebulliently slim Anna Nicole Smith.

"Be envied," reads the slogan.

The ad has pictures of Smith before and after she began taking the TrimSpa pills that enabled her to lose 65 pounds. You had read that Schiavo used another diet, NutriSystem, to shed 60 pounds toward the end of high school.

Tell me again, liberal America, that you don't judge others by the size of their wallets, by their station in life. That you're open and love to meet people of different cultures. Rich people, for the most part, aren't "obese" -- or hasn't it yet dawned on you that when you discriminate against the fat, the toothless, the people who live in trailers, the men who drive trucks and the women who serve you fast food or ring up your gasoline at the mini-mart you are, in fact, discriminating against the poor.

Let me repeat that in case you missed it. The "obese" are, in fact, poor.

Of course, I could move to south Baton Rouge. Or get a better job. People are finally starting to employ veterans around here. At least that's what they're telling me at the labor office. But then if I did, who the hell would tell you the truth from my side of the tracks?

Peter Jennings? Dan Rather? Tom Brokaw? Give me a break! They made too much damn money! And that's why you won't hear the truth from their successors. Priests? Rabbis? Imams? Preachers? Politicians? Lobbyists? You're killing me! HAHAHAHAHAHA!

I was sitting on the bench for 50 years, learning the game, going through hell and I couldn't figure out why. And I was driving the truck one night down a lonely stretch of road and I said to God, "God, I am sick and tired of sitting on the bench damnit! Play me or lose me!" Now I know why I was sitting on that bench going through nine kinds of hell and abuse from the evil and greedy and the corrupt of this world. God was waiting for the internet and I was learning. One aunt wanted me to be a teacher. Another wanted me to write. One uncle thought I was a warrior. One uncle taught me to fish. My grandmother was a tough cookie who didn't back down. I'm all of those and none. And all my mother wanted was for me to be me. Thanks to my cousin Dan, I'm a truck driver. He taught me how not to tip a truck over. And I'll fight for the afflicted. And I'll wage war on the comfortable. And I'll write for you. And hopefully I'll reel you in and teach you what it's like to not be you, to be less than you, to have less than you. To live from paycheck to paycheck. To not have benefits and to have false teeth because of it. To not be rich or live in a nice house in the suburbs and yet still, still be able to love what the founding fathers wanted for this country and for the world.

Had Saddam Hussein weighed 600 pounds, maybe President Bush could've gotten the liberal mainsteam media support he wanted for the war in Iraq. If you're a mercilous, violent, blood-thirsty, genocidal dictator, you can be forgiven. But if you're "obese," you can't. Because you cost the state.

[Update 4/7/2005: Tell me something I don't know -- A unit of the Federal Reserve says it has completed a study showing "It helps to be tall, slender and attractive." People with those characteristics were more likely to earn more money and get better jobs. Writes the AP: "Jean Seawright, a human resources consultant from Winter Park, Fla., said the analysis backs up what she sees in the workplace. ... 'It hurts employment in the long-run because there are talented people out there who are not tall, blond, slender and attractive,' Seawright said."]

[Update 4/8/2005: The Bell Curve Strikes Again -- Maybe I was a little too ready to slam liberals as being the only ones who discriminate against large people or who enjoy making light of the larger than "average." Maybe I just assumed that just because large conservatives Rush Limbaugh and William Bennett don't mind being in the public eye or because it was traditionally liberal newspapers and wire services that were yelling "Boo!" to the public in their efforts to demonize the "obese" and place fiscal woes on their shoulders. It apparently is a cultural phenomenon that crosses all political affiliations, or at least the newsletter of the Wall Street Journal's "Best of the Web Today" in James Taranto's report on "The Case of the Corpulent Cop." There's another instance where the size, age and sex of a cop might have been a factor, but Mr. Taranto didn't reference that in his dig at the "obese." When the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control develop a Color-Mass Index and a Sexual-Preference Mass Index to tell me what color I should strive for or if I should lean more toward sheep instead of women, I'll follow norms and averages he believes should be followed. Until then, I'll be who I am tall, blonde, toothless, poor, damn good looking and larger than life. Sorry Mr. Taranto, you can strive for average if you wish but the mold in which you seek to place large people like me won't fit. We tend to break the mold, and it's something other than size and weight that does it. And despite what you may have heard, the conservative label doesn't require one to be a bigot.]

[Update 4/8/2005: Marketing 101 -- Find a minor problem, magnify the problem in the eyes of the customer even if it means demonizing a class of people, sell a costly solution, try to sleep nights counting your loot. From the New York Times: "From pharmaceutical giants to tiny start-ups, the industry is spending billions of dollars developing obesity drugs. An estimated 200 possibilities are now in the research pipeline or under test among patients at dozens of clinics like L-Marc, according to MedMarket Diligence, a health care research firm. ... 'Everybody is just foaming at the mouth to make money' from obesity drugs, said Dr. Donna Ryan, an obesity researcher affiliated with Louisiana State University, which has received millions of dollars in government and drug-industry grants. Industry forecasters say that an effective weight-loss drug could have annual sales far surpassing the current best-selling drug, the cholesterol treatment Lipitor, which reached $12 billion last year, especially now that Medicare says it will pay for "effective" obesity treatments.]

[Update 4/11/2005: The Associated Press quotes Scott Krugman, spokesman for the National Retail Foundation in Washington, D.C., as questioning the validity of the Rice University study that indicates retail clerks tend to be rude to shoppers who happen to be large. "He doesn't think the study clarifies whether the store employees were actually discriminating against the obese shoppers or whether they were just rude across the board," the AP report says. "Krugman said the women carrying drinks might have been treated poorly because the store may have forbid food or beverages." It's probably about time someone put Mr. Krugman in a fat suit and sent him into a few stores.]

[Update 5/1/2005: Wow. Reporters are now writing that it's been known all along that "obesity" afflicts mostly the poor. "It's paradoxical, but for years doctors have known that the people most likely to be overweight have the lowest incomes. That's because fresh produce and other healthy fare are more expensive and less accessible in low-income neighborhoods than are fast food and other high-fat options," reported AP Medical Writer Lauran Neergaard. If doctors have known this for years, why hasn't your educated, elite journalist reported it? I guess the poor can't afford Slimfast and Thigh Masters.]

[Update 8/4/2011: A new study finds healthy eating is a privilege of the rich and that the poor may not have access to stores that offer fresh fruits and vegetables. Big surprise? Nope. Not to anyone who read this blog post.]

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Blog posts of the Day:

1. Late Nite Whale(?) blogging
2. Additional Whaleblogging

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Porn spam Easter egg of the day:

Haec trutina errat - There is something wrong with this scale