Fat bastards
Today’s Americans have as much lard between their ears as on their flabby butts

By Jaime O'Neill

America, you're really starting to creep me out—big time. Make that huge time. Everywhere you congregate, I’m overwhelmed by how overwhelming you’ve become. Fat was once considered funny: from Fatty Arbuckle to Oliver Hardy to Jackie Gleason to Fat Albert, we laughed at the idea of people with enhanced poundage. Some even found humor in the frenzied, repulsive and ultimately pathetic Chris Farley.

But fat’s not funny anymore, not given the sheer number of fat people thundering through America’s malls and markets. As Alfred Hitchcock understood, even things that are benign in small numbers become creepy en masse. Little birdies are cute—even sweet—but when the flock blots out the sun, it’s creepy.

And that’s how it’s become with fat people. You’re everywhere these days, people of a size once found only in tents where yokels paid a quarter to gawk at them. You’re not just fat; you’re huge, ponderous, beyond jumbo, a vast and undulating formidability of flesh, an avalanche of avoirdupois, a devolution of the species back to a future of protoplasmic balloon creatures.

You’re becoming a living metaphor for the way the United States is viewed by much of the rest of the planet: a rapacious, gluttonous, insatiable nation of swine, the Pig People of North America, the fat neighbors who are fouling the whole neighborhood, consuming everything in sight, and strewing waste in your wake. According to figures from the U.S. Department of Energy, each person in the United States consumes twice as much energy as Germans, 12 times that of Colombians, and almost 30 times the consumption of India’s citizens. For each American’s consumption, 127 Haitians or 395 Ethiopians could consume away.

The United States leads the world, by far, in carbon-dioxide emissions and in water and oil consumption. We have the largest houses in the world. Each year, the average American generates 189 pounds of food waste, 183 pounds of plastic trash, 570 pounds of paper trash and 86 pounds of glass trash.

And we’re the most obese nation in the world. Rates of obesity have doubled during the time George W. Bush has been president. I’m not making that up. Check the stats put out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Just visit any county fair throughout the land. Obesity in adults has increased by 60 percent in the past 20 years and has tripled in children over the past 30 years. The kids at those county fairs are often porkier than the comparatively sleek pigs in the FFA stalls.

Lots of those obese people deal with it by purchasing electric carts to haul themselves around in. You’d think when you’d gotten too damn fat to walk, that fact might be a wake-up call, a message from God or just an indication that something is a little out of whack in the old lifestyle department, but the message lots of Americans take from the confabulation of flab is that it’s time to motorize the motion.

In the not-so-long run, that combination of inactivity, sugar and super-sized portions of greasy, salt-filled foods will kill us, but we might as well ride easy on the way to that early grave. Obesity-related deaths now have climbed to more than 300,000 a year—second only to deaths from tobacco-related diseases.

Seeing those stats in the full and bounteous flesh, out in public, strolling in herds and swelling the size of crowds is, as I say, beginning to creep me out. Contemporary America begins to look more and more like that old movie, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which aliens take over the bodies of earthlings, exact replicas of the people whose identities they assume, but minus feelings and emotions. In Body Snatcher: 2007, however, the aliens have snatched the bodies of normal Americans and made them unable to wedge themselves into most public seating or, if able to sit, completely unable to extract their bloated butts from those no-longer-adequately-sized seats once their full weight has spread and settled.

Fat, dumb and ugly is not the image most Americans have of themselves—or their nation—but until or unless we shape up, that’s pretty much the reality.

And shaping up won’t simply be a matter of signing on for weight training or signing off from all that fast-food super-sizing and high-in-sugar-and-carbs convenience food. We’re going to have to get a whole lot less lazy and actually look at what is being done to us. That means taking the time to get better informed, not only about what we’re shoving into our faces, but also about what is being shoved into the minds of our children and down our throats by our politicians, most of whom long since ceased working for us and turned their energies over to serving their corporate masters.

We’re going to have to become Americans again: people who demand the kind of pay that allows us to harvest our own crops and work in our own factories. Shaping up means losing the mental flab that has us tuned in like automatons to American Idol, the latest adventures of Lindsay Lohan and the bimbo brigade, or any of those other Romanesque circuses that make us slack-jawed consumers of whatever swill the media moguls pump into our brains.

The fat on our bodies is simply the external manifestation of the fat that infects the national spirit—the corruption of our most sacred institutions, the incompetence of our public servants, the erosion of our civil liberties and the apathy that weighs us all down like a double Whopper with cheese.

Fat, dumb and ugly: We’re fat because we’re either too dumb or too lazy to either watch what we put in our mouths or take the trouble to inform ourselves of the high-fructose corn syrup added to nearly everything marketed as “convenience” food. As a result, we grow increasingly ugly, allowing our nation to be redefined by the corporations rather than own our politicians. We’ve grown so bovine in mind and body that we may be getting the representation we deserve, especially since a majority of us don’t even bother to vote, and an even bigger majority exercise as little effort informing themselves about who and what we’re voting for as we do about the food we’re stuffing in our mouths.

Our heritage requires of us, as citizens, that we be more than a nation of overstuffed swine wallowing in the mud of our laziness and indifference. We must reclaim our bodies and our minds from those who’ve snatched them from us. If we can regain our bodies and our minds, maybe we can regain our country, too.


Link to Article

Why doesn't he say what he really thinks.....

This article makes me sick. I suppose this idoit thinks this type of article is going to shape up America. Makes me wanna go out and run laps, lemme tell you.....

Everyone is entitled to their opinion. He must be a believer in tough love.

Swine, huh?? Totally unnecessary.

Notice that he gets the underpinnings right: sugar and carbs. I doubt he thinks this screed will motivate anyone, but parts of it are dead-on. We're a society that exists on mental and physical sugar in lots of ways. I don't think we are in as dark a place as he thinks, but lots of it is undoubtedly true.

I think he scored a few touche's. I was just listening to something on NPR how global warming and obesity are linked. I kind of scoffed at first, but see they're actually on target.

While this article seems a little over the edge, he does make some good points. I have noticed myself that people I see when I'm out are much, much larger than when I was younger.

I used to think that Kate Smith and Edith Bunker were fat! Now when I see photos of them, I realize that they weren't all that big in comparison with most people today.

I'm old enough to remember when every family had a vegetable garden. You didn't buy snack foods--my sisters used to make fudge or potato chips on Saturday night as a family treat. The only time we had soda in the house was for a special occasion or if someone was ill.

It really bothers me to go out to eat and see toddlers drinking coke with their meals. Kids nowdays won't even touch water!

So, I think this man has made some very important observations. We need to stop and look at where this world is going. It is our responsiblilty to change things. As Al Gore says, if each of us would just change our light bulbs to compact flourescent we could impact global warning Likewise, if we would stop buying processed foods, we would all be slimmer.

Instead of looking at this type of writer as kooks, we should stop and see exactly what they are trying to tell us.

I'm amazed at the negative comments about this article. Sure, the truth hurts. And it's always easier to shoot the messengers who don't dress it up and make it somebody else's fault. He doesn't pull any punches, it's true.

But IMHO, unpalatable as the points he makes might be, he's right.
..and George Bush ought to be ashamed of himself .

Stuart

Honestly, I was just impressed he didn't blame it on fat and would have wasted all that satirical repose on calling for us to adopt the same lame low-fat dogma that hasn't worked for so very long. So, in all, I have to say that I didn't disagree with this article. I would say that it certainly wasn't written to "comfort" us but it was definitely on point with the carbs, sugars, and processed foods components of the article!

I love someone that doesn't pull any punches, and this guy definitely doesn't. Thanks for posting this, Regina.

Yes we all need to take responsibility for our choices, but insulting and attacking people in that way often does more harm than good, IMO.

.

A lot of people make the mistake of listening to their doctor. I agree it's a mistake, but I don't think it's appropriate to call someone dumb or lazy for it. Many people still respect the education the doctor is "supposed" to have.

And personally, I'm neither dumb nor lazy, and I'm following a low carb diet. Yet, I'm still fat. Obviously there's some other problem I'm missing. I don't think that makes me dumb or lazy. It can be very elusive.

Actually, this is rather reminiscent of another article that was in the war zone. A woman wrote it. That women who dieted were vain, shallow, etc...

I'm surprised there wasn't more support for the article. After all, the writer is correct. We Americans are the world's biggest consumers of energy and calories. We are fat and lazy. We want easy fixes. We don't want to push away from the table. We don't want to walk anywhere. Vacations mean sitting on the beach, not swimming in the ocean.

*wiping away a tear* i think i'm going to engrave the author's name on the handle of the squeeky hammer of doom™.