Thoughts from Lileks on the new Puritans:
Let’s get one thing clear: when the TV talk-show people lavish praise on the idea, it has nothing to do with some abstract notion of the costs of obesity. They just don’t like fat people. Fat people, at best, are a rebuke their own finicky vanity – I look good, why can’t you? – and at the worst, aesthetically unpleasant. If they all went away, the trim pert types woudl miss them after a while, and realize that people no longer came pre-packaged in a style that made them easy to dismiss.
A thin woman with three children by three men who can’t get by is an object of concern. A fat women with two kids who can’t get by is a toad, and probably a smoker.
A culture that redefines food choices as moral issues will demonize the people who don’t share the tastes of the priest class. A culture that elevates eating to some holistic act of ethical self-definition – localvore, low-carbon-impact food, fair trade, artisanal cheese – will find the casual carefree choices of the less-enlightened as an affront to their belief system. Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism.
I do have to agree that sugar is bad for you. But people have a right to eat things that are bad for them. Until the rest of us are forced to pay for their health care, of course…
The new Puritans are the same as the old Puritans — ‘cept Jesus is no longer Lord and Savior, merely Community Organizer in Chief, if he must be brought into the conversation at all. Instead of busting into homes and smashing allegedly pagan Christmas trees, they’re busting into 7-11 and smashing Thirsty-Two ouncers and 100W light bulbs…
That is the argument they make anyway, that we are forced to pay for their health care. It just happens to be that their solution is worse.
I was a clean cut kid, but grew my hair long as a experiment. It was absolutely amazing to me how some (not all) treated me differently. I was still the same person inside. Being fat is much worse. You can’t fix it with a barber. I had a well meaning friend tell me how well I dressed and my good posture compared to other fat people. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he needed to be a bit more compassionate for those others because it’s a burden you always carry with you. It wears you down. I certainly have been.
Then to have others plan to fix ya! It’s not just arrogance. Wars have been fought for less. Remember how much trouble that ‘short people’ song gave the band. That’s why they didn’t come out with a ‘fat people’ version (which is how I sing the song when I’m alone!) You don’t want a herd of fat people after ya.
Fortunately for the food cops, they have no sense of shame or they wouldn’t have become food cops in the first place.
They have no sense of shame. Period. Shame is not PC. Shame served a useful purpose, but not for the left. There should be limits, but zero is not the right limit.
The part that’s most amusing is that the exact same people will tell you Copper River Salmon is the best type. Because of all the fat the salmon accumulates to make it up a particularly rugged river.
So fast-fried cod – bad.
Butter-soaked grilled CRS – good.
“But I’m eating in a fine-dining establishment, that makes it healthy.” Sigh.
There is another drawback of soda drinks, and it applies to both sugared and sugar free on account of the phosphoric acid content.
Silver-mercury amalgam dental fillings only last so long. Mine are not very deep, but I have them on all the bite surfaces of my molars. In modern dental practice they might have used sealants, but back in the day, amalgam fillings were the treatment for the kind of “developmental cavities” I had in the grooves of my teeth.
My dentist one day chirped, “All your fillings need to be replaced!” I came home and told my wife, “Guess what, the dentist wants to replace all my fillings, but it is all covered by insurance, and if I can get another 30-35 years out of the new ones, that will take me until I am really old.”
My lawfully wedded spousal person scolded me, “Paul you are doing no such thing. You are going to MY dentist for a second opinion.”
So I scheduled an appointment and explained what this was all about, and this second dentist agreed to see me. So I am sitting in the chair, and this dentist along with yet another dentist he called into the exam room, are taking turns peering into my mouth with those high-power binocular viewers they use, looking at every tooth from every angle and poking up my fillings with that sharp thing they call an “explorer.”
“Well, you are pretty much at end-of-life on those fillings, but since you don’t drink soda, I would just leave them in there and replace them one at a time over the course of dental visits when they fail.”
So how did he know I didn’t drink soda? I will drink a phosphorated soda drink if it is served to me, but I don’t drink it on a daily basis. I guess those dentist-nannies are right, and soda drinks do indeed put serious mileage on your teeth.
For men, it’s called manorexia.
Wasn’t he played by Mike Connors? 🙂
Dunno, Mike Connors as “Mannix” the private-eye looked like he ate OK. I think he got clonked on the head a lot by the bad guys, and I wouldn’t be suprised if he were in a nursing home in his old age as a result of all of the head trauma.
I’m pretty sure Manorexia was played by Simon MacCorkindale.
I was always a big guy, but not obese. Well, not until they moved the line in the late 70’s to start with. As with many of us, I got heavier as I got older. But even at 320lbs, I was very active. I was the guy everybody called if they needed help moving something.
I stayed at that weight for 6 or 7 years.
I kept right on working too, never missed a beat. The last week of March 1992, I carried a 80lb pump, on my back with straps, up a 25′ ladder, so I could install it in a cooling water enclosure at a co-gen where I was an I & C Tech / Operator. I put the busted one on my back, with the same straps and climbed back down, job done, no biggie, just another day in the life.
By the 3rd week of April, I was down with what we thought was the flu, except it just would not go away. Months later, still flu like, I was informed that I had sarcoidosis, (a misdiagnosis BTW) and I then took off on years of being on and off steroids as a treatment.
160 pounds later (480 lbs), I was still sick, way miserable and went days at a time without leaving the house. After two bouts of getting trapped at the very back of the grocery store, I started using the electric cart, and about that time, a handicap placard. And THAT’S when I noticed a face-to-face shift in my life.
I had people who didn’t know me, never seen me before in most instances and completely without any reason, tell me if I wasn’t SSSSOOO fat, I’d be able to walk and park like (three grown adults said this) park like ‘regular people’. I was shocked the first time, and that jerk got away scott free. Anyone with the lunacy to come at me after that, and too this day, gets an ear full!
Why people think that they have the right to walk up to someone they don’t know and say these kinds of things, is primarily driven, IMO, by the societal attitude that anyone overweight is useless, hopeless and therefore HAS to listen to the group ‘opinion’.
I wonder how many of them walk up to African-Americans at the Job Service and say things like, “…if you’d quit tap dancing and eating fried chicken and watermelon, you could get a job like ‘regular people’ too!”
I wanna be there when it happens.
Al – Different type of fat. High in omega-3s (all sorts of proven benefits) for the salmon, huge amounts of severely altered trans-fats for the cod.