Excused Lame

On Saturday, I post about Tony Lewis’s last column and today Jay Nordlinger and James Taranto make much the same points! Advantage: Excused Lame! Read it here first!

Speaking of arteriosclerosis, retired Rear Admiral Eugene Carroll of the Center for Defense Information says that the United States is acting like a schoolyard bully. The only excuse for warmed-over Reagan-era statements like these are if they’re being phoned in from some planet 20 light years away. He was speaking to the Tacoma PJH, or People for Peace, Justice and Healing, which, from the “clucks of approval from the audience and the standing and enthusiatic applause at the end,” seem to have their minds locked in amber as well.

Michael Kelly made the same point this summer, more amusingly and in aesthetic terms, but the op-ed in Saturday’s Washington Post presents a bleak picture of America. We’re too fat.

Obesity is epidemic, as Surgeon General David Satcher noted this week. More than 120 million Americans are classified as either overweight or obese. Obese people are twice as likely as those of normal weight to develop Type 2 diabetes, 50 percent more likely to develop heart disease and 86 percent more likely to get colon cancer. Last year obesity cost the nation $92 billion, according to federal figures.Since 1970 the percentage of the U.S. population that is obese has increased by 60 percent. At that rate, we risk wiping out the tremendous gains made in the past 25 years against cancer and heart disease by the middle of the 21st century.

And it’s not your fault!

[T]he larger problem lies with the environment. We are surrounded by tasty, cheap, high-fat food, while fruits and vegetables are comparatively more expensive and less readily available. Our suburbs are built without sidewalks, our kids buy candy and soda in the hallways at school, and our sense of portion size is so out of control that we think a 600-calorie cinnamon bun (about a quarter of the total calories the average man needs per day) is a snack. We could not have designed an environment more conducive to getting fat.

Cinnamon bun…mmmmm! I’m hungry already.

Maybe some passionate, idealistic visionary will create a fast-food chain based on tasty, cheap, low-fat fruits and vegetables. I don’t think it would last a week. Everybody likes fat. “97% fat-free” equals “97% taste-free” in my book. I once read that a century ago, our forefathers lived on a diet of “clearly recognizable body parts cooked in fat.” They also worked their butts off on farms, in mines, and in factories. The only way I work my butt is pulling it off a chair. Furthermore, cheap low-fat fruits and vegetables don’t have any taste at all. We can grow apples the size of a softball and strawberries three inches across, but they have no flavor.

Still, the situation is disgraceful. Something must be done. $92 billion dollars! In one year! No one warned me about the dangers of fat until I became hopelessly addicted. I’ll bet there are some documents locked away in some industry file drawer detailing how we were all duped into arteriosclerosis, colon cancer, and diabetes. Does someone know a trial lawyer? Of course, the government needs to recover its costs too…

Anthony Lewis is retiring after 32 years as a columnist for the New York Times. Of course, no one has read anything he’s written in the last ten years. The passion which he brought to his column is matched only by how often he’s been wrong: wrong about the communist takover of Cambodia, wrong about the Soviets, wrong about the Palestinians. In his last column he’s wrong again, warning about the dangers of religious fundamentalism in this country. If it was dying before, religious fundamentalism as a political force in this country was killed off by September 11th. Jerry Falwell proved to everyone what kind of a fool he really is and Pat Robertson has resigned from a moribund Christian Coalition.

Which is a good thing. Religion which aligns itself with secular power is religion which will soon be derided and ignored. The First Amendment’s prohibition of an established religion and freedom of religious practice has given us a religously-active citizenry as well as an almost complete lack of anti-clericalism. Now if only we can get “The Reverend” Jesse Jackson and “The Reverend” Al Sharpton out of politics…

Winona Ryder’s lawyer says her arrest was a “misunderstanding.” Yes, she probably thought that since she was a celebrity, the items would be “complimentary,” part of the Celebrity Bill of Rights (“The right to VIP and V-VIP rooms shall not be abridged… Celebrities shall enjoy the right to fawning stories in People magazine…”). Still, my eye was attracted to a sentence late in the story:

Ryder…has maintained a grueling film schedule she has blamed for causing occasional mental breakdowns.

Sorry, the life of a celebrity isn’t “grueling.” Emergency room doctors and interns have grueling schedules. Single mothers with two jobs have grueling schedules. Self-employed businessmen and entrepreneurs have grueling schedules. Half-educated celebrity ditzes who are surrounded by personal assistants, syncophantic toadies, and publicists and lawyers to lie on their behalf don’t have “grueling” lives.

Does doing this blog mean I have to start reading the New York Times again? Yecch, it’ll be like doing an autopsy on a “floater”…

Another activator to beginning this was Cindy Adams’s column in the New York Post, where our revered former President offered a breathlessly admiring nation this insight:

There wasn’t a sicker person than I on September 11. I was on the telephone when it happened. The instant that second plane hit, I said to the person with whom I was speaking, ‘Bin Laden did this.’ I knew immediately. I know what this network can do.

Mr. President, if you took even one picosecond to look outside your own self-referential sphere, you would realize that there were sicker people than you on September 11th. The ones who listened to phone calls and messages from their loved ones trapped in the WTC or on the doomed airliners. The ones who watched in horror as the towers crumbled and those who were dear to them were not simply killed but so thoroughly pulverized that those who mourned them could not even have the comfort of a funeral. The ones who were agonized with uncertainty over the fate of their family members.

No, Mr. President, if you “knew…what this network can do” and did as little as you did to stop them, then you failed this country in the most fundamental way you could as a Chief Magistrate. The oath you twice swore bade you “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States,” established to “provide for the common defense.”

You preen yourself on America’s prosperity during the years of your presidency. As though the myriad daily transactions of 270 million people were yours to control! You were the Commander in Chief. You had a monopoly of power in how to protect this nation. If you were aware of the dangers to it and could have prevented them, why didn’t you do so?

And no, Mr. President, I don’t want to know about the person with whom you were speaking.

I really have no business doing this. With a full-time job and fur children to take care of otherwise, little of my time is my own to command, I am not a professional writer, nor do I immerse myself in the sea of information, news, and popular culture which might make this more interesting. But a note by Bjorn Staerk impelled me to dip my toe in the water.

Perhaps it’s some long-repressed creative urge, or latent exhibitionism. No doubt there will be few readers at first and not many more later. I can never hope to the same level of quantity or quality as the Mozart of the weblog, but as I find my voice and my wits these posts may someday repay the reading.