Posted on 05/31/2004 2:51:21 PM PDT by Pokey78
Just for a change in the old columnar diet, I thought I'd weigh in on Britain's obesity epidemic. But, on closer inspection, the war on blubber seems to be the war on terror by other means. In the Guardian, for example, Polly Toynbee had no hesitation in deciding on the root cause: "America has by far the most unequal society and by far the fattest," she wrote. "Britain and Australia come next. Europe is better and the Scandinavian countries best of all. No doubt there are also social policy reasons for this: the best social democracies pick up family problems earliest... But the narrower the status and income gap between high and low, the narrower the waistbands."
Plenty to chew on there. Just for the record, the fattest people in the world aren't the Americans but our Commonwealth cousins in the Pacific - the hearty trenchermen of Nauru lolling atop their island of guano deposits. Still, there are 300 million Americans and a mere 10,000 Nauruans, and if you stuck every single one in a New Jersey mall no one would even notice. So let that go.
Also, when it comes to Ms Toynbee's "income gap", the United States is 41st in the world, the United Kingdom 63rd and Australia 74th. But OK, by Fleet Street standards of pundit accuracy, that's close enough. Oh, and the Greeks have less income inequality than the British, but are much fatter. And the country with the highest obesity mortality rate in the world is apparently Denmark. Don't ask me why. I saw a report at the weekend detailing the remarkable rise in Danish breast size over the past two decades, so maybe it's sweaty Danish fat guys keeling over at the sight of all that fabulous Jutland cleavage.
But I digress. When Polly says America, Britain and Australia are the fattest countries in the world, she's making a broader point - that the coalition of the willing is also the coalition of the swilling; that there are terrible aesthetic consequences for any nation that heeds the siren song of America ("Would you like fries with that?").
This has been a barely disguised subtext of the new war ever since 9/11. In February 2002, Salman Rushdie reported back to New York Times readers his experience of metropolitan dinner parties. "In the non-American west, the main objection seems to be to American people. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners' diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted. American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centredness: these are the crucial issues."
When the press warns that Britain is becoming a nation of obese children, who does that sound like? In America, you can be an obese child at 45. In Paris a couple of years ago, my French dinner companions harangued me at length about how they could no longer bear to walk down American Main Streets, filled as they are with 300lb middle-aged toddlers waddling along the sidewalk in Xtra-large Disney T-shirts and slurping super-sized sodas from plastic bottles with giant nipples. "It is a culture of arrested development," one disdainful Parisian sniffed wearily, "of perpetual childhood."
Naturally, when such a culture sallies forth into the world, it will be crass and blundering - see Sir Max Hastings, for most of the past year, on what hopelessly vulgar imperialists the Yanks make. Indeed, when Europeans gleefully contemplate America's imminent "imperial overstretch", the very phrase takes on awesome metaphorical power, conjuring a pair of polyester check pants straining at the seams across some huge global butt.
Thus, in January the municipality of Carquefou in north-western France held a competition. The town's schoolchildren were asked to illustrate what America meant to them. The older pupils turned in pictures of an enslaved Statue of Liberty being run over by Uncle Sam on a motorcycle (liberty, or at least the statue thereof, being a gift to America from France) or of three hands - Stalin's fist, the Hitler salute, and Bush's fist clutching a cross: the axis of evil as seen from the Continent. Yawn.
But even more weirdly obsessive were the entries of the younger children. For them it was all about the evils of Coke and McDonald's. Corpulent American moppets were pictured devouring giant cheeseburgers and sipping giant colas over explanatory slogans like "Obesité assuré". To French schoolchildren, Americans are a race apart - strange, misshapen monsters staggering from across the ocean to devour anything in their path. As the French student advances toward graduation, he comes to understand that the condition of the American behemoth approximates that of the dinosaurs of old: huge bodies, tiny brains, doomed to extinction. After which, the natural leaders of the world will resume their rightful role.
That's why Michael Moore makes such a perfect performing seal for the European intellectual class: the vast bulk of his credibility derives from his vast bulk; to the sophisticates at Cannes, he's their very own Uncle Tom who growed like Topsy. As to Polly Toynbee's economic arguments, I don't buy that. The EU will have collapsed under the weight of its social programmes long before America collapses under the weight of its weight. VS Naipaul was closer to the mark in his book A Turn in the South, marveling at how Americans had "turned fulfilment and the glory of abundance to personal fat. A kind of suicide, it might have seemed; but I also began to wonder," he wrote, "whether for these descendants of frontier people and pinelanders there wasn't, in their fatness, some simple element of self-assertion."
British obesity seems, to these eyes, a sadder affair. But you can see why it bothers the nation's increasingly unrepresentative attenuated elite as they nibble their curly endives in Islington and Hampstead. How can you argue that Britons feel more and more European when they look more and more Floridian? One day the bony-butted Dutchmen and Swedes will notice; one day the French school competition will be won by some drawing of corpulent West Midland tykes gorging on Cheesy Wotsits. That's what's at stake. If Polly Toynbee and the nannytollahs can't fix things now, the bottom will drop out, literally, of Britain's European future.
Steyn inspires me to continue the Atkins regime.
Could you add me to your Steyn pinglist, please?
A whale of a ping
Good job beating the quidasaurus to the punch!
I'm convinced Steyn can write on and make complete sense out of anything.
Anything!
Indeed, when Europeans gleefully contemplate America's imminent "imperial overstretch", the very phrase takes on awesome metaphorical power, conjuring a pair of polyester check pants straining at the seams across some huge global butt.
Oh lord is he good!
Steyn bump!
quidasaurus . . . ROTFL!!
Of course, I was weaned far too early.
Sure!
Ping
quidasaurus . . .Great label. Accurate, too.
I know of no other writer who could so effectively write of the politicization of obesity.
Mark, give the WH a call; they need you.
Thanks, Pokey.
The French may be annoying, but they have made a correct observation here. It's irritates me to no end to see the way people feel free to dress and act in public in these times
Ms. Toynbee's statement is so devoid of intellect that it could only have been made by someone who attended college.
>That's why Michael Moore makes such a perfect performing >seal for the European intellectual class: the vast bulk of >his credibility derives from his vast bulk; to the >sophisticates at Cannes, he's their very own Uncle Tom who >growed like Topsy
Can't say this enough, I LOVE MARK STEYN!!!
I would be so reassured if I knew that Mark Steyn was in some way helping the re-election campaign. He is a virtuoso of the language.
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