Ah, the Glories of an Overly Large Gut

From Ezra Klein who basically reflects a major topic of discussion around Blogto - er, wait, I don't have a dime to pay Skippy - er.. - Blogosphere today:

Watching David Brooks and John Tierney both race to write the same column extolling the virtues of obesity and mocking liberals for denying themselves cheeseburgers was pretty funny. Did no one warn David that Tierney got there first? Does David not even read his conservative competitor? Seems that the Times token righties need to coordinate a bit better.

The FDA, as usual, did Americans no favor in the last 10 days with their multiple personality disorder-branded 12 - count them - 12 new food pyramids and their schizophrenic response to whether obesity is a good thing or a bad thing.

And Brooks and Tierney simply prove (yet again that they are not just asses but fat asses at that.

This is a topic that hits a little close to home because, for the past few weeks, for probably the first time in my life ongoing, I'm just not hungry. Never hungry. So I simply don't eat. Eventually, my not eating is going to catch up with me and bite me somewhere tender, but for right now, I'm just aghast at food commercials (if one pizza is good then 7 pizzas are heaven and burgers large enough to choke Rush Limbaugh).

We really are a country of gluttony. I think it's beyond the reasoning of most Americans what hunger really means. For many (although certainly not all Americans), hunger means the 7,000 calories they had that day - most empty calories - just didn't do it. Hunger is a concept here (except for the very poor).

Last night, I happened to catch a "fashion show" done by some surgeon who performs gastric stapling. Heh. And the women who were in the show were about as vapid as you can imagine. A twenty-two-year-old who was just "tired" of dieting so she had this procedure done (wow, I can understand - I mean, she's twenty-two. One woman cried because she woke up and realized that McDonald's was introducing some new sandwich and she wouldn't be able to eat it (wiping tear from my eye).

We're a country that eats our own weight in food in a week and then decides that a pill or some surgery will make it all go away. I read recently that people were asking their doctors for Lipitor (a statin drug used to lower cholesterol) "so they can eat cheeseburgers, chili dogs, and ice cream with inpunity".

Bill Maher used to joke that it was America's gluttony that helped explain "why they hate us." I'm starting to think maybe it's not so much of a funny.