Why do so many fat people go to Disney World
haunches lapping over the little seats
in the Grand Prix or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride?
When I was growing up, we never heard the word "obese." The Fat Nazis weren't yet around to shake their bony fingers at the trembling tummies of overweight Americans, nor had it become a widespread (sic) health problem, though we had it in our family.
From about age 40, our father gained weight steadily, and by the time he turned 50, whenever he'd get together with his three best friends, we'd have 1,000 pounds of manhood shaking our living rooms, drinking, smoking, singing and enjoying — it seemed to us children, as they offered us cherries from their manhattans — a perfectly marvelous life.
Even our only brush with celebrity involved oversized men, as Dad occasionally played handball with heavyweight boxer Two Ton Tony Galento (1910-1979), a Babe Ruthian character who once ate, on a bet, 52 hot dogs before a match (he won both the bet and the match). I'd watch these men in awe, as they slammed into each other like playful mammoths in Marine Park, near our home in Flatbush.
We thought of these men and women as "heavy," and it wasn't a pejorative term. Maybe the difference is that today this weightiness has slipped down to the young — 32 percent of Florida children are obese or overweight; even the national rate, 22 percent, is far too high. Apparently, these kids don't play stickball anymore.
We know the fat genie is an unfair son of a bitch, so some people can gobble fudge-filled marshmallows without gaining an ounce, while others drive past a McDonald's and lay on two pounds. Our mother wasn't thin, but for some reason our doctor thought she should put on some weight, and suggested a milkshake a day. Helpfully, our father learned how to make them in order to deliver Mom's daily chocolate fix, with the result that he, my two sisters and I gained a fair amount of poundage, while she remained her natural slim self. We children, belonging to the pre-television generation, ran the pounds off, but Dad never did.
Even though there's plenty of evidence that obesity practices class and racial prejudice — the poor are fatter, Asians are slimmer — our government has enough on its plate already. Grownups should be able to consume the poison of their choice; if Golda Meir or Alfred Hitchcock enjoyed large meals — not to mention President William Taft, who'd get stuck in the White House bathtub — let them carry their weight proudly before them, like Winston Churchill marching to war.
On the other hand, spending large amounts of time and emotional energy trying to lose weight seems like a sad life, so it would be good to catch this problem early: as with our drinking laws, the young need disciplined guidance — perhaps particularly young women, as one in five pregnant women are obese. Michelle Obama is heading a task force on childhood obesity that's recommending the right things: expanding safe opportunities for exercise and serving healthy food in the schools — especially in poor neighborhoods where the school meals often are the only ones the children get.
When I was a teenager, my friends and I would work off our calories and testosterone by sneaking back into school to play basketball. During the school day, we'd prop open a window somewhere, crawl in after dark, pull the gym curtains, and play for hours before exiting exhausted, sometimes going out through the girls' locker room, where we'd pretend to faint in front of Janet Carter's locker. This was very healthy, mostly.
Over 64 million adult Americans are obese, and there's not much the government can do about them. One exception may be the police force, which should have weight limits, on the theory that you're much more likely to get shot by a fat cop if you run.
For his Supreme Court nominations, the trim Barack Obama has chosen Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, neither a slender reed to lean on. He seems to agree with Shakespeare's Julius Caesar:
Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o'nights;
Yond' Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
—from Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
—Peter Meinke is the Poet Laureate of St. Petersburg.
This article appears in Jun 17-23, 2010.