January 15, 2003

IT IS NOT news that Americans eat too much and too shabbily and are increasingly fat as a result. Hence the bold, page-one, above-the-fold San Francisco Chronicle story from last Tuesday, reporting that yet another brave and well-meaning surgeon general, Richard Carmona, following in the footsteps of C. Everett Koop (antismoker) and Joycelyn Elders (promasturbator), has launched a public campaign, this one against obesity. Since Carmona serves at the pleasure of G.W. Bush, there of course must be a "security" angle to the campaign, and so the effort to trim American flab will be undertaken mainly because "the military needs healthy recruits."

To provide this higher-quality, better-buffed cannon fodder, Carmona would like to see a "cultural transformation." Doubtless he is not alone in that wish. But he misunderstands – or perhaps I mean he does not at all understand – why we are in our bloated fix in the first place. We do not eat too much because we are weak and immoral, as the puritan truism would have it, though of course most of us are both, in varying degrees. We eat too much because there is too much to eat, and we eat too much junk because junk is what is endlessly advertised on television and displayed in supermarkets.

But even all that is only a partial explanation. We eat too much, finally, because we are empty. Food has always been a great consoler, and to take a walk through America's greasy, neon-lit food courts, filled with pale, chewing faces, like woebegone moons beyond number, is to see a certain fundamental desperation gnawing at people.

For all the stupefying forces at work in modern American life, we the people do retain a dim sense that we have lost control of our country and our destiny. An election-stealing president is now a "wartime" leader, picking fights around the globe. Corporations do not bother to conceal their thievery. And our great pride and hope, technology, has taken a number of Orwellian turns, first bringing a needless acceleration to everyday life – machines, once our servants, are now our cruel masters – and then providing sinister spy tools for such latter-day Savonarolas as John Ashcroft.

It's not pretty, as Ross Perot, our live-action Elmer Fudd, likes to say. No indeed. And scarfing Krispy Kremes isn't going to make it prettier – if anything the opposite. But a few moments of false satiation are better than none at all. Like the surgeon general, I would like to see the fat scraped from the citizenry. But real cultural transformation doesn't result from newspaper-posturing but from historical imperative. And it often doesn't go the way the posturers expect.