Skipping Towards Gomorrah (20 page)

The increasing purity of heroin has made it easier for people who are afraid of needles to snort the drug. (How someone can be afraid of needles but not afraid of
heroin
is beyond me.) But while heroin is cheap and plentiful and pure, and while I live in Seattle, a city where the streets are practically paved with heroin, and while I am at times a restless, alienated individual, easily bored and prone to seeking out distractions and sensations that Bork might consider degraded, I've never been tempted to try heroin. Not once—and not because it hasn't been offered to me. But like most people, I don't want to use heroin for the one simple reason: I'm not an idiot. Unlike pot, heroin is wildly addictive, and it actually kills people. I don't do heroin because heroin is a dangerous drug, and people who use it are trying to kill themselves, and I'm not interested in killing myself. Even if heroin were legal, I wouldn't do it. There's that pesky internal corrective of mine again, kicking in without a nod from Hillary Clinton or Tom Harkin.

What about people who become addicted to drugs? Shouldn't we fight the drug war to protect these people from themselves? That some people have no internal correctives where drugs are concerned is not a good enough reason to deprive (or imprison!) the vast majority of us who do. The argument that we can't legalize drugs because some people are addicts is absurd. Addicts don't have any problem getting their hands on drugs
right now,
drug war or no drug war, big city or rural area, on the street or in prison, in schools or at malls. Furthermore, the some-people-can't-control-themselves argument isn't made about any other substances; people get addicted to caffeine, sugar, computers, booze, food, and sex. Some people are destroyed by these addictions. Cigarettes kill 400,000 people a year; 16,653 people were killed by drunk drivers in 2000, according to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and 25,000 Americans die every year of cirrhosis of the liver; the fatty American diet causes heart disease, which kills 500,000 Americans every year according to the Harvard School of Public Health. I've personally known people, men and women, gay and straight, who couldn't control their sex drives and literally fucked themselves to death. By contrast, marijuana has never killed anyone; no one on earth has ever died of a marijuana overdose. And yet pot is banned and Budweiser, cigarettes, hamburgers, and sex are not.

Addicts, addicts, addicts—I get so sick of hearing about addicts. Tens of millions of Americans use drugs every year, but only a few hundred thousand Americans are addicts. That's a good indication that most people can use drugs—even addictive ones—without becoming addicted. But the only times we hear about drug use is when people who are addicted are being condemned, imprisoned, pitied, or rehabilitated. If the only time food was ever publicly discussed was in connection to some horror story about people eating themselves to death, well, the public image of food and our attitudes towards food “users” would be distorted. Some will insist that the comparison isn't a valid one because we can't live without food. As a species, we can't seem to live without stimulants and euphoria-inducing substances either. Every culture has its mind-blowers, from peyote to beer to wine to khat to pot to sweat lodges to vision-inducing fasts to Harveys Bristol Cream.

For the time being the right-wing scolds can gripe at me for smoking dope, and DARE “educators” can attempt to stuff my kid's head with lies about marijuana at his public school (lies I fully intend to debunk). But they can't stop Americans pursuing happiness (and slothful, restful, pharmacological vacation time), even if it leads us to the head shop.

 

“I
do not believe an America that accepts widespread drug use is going to retain the spirit of optimistic individualism that has been our hallmark. Massive drug use may be acceptable in a more passive society, but it is antithetical to a free nation of self-reliant individuals.” So says Newt Gingrich in his book
To Renew America
.

I hate to end this chapter by picking on poor ol' Newt Gingrich, who always was something of a slow-moving target. Picking on Newt is slothful of me, however, and for that reason I'm going to indulge myself. I spent so much time working on this chapter that I hardly feel as if I committed this particular sin, and that was supposed to be the point of this book.

I love this quote. Drug use, for many of us, induces the very spirit of optimism that Gingrich identifies as our national hallmark. And far from being antithetical to a free nation of self-reliant individuals, the right of one self-reliant individual to put in his pipe and smoke whatever he cares to grow in his garden seems to me the very picture of freedom. If some Americans want to pursue happiness in clouds of marijuana smoke, that should be among their inalienable rights. While Newt Gingrich may not believe that drug use and optimism go together, self-reliant individuals living in a free nation should have an absolute right to make that call for themselves.

—Saint Paul (Phil. 3.18)

—Saint Jerome

 

 

 

 

A
s anyone who watches political chat shows can tell you, a lot of American virtuecrats have weight problems. I'm not the first, you know, terribly, terribly serious writer to point this out. In his groundbreaking work of political scholarship,
Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot,
Al Franken opened America's eyes to the vast waistland (har!) that is Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk-radio host. Robert Bork, William J. Bennett, and Jerry Falwell don't just resemble Limbaugh politically; all four men aren't exactly skin and bones, with Falwell being the most Rubenesque of the bunch. That so many conservative scolds are overweight might explain why we don't hear much from them about the sin of gluttony. Or perhaps the silence of the scolds on this issue has something to do with the fact that Republicans tend to be more obese than Democrats, as do born-again Christians, Southerners, and Bush supporters.

Nevertheless, overindulgence in food and drink was once regarded as a sin on a par with the other deadly sins; gluttony used to be right down there with adultery, divorce, and fornication. Dante condemns the gluttonous to the third circle of hell, where a heavy, cold rain falls on their huge bodies. One Dante translator, John D. Sinclair, points out that Dante puts the gluttonous lower in hell than the lecherous because gluttony “is more simply a yielding of the soul to the flesh without any but a fleshly motive; it is a more entirely beastly sin,” more beastly, in Dante's opinion, than fornication or adultery. Writing in the fourth century, Saint Jerome is even less kind to gluttons, blaming their sin for the fall of man: “[Adam obeyed] his belly and not God, was cast down from paradise into this vale of tears.”

People who ate too much were believed to think too much about food and drink, which left them with too little time for God and salvation. Today, however, we have to look to secular culture to find ringing condemnations of gluttony, where the sin is no longer discussed in terms of spiritual health, but in terms of physical health—and physical attractiveness, which may explain why modern scolds leave the subject alone. Allowing people to become obese, or standing silently by while your flock porks out, may prevent them from becoming the “occasion of sin” (inspiring lust in others) and encourage other virtues scolds value, like chastity and, uh, let me see . . . heart disease?

When it comes to fat, I'm in no position to throw stones at Jerry Falwell or Bill Bennett. I may not be as fat as they are—as of this writing—but I love food just as much as they appear to. For me, a day without bacon is like a day without, well, what compares to bacon? Hands down my favorite food is cake, and my favorite cake is chocolate, and my favorite kind of chocolate cake is the kind of cheap bakery cake that's gritty with sugar and covered in frosting flowers. While I may be slightly underweight for my height, staying slim is a constant battle against my genetic makeup (most of the people in my family are heavy) and my baser impulses (I would eat bacon cake all day long if I let myself). I was fat for a few years as a teenager, so I don't think, “What a pig!” when I look at Falwell. Instead I think, “He is my destiny.” My relationship with food is deeply unhealthy, larded with fear, guilt, self-recrimination, bingeing, penance, and frustrated desires. (Alas, no one has yet to perfect a bacon cake.)

The battle in my head over food never seems to stop—I think about food when I wake up, and I'm still thinking about food when I go to bed at night. In my head, my desire to eat everything in sight plays out as a battle between good and evil, a struggle with distinctly religious overtones. Gluttony is the one sin I would most like to indulge myself in, and yet I'm overwhelmed by feelings of guilt after I eat, say, two pounds of bacon followed by a cheap chocolate cake. When I do something like that—and, yes, I've really, really done that—I think of myself as fallen, as a sinner, as someone who should be punished. When I get my ass back to the gym or on those rare occasions when I walk out of a bakery without buying myself anything or those rarer occasions when I stop eating the bacon before it's all gone, I think of myself as saved, as something of a saint, as someone who deserves a reward. (Maybe a piece of chocolate cake?)

While my own inner struggle with gluttony plays out in quasi-religious language and images, public discussions of gluttony and obesity are now entirely secular. It's not the preachers who get after us about our gluttony, it's the personal trainers and diet gurus—Jenny Craig and Sarah Ferguson, not Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Secular obesity virtuecrats aren't much gentler with gluttons than Saint Paul was two thousand years ago. Fat-assed Americans are ostracized, dismissed as unattractive and unlovable, and humiliated in a thousand little ways every day. Non-fat-assed Americans may have loved John Candy and Chris Farley on television, but who among the narrow-butts would have wanted to sit next to Candy or Farley in coach? Every narrow-butt in the United States of America has made “the face,” what our obese fellow Americans call the look on skinny people's faces when they see someone the size of Chris Farley coming down the aisle. “Please, God,” the face says, “don't let that fat ass sit next to me. . . .”

The hostility fat-assed Americans are subjected to seems especially odd when you consider just how many Americans have hugely fat asses. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the number of obese adults has doubled in the last twenty years; according to the DHHS, 61 percent of all adults in the United States were overweight or obese in 1999 (the last year for which figures are available). The numbers of overweight or obese children has tripled in the same period, to 13 percent of children and 14 percent of adolescents. American adults are obese, American children are obese—our friggin'
pets
are obese. We're in the midst of an obesity epidemic, according to Surgeon General David Satcher, who released a report in early 2002 with this appropriately bloated title, “The Surgeon General's Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity.” Sounding like Bill Bennett discussing adultery, Satcher encouraged Americans to stop thinking of obesity “as strictly a personal matter,” and pointed to the social costs of obesity, from the three hundred thousand deaths per year linked to obesity, to health problems like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, arthritis, and breathing problems. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently announced that more than one in five American adults—47 million people—suffer from metabolic syndrome, “a disorder that includes a beer belly, high blood pressure, poor cholesterol, and high blood sugar.” To hell with winning World War II, if mass were the sole criteria,
we
are the greatest generation.

Unraveling the mystery of fat American asses isn't difficult: Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson—no Calista Flockhart himself—pins the blame on “our modern environment,” while the CDC in Atlanta warns that physical inactivity, “a major contributor to obesity,” is skyrocketing. Perhaps another reason conservatives don't talk about obesity is because they're simply not comfortable with the word
environment
in any context. But our modern environment
is
making us fatter. We drive everywhere and eat while we drive; we work all day sitting on our asses and eat while we work; we sit on asses all night watching television and eat while we watch TV.

At the same time that our lives have become numbingly sedentary, the portions served up by the food and beverage industry have grown to ridiculous proportions. Why are muffins and bagels bigger than our heads? Who decided that movie theaters should serve Coke in drums you could drown a dog in? Just how many places can Domino's hide cheese on their pizzas anyway? Has anyone notified the CDC that Baby Ruth bars are bigger than baseball bats? Speaking of baseball, the Cracker Jack sold at ballparks now comes in breakfast-cereal-size boxes. There are 820 calories in those 7½-ounce boxes of Cracker Jack you can buy at ballparks today, compared to the old 1 ounce, 106-calorie boxes of Cracker Jack.