Blow-Up

If Jonathan Swift traveled to the United States today, he would surely ditch the little guys, the big guys and the horses and just feature Gulliver being squashed flat by enormously fat people.

I suppose I first noticed how fat Americans were getting about a decade ago. Along supermarket aisles, you'd see the odd whale unhappily chugging along on a mini-kart, pulling fat-enhancers off the shelves.

In early October, I drove east to west across America along Interstate 40 — much of the western portion is the old Route 66, famed in song and story — which runs from Asheville, N.C., to Nashville, Tenn.; Little Rock, Ark.; Oklahoma City; Amarillo, Texas; Albuquerque, N.M.; and on through Arizona into California.

Every truck stop, every diner, every mall offered its tumid diorama of human hippos. We're talking every age group here — starting with humpty-dumpty adolescents and ascending through the decades to 50-year olds, stertorous and gray of countenance. My friend Wilbur, who runs a trailer park in South Carolina, told me there's a woman in one of his doublewides who's up around 400 pounds and can't get out the door even if she wants to. She sits and watches TV all day and when she passes, Wilbur will have to get a giant can opener to rip open the side of the trailer to winch out her corpse.

In Eureka, my local town here in Northern California, a couple of years ago, they had to get new scales in the clinics and bigger MRI tubes. The Pentagon could probably make a buck or two for the taxpayer selling torpedo launchers from decommissioned submarines for MRI conversion. It's not quite what the swords-into-plowshares movement had in mind, but that's America for you.

And it is America. I was just in Paris and in the course of a week, Alya and I saw precisely one person — a young woman — who could be classed by a European as very plump. In America, she'd be still dreaming of going to ballet school.

Of course, there's a lobby that says it's all prejudice by the slim crowd, and fat people are perfectly normal — just a bit heftier. I remember picking up a magazine in the lefty book store in Pike Place, Seattle, a few years back called "Fat Dykes and the Women Who Love Them" and it's true, on my observation, that a very fat lesbian will not pine away for lack of slim young baby-dyke admirers of her inviting corpulence.

There's the old tale of the dwarf who married the fat lady in the circus and when the acrobat and the clown took turns peering lewdly through the keyhole of the honeymoon couple's trailer, there was the dwarf dancing up and down on his plump bride, shouting, "Acres and acres of it, and it's all mine!"

In this lobby's tactful thesaurus, "fat" is the unusable f-word, and the last-resort term, "heavy."

But the fat people I saw across America don't seem happy, and aren't accompanied by lustful dwarfs in search of spacious carnal real estate. An 18-year-old young woman waddling along, soda in one hand and a bag of Cheetos in the other, would be happier if she were downsized by 50 percent. The gray-faced diabetics on their go-karts look absolutely wretched.

How did it happen?

Blame the obvious suspects: the fast-food chains and the food industry, whose chemists figure out the precise mixes of sugar and salt that will addict their customers.

Blame the decline of physical education in schools. Blame couches and TV sets. Blame restaurants for serving monster portions. In Seligman, Ariz., I had breakfast in Westside Lilo's Cafe and the huge elk-hunter draped in camo next to me at the counter devoured a breakfast that completely covered a large dinner plate to a height of about 4 inches.

Ten years ago, you could go to a national park and encounter plenty of people hiking in the more remote portions. These days, you'll see no one off the major trails and most of the visitors having a brief amble near the parking lots. The black bears in Yosemite recently voted — we're talking statistical levels of bear break-ins here — the minivan their car of the year to break into because it's what many Americans haul their kids around in, and the vans are full of potato chips and kindred snacks the bears have learned to enjoy.

The Pentagon is getting alarmed. The good news for the Armed Forces here has been the surge in unemployment. Curtis Gilroy, a senior Pentagon official, said recently that a 10 percent increase in the national unemployment rate generally translates into a 4 percent to 6 percent "improvement in high-quality Army enlistments." For the first time since the creation of all-volunteer armed forces in 1973, according to Bill Carr, deputy undersecretary for defense for military personnel policy, "all of the military components, active and reserve, met their number as well as their quality goals."

In other words, the lack of jobs in the civilian sector means no option for many young Americans other than enlistment.

The bad news for the Pentagon is that many would-be enlistees are not "high quality" and have to be turned down because they are too fat.

The Army Times ran an article this week by William McMichael citing the latest government stats on America's fat crisis. One third of the 31 million Americans between 17 and 24 are unqualified for military service because of "physical and medical issues." Gilroy told the Army Times that "the major component of this is obesity. We have an obesity crisis in the country. There's no question about it."

The Pentagon gets its data from the U.S. government's Centers for Disease Control. The CDC says that 22 years ago, 6 percent of all 18-34 year olds were obese. By 2008, that number had swelled to 23 percent — one out of four.

"Kids are just not able to do push-ups," says Gilroy. "And they can't do pull-ups. And they can't run."

Increasingly, young Americans are getting too fat to fight, which is just as well — because the antiwar movement is in terrible shape, probably because yesterday's peace marchers are all too busy on weekends jogging or going to yoga classes.

The Pentagon now issues waivers for at least the semi-obese, no doubt reckoning that Spartan training will slim them down enough to be capable of some sort of useful military activity, though not running up and down mountains in the Hindu Kush.

Michelle and Barack Obama have been making rather sotto voce remarks about America's appalling diet and ensuing weight problems, albeit tactfully since the Fat Vote is in the millions and the Food Industry's political purse is bulky, too.

But how does Michelle's organic vegetable garden weigh against Obama's pick as Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack — a wholly owned property of the food corporations?

Hence we get the tragic comic spectacle of a ferocious political battle over a health "reform" bill, which may make it easier for poor Americans to cover the costs of treatment for Type 2 diabetes and the health consequences of consuming prodigious amounts of high fructose corn syrup. Meanwhile there is no effective political opposition to federal subsidies for the farm policies that have fattened America into macabre absurdity.

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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