Pubdate: Sat, 22 Oct 2005
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Copyright: 2005, The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.globeandmail.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: Heather Mallick

BURGERS, GIN, METH: IT'S OUR TOXIC DRIVE

So many people are fat now that they're getting close to a majority. 
It seems odd that they need defending. But I recoil at the venom shot 
their way. Here's an antidote they may or may not want to take up for 
themselves.

If the recent public tarring and feathering of Kate Moss for her 
personal Bolivian Marching Powder festival is cruel and hypocritical 
- -- and it is -- then surely we should defend the fat. For them, food 
is just another drug.

I had been puzzling for years about people in the Western nations who 
cannot refuse the dubious pleasures and benefits of the heavily 
processed, over-fertilized and pesticided fat-thick food products 
sold to us in TV ads and surrounding us in fast-food joints. Wendy's, 
McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, Subway, Pizza Pizza, Taco Bell -- they 
line the streets.

As I watch TV ads in which fake steam rises from what is intended to 
look like huge chunks of lobster in white sauce but is more likely 
Elmer's Glue over Styrofoam with a vapour machine working overtime, 
my stomach heaves. I block my eyes. Wouldn't eat that if you paid me, 
I say, but I would if I were exhausted from my minimum-wage job, 
facing a hungry family and longing for something quick and tasty. 
Cheap salt and grease is ideal if you don't have time for sanity and 
nutrition and lack the drive to boil and mash a huge waxy turnip and 
sprinkle it with nuts and seeds. Who among us does?

Fat people haul around their Kummerspeck, the German word for "grief 
bacon," or weight gained from emotion-linked overeating. Kummerspeck 
is a byproduct of addiction, no different from the megalomania of the 
cokehead or the violence of the drunk.

Obesity is one of the reasons for the wave of diabetes hitting 
Canadians now. That disease is another reason not to be fat. But fat 
people aren't ashamed because they think passersby are secretly 
blaming them for increasing health-care costs with their lighthearted 
approach to insulin. Rather, they are haunted by self-blame for 
having violated our aesthetic norms. We don't like the look of fat 
people. Neither do they.

But they have the misfortune to be hooked on a drug whose side effect 
comes fast and isn't aesthetically pleasing. Other drugs' side 
effects are less obvious.

Many fine minds, from Nietzsche to theorist Terence McKenna, have 
studied the use of intoxicants to take the human into another state, 
ideally of pleasure but often just another state for the sake of it. 
Taking drugs, legal or otherwise, drinking alcohol and coffee, or 
using other means like sex or extreme sports is part of the "toxic 
drive." I have written about this before, as it seems to explain an 
increasing number of things in our lives. American literary theorist 
Avital Ronell was the first to use it, although she bows to 
Heidegger, and who doesn't, I ask.

The human animal is conscious and is conscious of its consciousness. 
Out of sheer mischief, we want to play with it, or take a vacation 
from ourselves. I have yet to meet a person who doesn't twang a chord 
somewhere on the toxic drive.

Americans deplore the toxic drive even as they press on its pedal and 
speed away. They are the world's biggest consumers of everything. 
They swallow medicaments like booze and Rolaids, drugs for diseases 
that don't exist (like social anxiety disorder), drugs for real 
diseases while abhorring preventive medicine, drugs for fleeting 
pleasure like cigarettes, heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, crack, 
Ecstasy and caffeine. Then they take quieting drugs to sleep it off. 
"Give us long rest or death, dark death or dreamful ease," wrote 
Tennyson, the patron poet of downers.

Rush Limbaugh takes OxyContin in Elvis-like proportions and balloons 
accordingly while excoriating drug users. He adores Ashley Smith, the 
Atlanta widow taken hostage by a mass murderer who read to him from 
The Purpose-Driven Life. But it turns out that she and Rush have much 
in common. She gave crystal meth to her hostage-taker (she was trying 
to kick her own addiction) and then she read to him. He mellowed and 
really got into it, as meth users do about everything.

Tony Blair is addicted to coffee to the extent that it is affecting 
his heart. Bill Clinton likes to think in retrospect that he would 
have shunned Monica Lewinsky, but he wouldn't. Sex is an almost 
irresistible drug. Rumour has it that a scared President George W. 
Bush is drinking again. Frankly, I would too if I had failed as badly as he.

Food is Americans' favourite intoxicant. Not only do they eat extreme 
food (deep-fried turkey, anybody?), but they eat it in massive 
portions. In eating contests, people regularly ingest 40 pounds of 
something horrible like hot dogs and cream pie. Eerily, they are 
proud to win. I call that addiction. Mr. Bush, a former alcoholic, 
mocked Karla Faye Tucker as he signed off on her execution. She had 
murdered while in a horrific drugged state. But Mr. Bush's drug is 
legal and hers wasn't. Then he heads off to a barbecue where he and 
his friends consume a whole cow. Beef and booze are okay.

But we cannot ignore the fact of human pleasure. Distinguished social 
scientist Charlie Brooker concedes that diets save lives. But are 
they lives worth saving? "Would you rather live to be a wizened 
500-year-old [praying] mantis? Or die fat, young and merry with 
caramel smeared round your mouth?" It's a fair question.

Wealth has brought the Western world to a fantastic level of 
intoxication. Yet we are unhappy. All in toxicology makes us soar; 
afterward, we feel wretched. But let's not claim that addiction to 
bad food is worse than any other form of enslavement. Love the drug you're with.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman