Friday 26 February 2010

Dieting death cult

So in the aftermath of the nightline "Is it OK to be fat?" episode. An embarrassingly presumptuous question to type out, granted. I was struck again by the mindset of MeMe Roth. Over and above her food fanaticism and rampaging fat phobia, I found her attitude towards her own family deeply odd.

Macabre, yet strangely unreal, as this whole crusade feels.

One the things she and others keep saying is that she hates this culture of giving up. Usually we answer that we haven't given up we're embracing a different way etc. Cool, but for me, that doesn't sufficiently hand it back to haters, because it is most definitely they who've given up, in more than one way.

Claiming something that has not worked to any large degree will start working apropos of nothing-through sheer repetition, is giving up on reality. Moreso, moving on to the prospect of finding something that actually might.

The way conservative types have become so frustrated in their inability to impose mindless obeisance to authority on the world, in an era that depends on endless innovation for personal survival has become a particular bane of fat people.

As they latch onto fat people as an avenue to play out their thwarted ideological frustrations, overlooking the fact that we've already epitomized exactly that.

Or perhaps its the other way around. They know this full well and wish to take advantage of the culture of denying reality to dodge this undermining of their fundamental belief system. That we all benefit from strong-i.e. brutish abusive, 'discipline', not matter how punitive and minimal in positive return.

Certainly, that is a giving up on a critical appraisal of your stance.

When she spoke of her family members who'd had succumbed to the dread obesity-her father's 300lbs and cannot run around like he used to and in her mothers case, diabetes. No one asked MR if she thinks it's OK for her folks to die because they cannot or will not do what she's doing, though she has rubbished them for this accepting that if they die they die. Even though she never says that they've been anything less than loving and supportive of her. 

I find her attitude genuinely incomprehensible.

She's certainly written them off.  Left them for dead she has. I wonder if its the dieting that makes her this angry.

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