GitM 3: The Warriors from Hell

For those new to FFFs, Muddy Monday is a never-ending feature that where we engage anti-fat opinions by accepting their faulty assertions (i.e., all fatties are gluttonous sloths) and dismantling their arguments anyway. To learn more, check out the inaugural Muddy Monday post.

I spent a good part of the last week seething over this self-righteous pile of sanctimonious hyperbole.

No need to read, unless you relish articulate ignorance.

Let me summarize.

*ahem*

I flew first class to Maui. That’s right, suck it poor people.

First. Fucking. Class.

But it seriously sucked.

Anyway, while flying first class to Maui, I sat beside this ginormous woman, while her equally ginormous sister sat the sister’s skinny 2-year-old daughter. Well, I heard the ginormous woman laugh about how fat she was and how small airline bathrooms, which horrified me, since I’ve never heard anybody crack wise about airline bathrooms.

(Surely this is one of the secret shames of fattydom.)

She then commented on how they needed to extend the tiny toilets, which I interpreted as meaning a specially-designed fatty seat for her grotesquely wide ass (as opposed to, you know, a regular toilet seat).

After these 250-pound women (which I determined using my patent pending Santos de Cartier EyeScale6000 aviator sunglasses) denigrated airline bathrooms, the ginormous woman and her minions had the audacity to eat and drink next to me the entire flight, resting only briefly to ask for a replacement box of wine.

Yet despite her public gluttony, I liked her.

Really.

You know, some of my best friends are fatties.

Anyhow, at some point the stewardesses had to regroup to replenish their food supply, at which point the ginormous woman withdrew a bag I can only assume was filled with jars of mayonnaise. And from amongst the many jars, she withdrew a box of what I like to call, humorously, “glow-in-the-dark cheese puffs.”

Ha ha. Ha.

*sigh*

Now, I’m sitting there minding my own business, eating the special lunch I packed for myself since I have some serious issues with food enjoy flaunting my superior lifestyle am a pretentious jackass hate airline food (am I right, people?). And I look over just in time to see them stuffing a fistful of cheese puffs in that poor, helpless child’s face.

So, I cast off my tray of precision-cubed melon-chunks and baked smoked salmon and feta cheese en croute, leap across the aisle and kidney punch the ginormous woman, as I round-house her sister in the face.

I flash my Federal Air Marshal’s badge and reassure the plane that we have regained control of the situation. After cuffing the two ginormous women together, I handed out socks full of quarters to the 10 thinnest passengers, who were allowed to bludgeon these fiends bloody.

When we landed in Maui, we turned the child over to the Nutrition Realignment Division of the CDC, where she will be raised by mid-level CDC bureaucrats trained by an exhaustive eight-hour webinar on parenting and child development.

Remember America, if we allow a fat parent to feed a thin child processed food, then the terrorist win.

Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a schosche, but damn people! Seriously, this asinine doctor had the balls to say that giving a child cheese puffs is as bad, if not worse, than giving an infant a cigarette, or a child alcohol or drugs.

It reminds me of a scene in Ed Woods’ “The Sinister Urge,” (yes, it’s an MST), which is about the pornography industry. The film is about a serial killer who murders several women involved in the smut picture racket. Lt. Matt Carson and Sgt. Randy Stone are discussing the murders when a “concerned taxpayer” barges into the office to demand that they stop investigating “this silly dirty picture business.”

Well, Lt. Matt Carson puts Joe Taxpayer in his place: “Some characters will steal or kill just to get this stuff. It’s worse than dope for them. The smut picture racket is worse than kidnapping or dope peddling. Show me a crime, and I’ll show you a picture that could have caused it.”

This is about how absurd Dr. Katz’s cheese puff/baby smokes comparison is.

Let’s get in the mud and dice this up.

Okay, here’s what I’m willing to concede… as per usual, all fatties are fat due to gluttony and sloth, with the bonus concession that any child who eats processed food in any form (especially those provided by fat parents) will become fat. Not just fat, but ginormous (by Dr. Katz’s standards). Therefore, the act of giving a child cheese puffs, even once, is an indicator that this child is in for a lifetime of the fats.

Oh. The humanity.

First of all, even if this box of cheese puffs is a life sentence for this child, the cigarette/alcohol/drug comparison falls flat, as it currently stands. It would be more reasonable to say that parents feeding a child cheese puffs is more akin to a parent who smokes, drinks or uses drugs themselves (but don’t necessarily provide them to his or her child).

There is solid research that suggests that parental habits with regard to smoking, drinking and drugs will be more likely to carry these unhealthy habits into adulthood. Also, according to one study, children of parents who smoke may exhibit symptoms of nicotine dependence. Another interesting study suggests that children who are allowed to see R-rated movies are more likely to drink earlier.

The idea that giving a child cheese puffs is as bad as giving an infant a cigarette, or a child alcohol or drugs, is way off base because all three of those incidents could lead to the immediate death of the child. But, as far as I know, there are no foods that have such immediate, deleterious effects. Not even Death by Chocolate cake.

The main problem, as put forth in the rest of Dr. Katz’s “article,” is that these parents are modeling and establishing poor eating habits in the child. The health risks are long-term, not immediate, which is why I could more readily accept a comparison to parental influence on smoking, alcohol and drug habits.

But even if this is your main concern (child’s health), obesity is still an issue separate from the more troubling concern for the child’s health. If you were to take Dr. Katz’s post at face value, you would think that obesity would be the worst thing that could happen to a child.

Far from it.

The worst thing would be a child whose diet consists solely of processed food, the result of which may be obesity, but the true health consequences would occur regardless of weight gain. There are thin people whose diet consists solely of processed and fast food, and their health is equally jeopardized by such habits. To emphasize the risk of obesity over the risk of general health indicates the authors obvious concern for obesity, rather than concern for ill health.

But even if his concerns are valid, then the concern is more for the long-term or lifetime health of the child, rather than some immediate, life-threatening consequence. So, if Dr. Katz implies child abuse due to long-term health and lifestyle impact, then we need to examine all parenting behaviors that could impact long-term health and lifestyle.

That begins with parents who smoke, drink or do drugs, even if they aren’t forcing them on their children. These children will likely grow up to be smokers, drinkers or drug users themselves. And, look at the stats, 45 million adults smoke (15% of the population); approximately 192 million adults are either regular or infrequent drinkers (50% regular and 14% infrequent); and somewhere between 30 to 40 million people have used drugs in the last year, while 12.7 million have used them in the past month (10-13%; 4.2%).

To me, the alcohol numbers are the most disturbing and they align quite nicely with obesity rates.

Basically, Dr. Katz completely ignores evidence for passing on alcohol consumption behaviors to that 2-year-old (as he mentions how much wine the ginormous woman drank) and the negative long-term health impact it could have on the child in favor of pointing out the nutritional issue.

Why? Because obesity is the Demon du Jour.

Drinking is practically a national past time in the US, so nobody would think to question a parent drinking alcohol in front of a child. I grew up in a drinking environment and, although only really drank in my early 20s, until V smacked some sense in me, I have no doubt that my father’s alcoholism gave me a more libertarian view of substance use and abuse.

Plus, I’m Catholic, so I got that going for me.

Anyhow, we would never suggest that a parent who drinks is engaging in child abuse, yet these are the threats leveled against fat parents every day by some well-meaning, albeit self-righteous, yahoo. Obesity has become such a threat to our society that many people advocate removing a child from his or her home if the child is fat, the parents are fat, and/or their diet does not meet the advocate’s preferred diet.

This is the ultimate expression of the Nanny State, where the government steps in to raise our children when parents are deemed unqualified.

Do we really want to open this can of worms? Do we really want to regulate parental behavior to prevent long-term health problems? Because there are quite a few parental behaviors that I’ve witnessed (most of them at Chuck E. Cheese), which I would say have significant long-term effects I would rather not pass on to the next generation.

For instance, I witnessed a woman grab her barely-walking toddler under the armpit and swing her violently upward into her arms. I then saw her do this multiple times. She would set the child down, let her walk, then rip her violently upward under the armpit.

I seriously considered telling the woman that she could dislocate her child’s arm that way, but what would that have accomplished? Judging the temperament I observed, I knew a confrontation would have turned into a screaming match about the proper way to carry her child.

Like Dr. Katz, I knew that it wasn’t my business to intrude, unless the mother were obviously abusing that child. This was more an example of parental idiocy that could suggest a pattern of ill treatment. DFS wouldn’t intervene based on a Chuck E. Cheese testimony.

Another parallel area would be violence. Teaching a child to be violent is potentially enabling a future generation to do physical harm to others. Multiple factors can pass along a temper, including a parent who has a temper, which happened in my case (and my children’s cases). But also, disciplinary spanking can cause a child to be more aggressive as well as teach that violence is acceptable.

Or we could look at how poor parental behavior can lead to take risks with their sexuality, which is also a long-term health issue. Once again, alcohol use is implicated in risky sexual behavior. Likewise, parents who do not monitor the activities of their children or are not available physically or emotionally may raise children who take sexual risks at younger and younger ages.

Here’s another area fraught with concern: driving. There is research that indicates that the way a parent drives throughout a child’s upbringing can impact how that child will drive as an adult. Are the parents who are modeling poor driving skills setting their child up for a lifelong flirtation with disaster?

Or how about parents who engage in risky personal hobbies, such as mountain climbing (see my comments on the mortality rates of mountain climbers here). It is reasonable to assume that the child of a mountain climber will have a greater likelihood of becoming a mountain climber herself. Is that passing on unhealthy behaviors?

Then there are parents with genetic anomalies. Veronica knows a former classmate who married a man with whom they had several children, all of whom had physical and mental disabilities. The doctors ran a series of genetics tests which determined that the combination of the parental genes was somehow flawed and that future offspring would also likely have genetic defects.

The same goes for parents who are both carriers for the Cystic Fibrosis gene, as well as many, many others. Should they be forced to abstain or be sterilized to prevent long-term health problems?

Or here’s my favorite of them all… many fundamentalist Christians espouse similar interventionist views when it comes to their hot button issues: homosexuality, atheism, abortion, whatever. In the Christian view (or Islamic too, I’m sure), a parent who teaches their child that homosexuality is acceptable, that there is no God, that abortions are legitimate forms of birth control… that parent is not endangering the child’s long-term health, but the eternal salvation of his soul.

If you are a Christian and you believe in damnation, then the threats to a child’s soul is much more dire and worthy of intervention than simply poor feeding skills. Witness the Christians who attempted to kidnap Haitian children. This wasn’t just some humanitarian mission to save these children from the wreckage of Haiti.

Fundamentalists have been actively participating in international adoptions for over 50 years as part of a long-term strategy to convert the offspring of nonbelievers for the greater good of the child’s soul. The practice is so common and so critical to fundamentalists that in some cases it borderlines on trafficking.

The Haitian kidnappers saw an opportunity to “save” these children while the adoption bureaucracy was disrupted by the earthquake.

These aren’t bad people, per se. They simply want to Save the Children.

And this is the mentality that Dr. Katz advocates when he engages in this extremist rhetoric of comparing cheese puffs to drug use. He is advocating a Save the Children approach to childhood obesity that labels a parent unfit who does not subscribe to his nutritional standards.

Personally, I would love to be given the power to decide who is and isn’t a parent. I’d probably enact some sort of parenting license requirement along with mandatory sterilization to ensure that only quality parents would raise our future generations.

But that’s not how it works. You don’t get to decide how I raise my child. And the only people who have the right to nag and nitpick and interfere with my parenting are my parents, and even then it’s not without a fight.

Save the Children is, once again, nothing more than a smokescreen for the prevailing anti-obesity attitudes. The thinking is that if we scare parents into thinking their very role as parents is at stake, then we can stop them from engaging in unhealthy behavior that will produce our future fatties.

As a parent of three very healthy children who enjoy the occasional cheese puff as a treat, leave me the hell alone, Dr. Katz, and keep your arrogant, presumptuous opinions to yourself.