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Jonathan Lear and Andrew Sullivan

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from: Andrew Sullivan

The Biggest Health Crisis in America

Posted Monday, Aug. 20, 2001, at 4:35 PM ET

Jonathan,

I'm surprised you're so earnest about resolving self-defeating human conflict. Isn't that part of what we live for, as Freud would understand it? Take a look at a missive from the West Bank in the Guardian today by Brian Whitaker. A recent poll, for what it's worth, found 70 percent support among Palestinians for suicide bombings. Whitaker, a lefty, also notes the high number of murders of Palestinians by Palestinians since the latest uprising. There have been 20 internecine deaths so far: a harbinger of what a Palestinian state would eventually look like. If they're so brutal with their own, can you imagine what they'd do with any Jew who happened to find himself in their neighborhood? Whitaker is distressed, as anyone would be. But he fails to see that humans have always found deep meaning in demonizing and murdering "the other," certainly more meaning in it than getting a mortgage and a nice job. It's a triumph of the West that we have been so sedated by capitalism that we've almost forgotten how good it feels to hate. But it's right there below the surface--or on it, in the Levant.

Speaking of hate, I was just having lunch with a few friends here in Provincetown. Now that it's August, the phenomenon we call "townnui" is taking root (short for "townie ennui"). It's what happens when those of us who live here for the summer finally have enough of day-trippers clogging up the tiny streets with their huge SUVs and massive, lardacious rumps and hordes of bratty little kids. Service gets even testier; cuss words puncture the summer haze; elbows start flailing at tea dance. I'm ashamed to say that one sign of our irritation is growing antipathy toward obese people. I mean, I like a chubby guy. But some of these people are more than chubby. It takes work to get as fat as these people. You can't get down the street sometimes--or a place at the bar. I nearly collided with one enormous, jiggly lesbian thigh on my bike the other day. It was as big as my entire torso. Now I know this is uncharitable; and I should know better. And I'm not a fan of the morally serious Leon Kass theory that because you find something repulsive, there's got to be something wrong with it. But, honestly, some of these people are so fat they need little buggies to cart them around. Others heave themselves from place to place on little crutches or walkers. It can't be healthy. In the heat, they get what a fat friend of mine calls "chub-rub." And these people--Mike Kelly calls them "wide loads"--are in their 30s and 40s. It's got to be the biggest health crisis in America right now. But how many articles have you read in the mainstream press lately on this subject compared to, say, AIDS? Yet obesity is killing far more people in this country than HIV.

On a professional note, what do you say if a patient comes to you weighing 300 pounds and doesn't even mention it in the counseling session? Why as a culture do we spend so much time excoriating lust and so little time concerned about gluttony?

Do I need therapy or do they?

Andrew

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Andrew Sullivan

The Biggest Health Crisis in America

Posted Monday, Aug. 20, 2001, at 4:35 PM ET
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Jonathan Lear is a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Andrew Sullivan writes daily for andrewsullivan.com, writes the "TRB" column for the New Republic, and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.
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