Black Women and the Fat Culture in America

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Why Black Women are Fat

Four out of five black women are seriously overweight. One out of four middle-aged black women has diabetes. With $174 billion a year spent on diabetes-related illness in America and obesity quickly overtaking smoking as a cause of cancer deaths, it is past time to try something new.

Josephine Baker embodied a curvier form of the ideal black woman.

What we need is a body-culture revolution in black America. Why? Because too many experts who are involved in the discussion of obesity don’t understand something crucial about black women and fat: many black women are fat because we want to be.

Alice Randall, New York Times, May 6, 2012

Not Having My Baby

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Where is Paul Anka when we need him?

Incredible Shrinking Country

In Japan, birthrates are now so low and life expectancy so great that the nation will soon have a demographic profile that matches that of the American retirement community of Palm Springs. “Gradually but relentlessly,” the demographer Nick Eberstadt writes in the latest issue of The Wilson Quarterly, “Japan is evolving into a type of society whose contours and workings have only been contemplated in science fiction.”

Ross Douthat, Op-Ed Columnist, New York Times (April 28, 2012)

Surprise, I’m in Afghanistan! (Obama, that is)

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President Barack Obama made a surprise trip to Afghanistan to announce a new strategic agreement with the government and to meet with the troops.  Read the transcript of his speech to the American people from Bagram Air Base.  Today there are 90,000 American troops stationed in Afghanistan, almost three times the number when Obama took office three years ago.  The American president pledges that the U.S. will hand over security to Afghan forces in 2014.  Is this a campaign stop or just the president doing his commander-in-chief duties?  Perhaps both.

And what is significant about the 2nd of May?

Obama: Comedian or Commander-in-Chief?

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Watch a professional comedian Jimmy Kimmel do his comedy routine

Watch President Barack Obama do his comedy routine

On Saturday, 28 April, the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner took place at the Washington Hilton.  The charity event, which raises money to support journalism scholarships, includes a popular American comedian as well as the American president engaging in a stand-up routine.  This year’s comedian was Jimmy Kimmel, host of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” included several digs at the state of American journalism.  Here are a few:

What’s black and white and red (read) all over? Nothing anymore.  (The answer used to be “a newspaper.”)

Some people say journalism is in decline, they say you’ve become too politicized, too focused on sensationalism, they say you no longer honor your duty to inform America but instead actively divide us so that your corporate overlord can rake in the profits.  I don’t have a joke for this, it’s just what some people say.

Kimmel was expected to poke fun at the American president, Barack Obama, and here are a few of his jokes.

Mr. President, I know you won’t be able to laugh at any of my jokes about the Secret Service so cover your ears if that is physically possible.

If you told me when I was a kid I would be standing on a dais with President Barack Obama, I would have said, ‘The president’s name is Barack Obama?’

Mr. President, remember when the country rallied around you in hopes of a better tomorrow.  That was hilarious.

You know the real reason people think you are from Kenya has nothing to do with your birth certificate.  It is the fact that you lost so much weight everyone thought you were the Kenyan that won the Boston Marathon.

He also went after the Republicans in attendance and the elites in the room.

I have my own theory about Lincoln’s death.  I think John Wilkes Booth was innocent, and I don’t even think it was an assassination.  I think Lincoln had a vision of what the Republican Party would become in 100 years, and he shot himself.

What a collection of people.  Here in one room we have members of the media, politicians, corporate executives, advertisers, lobbyists, and celebrities.  Everything that is wrong with America is here in this room tonight.

Obama got in some good one-liners too:

Four years ago, I was locked in a brutal primary battle with Hillary Clinton. Four years later she won’t stop drunk-texting me from Cartegana.

Obama on Romney: We both have degrees from Harvard. I have one, he has two. What a snob.

Last year at this time, this very weekend, we finally delivered justice to one of the world’s most notorious individuals. (Displays Photo of Donald Trump)

What is the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull? A pitbull is delicious.


The Washington-Hollywood Nexus

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White House Correspondents’ Weekend

“Yes, the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner is decadent and depraved. It is elitist and shallow, smug and insidery, a three-day orgy of corporate preening and celebrity suck-up so far removed from its earnest D.C. journalism roots as to be completely meaningless.  But you can’t fight it. You can’t change it. So, relax. Surrender. Just try to make the best of it, okay?”

This is the Super Bowl of politics, where Hollywood takes over Washington.  It’s a brief triumph over the joke that Washington is Hollywood for ugly people.  I know a lot about this connection between Hollywood and Washington.  I lived in Washington, D.C. for nine years (1986-1995) and have lived in the vicinity of Hollywood (Thirty Mile Zone or “TMZ”) since 2000.  If Washington is Hollywood for ugly people, then one might observe that Hollywood is Washington for dumb people.  That’s a very coarse observation, but the premium in Hollywood is sex appeal and physical appearance, while the premium in Washington is smarts and advanced degrees.  Hollywood types like George Clooney are able to cover both bases; he has sex appeal but also is well versed on human rights abuses in Africa.  There are still many Americans who disdain both Hollywood and Washington, Hollywood for its decadence and Washington for its overspending.

 

 

The Weight of the Nation

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The Weight of the Nation

This USA Today article examines the four-part documentary series, “The Weight of the Nation,” which is on America’s obesity epidemic.  Our excess weight is impacting our productivity as a nation.  The simplest motto I know to attack obesity is “Eat Less, Move More.”  Our meal size proportions are bigger than any country I’ve experienced and we are highly sedentary.  I recommend that you weigh yourself at least once a week to keep yourself on target toward your weight loss goals or to make sure that you haven’t gained weight.  I wouldn’t weigh yourself everyday because then you get obsessive about losing weight.  Have a healthy and positive attitude toward your body image and remember “sedentary kills.”

Read also “As America’s waistline expands, costs soar”

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America’s Debt to Propaganda

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There is some virtue in recalling the debt of America to propaganda. Far from being a recent affliction, propaganda has been one of the most powerful contributors to the growth of civilization on the North American continent. The propagandist of religion walked beside or a little in advance of the explorer, trader, and occupier of the broad acres of the New World. The natural reluctance of men to pull up stakes and settle overseas was partially overcome by the incessant use of propaganda.

It is true, as we are often reminded by disillusioned observers of the American scene, that the early bearers of European culture to this continent were often recruited from the debtor’s prisons of the Old World, and dispatched to the New World under constraint. Gradually, however, the lure of the West caught the imagination of Europe and sturdy citizens trooped by the millions to these shores. The alluring slogan, “the land of opportunity” is in itself a tribute to the tireless propaganda of the colonizing and shipping interests on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Without the seminal touch of capital investment, the abundant resources of the New World would have remained unused. The task of attracting capital to a fallow continent was undertaken by promoters who made use of every device in the propaganda repertory of their day. All in all, there is no doubt of the efficacy of propaganda in overcoming the hesitation of men to move themselves and to risk their capital in America. This, perhaps, is America’s greatest debt to propaganda.

Harold Lasswell

Reo M. Christenson, and Robert O. McWilliams, Voice of the People: Readings in Public Opinion and Propaganda (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), 323.

The 1960s: From Cool to Chaotic

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1960s America has been described as a decade for the youth and as a turbulent turn in American political culture.  Like a reverse spring, it came in like a lamb and left like a lion.  John F. Kennedy defines the early decade.  He evokes cool at 43 years young when he is elected president in November 1960 with his younger and very pretty bilingual wife, Jacquelyn Kennedy.  Their two children, Carolyn and John, are picture perfect.  Kennedy proclaims “Ich bin ein Berliner,” initiates the idealistic Peace Corps, staves off nuclear disaster with Cuba, and holds very popular news conferences with a fawning White House press corps that looks the other way from his private life.   In November 1963 the dreams for the American decade die with the assassinated president.  LBJ takes office and is challenged by JFK’s younger brother, Bobby Kennedy, who is also assassinated in June 1968 after winning the California Democratic Primary, two months after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in Memphis, Tennessee.  In the summer of 1969 America is heavily involved in Vietnam but manages to fulfill a JFK dream to put a man safely on the moon. There’s so much turmoil by the end of this decade that one song helps people to forget their troubles.  It’s the top rated song of the year:  Sugar, Sugar by The Archies