Today from the FCC: "The Commission will hold a meeting as part of Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Pediatric Obesity Conference. The Commission will listen to witnesses discussing a host of issues surrounding childhood obesity including the impact and role media serve in the area of children's health, the causes of pediatric obesity, and ways to increase awareness of and promote healthy lifestyles among children and teens."
We've moved from babyfat to husky to chubby to childhood obesity to the very serious sounding pediatric obesity. Being fat and out of shape is always serious, mostly because fat people make thin people uncomfortable. Gay clothes designers are forced to design pants to fit a man who wears size 40 or higher waist. If they can get to the kids early, this national waste of our synthetic stainproof fiber resources can be stopped and everyone can shop at Banana Republic.
But this whole TV thing and fatness sounds just like other arguments where individual responsibility and human factors always manage to be shoved aside so blame can be apportioned more fully to some innanimate object or some large amorphous industry (see, e.g., guns, helmets, transfattygoodness acids, cigarettes, Power Rangers and SUVs). Here we have the FCC -- the Federal Communications Commission! -- fully involved in "doing something" about the role that "the media" play in "pediatric obesity." It sounds reasonable - the FCC controls all the media (even though it doesn't, which SBD supposes is the problem from their perspective) so they have to do something about it, goshdarnit! People don't make people fat, the media makes you fat. The all powerful, mesmerizing media. And it is mesmerizing. We all admit it is mesmerizing and comfortable and fun. So there is no damn secret and there is no conspiracy and there is no sublimnable nonsense. We know exactly what we are doing when we watch TV, pass the chips please.
But what about the children, asks the Society for the Use of The Children as A Meme to Change Society According to Our Particular Fantasy of the Kind of Life Everyone Should Lead?
Sydney Brillo Duodenum likes his television. And Sydney Brillo Duodenum watched a great deal of television when he was a fat child. SBD attended a private boys school with rigorous academic standards and a long tradition of sports. The school day did not end until every child had been reduced to quivering, lactic acid depleted jelly on a soccer filed or football or what have you. Instilling "the tenacity of pursuit" was the stated goal. After this punishment, SBD longed for his father's den and what at the time was a gargantuan 19 inch color television. It would not be an exaggeration to describe a typical day after school in which SBD and his brother, Sydney Brillo Brother, also fat at the time, firmly ensconsed in leather recliners drinking two 16 ounce Cokes each (the kind in the tall glass bottle) and sharing an entire bag of Doritos while watching Speed Racer, Star Trek (animated) and the unforgettable dystopian fantasy Star Blazers. After a couple of hours of this and following a good 45 minutes of lackluster harranguing by Mother Brillo, SBD and SBB would turn to their two hours of homework, which they knew had to be completed by 8 pm or there would be no Bionic Woman or Buck Rogers or Rockford Files. So, two hours of homework was completed in one hour and it always got the B- it deserved. Weight remained a problem for SBD at least until his senior year in high school when he was forced onto the track team and all that running firmed him up a bit. But his television habit never slackened.
The obesity industry, and by that I do not mean the makers of processed food or candy or anything else that tastes good and yummy with ass firmly planted in Scotchguarded polyester. I mean the professors, researchers, bureaucrats, grant givers, grant takers, doctors, and scolds who make a living ignoring the single biggest contributing factors to so-called pediatric obesity -- parents. If a kid is fat and is spending his free time in front of the TV, it's because his or her parents suck. They suck at parenting. They are the reason their kid is fat. The TV did not walk into the child's bedroom, unpack itself and hook itslef up to the new Pottery Barn Media Headboard. It's not the shows, it's not the food makers, it's not advrtisers. It's the parents.
The end result of this Commission intrusion into the life of the family is a Task Force with findings and ultimately some shakedown of "the media" and "the food industry" and "the advertising industry" and "the toy industry" usually involving the funneling of shareholder profits into more grants, more research, more institutes for the prevention of real life happening to you, and more nanny state substitution of the single most important structure our society has - parents.
