I Love You Horrible Little Bastards
Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice writes about the new media talking point that Americans don’t deserve better health care because we’re a bunch of big fat slobs. America’s obesity epidemic even explains, to Maria Bartiromo, our high infant mortality rates: damn babies need to stop stuffing themselves with all that breast milk and hit the discover & play gym. Now, as mentioned the other day, I’m on a “It’s Me or the Dog” kick, seeing mostly the British episodes, and let me tell you, America need not be relatively ashamed of its waistline compared to England and Wales. Nor its fashion sense, but that’s a separate issue.
What interests me though is the pivot. Last week right-wingers were crying crocodile tears over fictitious “death panels” that were going to snuff Granny and other unproductive citizens. They opposed health-insurance reform out of compassion. This week they oppose health-care reform because regular people suck.
This phenomenon can be generalized. During the bubble years (aka the “Bush Boom”), high levels of middle-class-and-lower consumption were evidence of the bounty of sorta-kinda-free-market capitalism, and the reason to support sorta-kinda-free-market capitalism was the lavish boon it brought to ordinary people. (Naturally, I speak from personal experience here.) Since the crash, one hears a change of tone: serves the bastards right for over-extending themselves. During the bubble years, it was easy to argue that the moral case for SKFM capitalism was the practical benefit it brought to broad swathes of the population. If the “recovery” turns "L-shaped,” that case won’t sound compelling. How many proponents of the optimistic strain in libertarianism and small-government conservatism will start sounding more like Objectivists ranting about parasites and the unproductive? (After going to all that trouble to save them from death panels?) I don’t think all of them by any means. A lot of good-hearted people will maintain that things will turn around for the lower three quintiles if we only unleash the imprisoned powers of the market. But it will be very tempting to fall back on “It’s their own fault.”
Comment by dhex —
August 21, 2009 @ 9:07 am
one undercurrent (amongst billions, it would seem) is that obesity is a moral failing.
as a side note, co-sleeping is a contributing factor in early infant death, particularly when drugs, alcohol or obesity is included in the mix.
Comment by dhex —
August 21, 2009 @ 9:09 am
edit: ooops, i meant to finish with “so, she’s not entirely wrong, just mostly.”
Comment by de stijl —
August 21, 2009 @ 9:16 am
dhex,
I take it the theory is that drunk fatty rolls on top of lil’ boo and doesn’t realize it?
Thanks, HFCS!
Comment by ed —
August 21, 2009 @ 9:52 am
Last week right-wingers were crying crocodile tears over fictitious “death panels” that were going to snuff Granny and other unproductive citizens. They opposed health-insurance reform out of compassion. This week they oppose health-care reform because regular people suck.
Yeah, they’ll repeatedly throw shit against the wall, assuming some of it will stick (beyond Fox News, which is covered in excrement)and move on to a new bucket.
I think They’ll eventually settle on the “We oppose Health Care Reform because it will benefit the Brown People” meme. We’ve already seen this with “Obama wants to lavish illegal aliens with free health care” and “I don’t believe there are 47 million uninsured Americans, most of those are illegals anyway” (always uttered without a shred of supporting evidence). And this is (obviously) a twist on the old “Welfare Queen” and “I believe in States’ Rights!” Southern Strategy nonsense, itself a twist on “Nigger Nigger Nigger!” They don’t call ‘em Teh Classix for nuthin’. Somewhere in the deepest pit of Hell, what’s left of Lee Atwater is smirking.
Comment by TGGP —
August 21, 2009 @ 10:04 am
I thought our high infant mortality rates were due to putting more effort into saving premature births, who in other countries wouldn’t have gotten counted as “alive” long enough to die in the first place.
http://www.theagitator.com/2007/08/15/two-cheers-for-shorter-lives/
Comment by dhex —
August 21, 2009 @ 10:16 am
I take it the theory is that drunk fatty rolls on top of lil’ boo and doesn’t realize it?
sadly, yes.
it’s also part of a cluster of correlations that seem to play a role in the higher infant mortality rates among segments of the population; higher rates of obesity, more drinking/drug use, smoking around the baby, etc. there’s also a large “who the hell knows” gap going on that could be a number of things (too loose clothing, too many layers, other smothering hazards, etc), which may never be fully filled in.
(i just finished materials for a public health project on sids so this is all fresh – and horrifying – in my mind)
Comment by Jim Henley —
August 21, 2009 @ 10:27 am
TGGP: That’s some weak sauce there. Radley is relying on a poorly argued piece by Bernadine Healy. Healy spends most of it spewing ink-clouds; she adduces some confounding factors like birth weight and statistical artifacts but never quantifies their effect – IOW, how much does it change the discrepancies. She assures us that when Nicholas Eberstadt normalizes infant mortality data to birth weights that survivability between Norway and the US converge, which is NOT the same question as “to what extent do counting procedures explain the discrepancy in infant mortality between Norway and the USA?” Plus, it elides the question of whether all those extra low-birthweight babies in the US themselves represent a problem with US-style healthcare.
Healy says, “Hey, high infant mortality represents good news! To prove it, I’ll demonstrate something else entirely!”
Then comes the, “Well, we have a lot of colored. What can you do?” excuse that fills out the rest of the article.
It’s a case-study in right-wing bullshit arguing actually. One of the frustrating things about Radley is how credulous he is about this bullshit outside his specialty of criminal justice and civil liberties.
Comment by Abidemi —
August 21, 2009 @ 11:09 am
You’re a meanie racist if you don’t think we must free the poor Iraqis–those ungrateful fucks who wouldn’t know freedom if it stormed their houses and shot their families! Shock and awe! Heavy collateral damage will teach them!
You can see the pivot point.
Comment by BDB —
August 21, 2009 @ 11:36 am
Abidemi, I could never quite tell which place the warpigs were coming from. Free the innocent Iraqis, or kill them Ay-rabs?
They seemed to often coexist at the same time, sometimes within the same person. I don’t understand it, either.
Comment by derek —
August 21, 2009 @ 11:37 am
You keep going on about how fat the “Brits” are, as if they weren’t on the same trend as the Americans. There may or may not be an obesity epidemic in the rich countries, but pointing to the UK of all places as somewhere where they ought to be skinny is the stupidest counter-argument imaginable. And that’s true even if their criticism of America being slightly further along the obesity trend has hurt your widdle feelings.
If the only people entitled to talk about another country’s trends is people who are themselves nowhere on the trend, rather than just a few years behind on the trend, then can I expect you to now shut the fuck up about Britain’s “surveillance camera society”?
Comment by Kolohe —
August 21, 2009 @ 11:39 am
You can see the pivot point.
And vice versa. There were lots of arguments against the Iraq war, some sound, some dumb.
Everyone always takes a shotgun approach to poltical advocacy; it’s marketing 101. The goal is just try to avoid too much message fraticide.
Comment by BDB —
August 21, 2009 @ 11:40 am
“If the only people entitled to talk about another country’s trends is people who are themselves nowhere on the trend, ”
I’m on the opinion that if you aren’t from country-X, you should STFU about the problems of country-X. It is none of your fucking business and just makes you sound like a smug know-nothing asshole. This goes for Europeans complaining about “fat and stupid” Americans, and also for Americans ranting about “Eurabia” or “Socialist Europe”. Just shut up. It’s not your concern.
Comment by Seward —
August 21, 2009 @ 12:01 pm
How many proponents of the optimistic strain in libertarianism and small-government conservatism will start sounding more like Objectivists ranting about parasites and the unproductive?
Few. Most libertarians IMHO are a bit like Mellon when he argued that the Great Depression was “a bad quarter of an hour” in comparison to medium and long term prospects. Of course that is slightly leavened with a nod to the notion that the government musn’t screw things up too much.
Comment by ajay —
August 21, 2009 @ 12:06 pm
I’m on the opinion that if you aren’t from country-X, you should STFU about the problems of country-X
Well, if country-X would just keep its problems to itself, that would be fine. Unfortunately, the dysfunctional politics of country-X have led it recently to invade country-Y, brutalise the residents of country-Z, and seriously endanger (through its inability to rein in pollution) the residents of countries AA to TTT.
Comment by BDB —
August 21, 2009 @ 12:07 pm
“Well, if country-X would just keep its problems to itself, that would be fine.”
Americans being fat, or not knowing the capital of Belgium (or some other foreign country), or not having a certain percentage of its population possessing passports, doesn’t impact the British AT ALL, sorry. And those are the three most common complaints I hear from Europeans.
Comment by BDB —
August 21, 2009 @ 12:11 pm
Not to mention the complaint about Americans not traveling to foreign countries as much as Europeans shows that THEY are being rather ignorant. It is much esier to travel to a foreign country when your state is the size of Maryland and bordered by three or four other foreign countries a short car drive away. It is a bit more difficult when your country is the size of a continent, and borders only two other nations (one of which is essentially a carbon copy of the northern USA outside of Quebec).
Comment by dhex —
August 21, 2009 @ 12:24 pm
I’m on the opinion that if you aren’t from country-X, you should STFU about the problems of country-X. It is none of your fucking business
while i dig the cut of your jib (note to self: look up “jib”) if everyone minded their own business, we’d have little to nothing to talk about. don’t get me wrong, glorious new day in america and all that, but it seems unlikely. how much of what’s going on in america is any of my business anyway, using that strict set?
the flip side of that is if – for example – we say “well, the suffering of group xyz in america is your business because a) you’re all americans or b) because you pay taxes which will/should support them or c) because they’re relying on policies which take from you via taxes or d) some other reason” then you come back full circle to the busybody issue.
if your objection is merely national/regional in nature, then that’s probably ok. if your objection is to being nosy, as it were, then it doesn’t do too much to address that problem.
Comment by BDB —
August 21, 2009 @ 12:26 pm
“if your objection is merely national/regional in nature, then that’s probably ok”
It pretty much is. I think its like how you can call your sister fat, but if someone outside of your family called your sister fat you’d be pissed off and offended–even if she was, well, fat.
Comment by Frederick —
August 21, 2009 @ 12:36 pm
Wait.. there was a boom during the Bush years? I mean, beside IEDs, you mean, like, the economy? Not from the average citizens perspective. We’ve been on a 30 year slide with a brief respite during part of the Clinton years.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
August 21, 2009 @ 1:50 pm
Yes, it can. On obesity, the paternalistic side of the debate merrily shifts back and forth between the “Americans afflicted by lousy diets and sedentary lifestyles” and the “obesity as moral failing” messages.
Rather a few professional chatterers, including those who support making the economy a touch more “sorta-kinda” and a touch less “free-market”, quite comfortably talk about how the average American has been direly wronged and is an irresponsible debtor headed for doom, dooooom.
Or, wait, are we only supposed to notice these things in the party out of power?
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 21, 2009 @ 2:09 pm
I know this might sound crazy, but hear me out:
What if…they’re being dishonest? And don’t actually believe either? What if both arguments are completely phony excuses, to be deployed and discarded purely for the effect they produce in any particular debate?
Comment by BDB —
August 21, 2009 @ 2:15 pm
“What if…they’re being dishonest? And don’t actually believe either?”
They’d be more effective at lying if they’d pick one and stick with it, though.
Comment by BDB —
August 21, 2009 @ 2:16 pm
I’ve said this before, Joe, but on the left you have this too. Michael Moore, in one movie, portrays the Americans soldier as both a heartless killing machine and as poor, patriotic members of the working class victimized by Dick Cheney.
Comment by Kevin Carson —
August 21, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
We saw the same thing with the Right’s ability to turn on a dime in its attitudes toward “the troops,” until they stopped being “worthy victims” and expressed political opinions that Limbaugh disapproved of–at which point they became “fake soldiers.”
Ditto for Coulter on the 9-11 widows. Anyone on the Left who expressed cynicism about Lisa “Let’s Roll” Beamer’s opportunism, or called her a five-star widow, would have been denounced by Coulter in the most demagogically self-righteous tones of moral outrage imaginable. But that didn’t stop her from using exactly the same dismissive rhetoric when the widows stopped being a conveniently quiet and docile bloody shirt,, and developed a voice of their own.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 21, 2009 @ 2:37 pm
I’ve seen Fahrenheit 911, BDB. The “heartless killing machine” scenes were always heavily laced with commentary about war dehumanizing people.
I never saw Moore portraying American soldiers as the bad guys.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 21, 2009 @ 2:45 pm
There’s offense, and there’s defense.
There was very, very little talk from war supporters about liberating the poor Arabs prior to the invasion. They picked “kill ‘em all” and stuck with it when they were trying to make the affirmative case for the war.
It was only after the war was status quo, and they were working to rebut war critics’ arguments, that they started going back and forth – deploying whichever argument was most useful against any particular objection.
John McCain’s problem was that he kept jumping around between mutually-contradictory talking points as he was trying to make the case for electing him.
Comment by BDB —
August 21, 2009 @ 2:48 pm
“I never saw Moore portraying American soldiers as the bad guys.”
I’ve seen it too and had a different interpretation of those scenes. It seemed like he was trotting out the old “baby killer” trope from the Vietnam era, or at least coming dangerously close.
“John McCain’s problem was that he kept jumping around between mutually-contradictory talking points as he was trying to make the case for electing him.”
Well, yeah, running on experience the entire summer of ‘08 talking about how Obama was “not ready” and just a “celebrity” because he attracted big crowds, and then picking Sarah Palin for VP was the height of that.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 21, 2009 @ 2:53 pm
BDB,
It’s tough to show the horrors of war, making one side’s cause look unjust, without it reflecting badly on that side’s troops. I think Moore tried very hard to avoid leaving this impression, but it’s tough, and the visceral reactions produced by the horrors he was showing make nuance difficult.
Comment by ed —
August 21, 2009 @ 3:47 pm
Earlier I said:
Why looky here, just today:
As with the phony terror threats for political gain, I fuckin’ hate being correct all the time.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
August 21, 2009 @ 10:15 pm
ed,
Glenn Beck says that health care reform is “backdoor reparations.”
http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/28317/
Comment by BDB —
August 22, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
I bet Glenn Beck was more fun when he was doing cocaine.
Comment by All Your Summer Songs —
August 22, 2009 @ 6:04 pm
I think he might be back on the Colombian Marching Powder. It pained me to try to make sense of that monologue.
Comment by BDB —
August 22, 2009 @ 6:56 pm
All I know is I can’t watch more than five minutes of Glenn Beck unless I’m shitfaced or pain killers, and then only because it becomes funny.
Comment by Barry —
August 23, 2009 @ 7:45 am
What really hits me about Glenn Beck is the phony tears. Am I the only one who doesn’t think ’sleazy televangelist’ when he does that? Of course, in his target audience, ’sleazy televangelist’ is a good thing, I guess.
Comment by dhex —
August 23, 2009 @ 11:34 am
i would think cocaine would encourage paragraph breaks, no?
anyway, i’m pretty sure televangelism is the general progenitor/template for television punditry. none of them actually have the same chops that a really good televangelist has – that hypnotic cadence, the focus on repetition of key phrases, audience participation – but perhaps that’s really an argument for recording beck/maddow/o’reilly/olberman in front of a live audience?
Comment by BDB —
August 23, 2009 @ 12:58 pm
Beck has already done shows in front of a live studio audience. With guest celebrity Chuck Norris. No, I’m not making this up.
And what’s up with his “9/12″ stuff anyway? Who the FUCK would want to feel the way they did the day after 9/11?
Comment by de stijl —
August 23, 2009 @ 1:42 pm
Glenn Beck – the Dick Vermeil of right wing punditry. If Dick Vermeil was also a coke whore.
Comment by Barry —
August 23, 2009 @ 1:50 pm
“And what’s up with his “9/12? stuff anyway? Who the FUCK would want to feel the way they did the day after 9/11?”
*They* want *us* (or at least a large enough chunk of Americans) to feel that way, because it will allow them to do pretty much whatever they want, with our eager assent.
There’s an old joke about the three-martini business lunch, that the real secret was that the *other guy* had three martinis, not you. The negotiations would go much better – for you, not him. Substitute ‘rage and fear’ for ‘three martinis’
Comment by Nell —
August 23, 2009 @ 2:18 pm
Who the FUCK would want to feel the way they did the day after 9/11?
The nice version of Wingers’ experience of 9/12 was: we all were united in patriotic fervor. The subtext: wingers got to let out the full war-cry and liberals were muzzled (of going along).
Comment by BDB —
August 23, 2009 @ 2:34 pm
“we all were united in patriotic fervor”
I seem to remember most people being in a catatonic, paralyzed state.
Comment by Nell —
August 23, 2009 @ 2:35 pm
That should be ‘(or going along)’ above.
Query for Jim: For a long time I was convinced you’d written a post early in the Iraq war predicting the quick transition of war supporters through three stages ending in “Kill them all!”, but have been unable to find it.
Did I imagine it? Maybe it was Jonathan Schwarz at ATR? It couldn’t have been many other people — I wasn’t reading many bloggers then, and fewer still who could/would have written such a post.
Comment by Nell —
August 23, 2009 @ 2:39 pm
As I said, BDB, the silence of the shocked and near-catatonic majority allowed the wingers to air their opinions unhindered by open disagreement or criticism. This they experienced as “patriotic unity”.
Comment by TGGP —
August 23, 2009 @ 3:37 pm
One of the frustrating things about Radley is how credulous he is about this bullshit outside his specialty of criminal justice and civil liberties.
Have you heard of the Murray Gell-Man amnesia effect?