I would have never given director Michael Moore the Oscar for his controversial documentary "Bowling For Columbine."
In our current shun-the-intellectual climate, the above statement would leave the first-time reader thinking I must be a so-called conservative , but more regular readers know better.
The reason I wouldn't give Michael Moore the Oscar for "Columbine," even if I agree with some of his conclusions, is that his film is a polemic, not a documentary.
And although I laughed at Moore's harassment of Charlton Heston, the scene ultimately left a bad taste in my mouth.
Gus Van Sant's "Elephant" is a much more powerful film about the plethora of guns and violence in our schools, and Van Sant is honest enough to try to tell the truth on screen, although he called his movie fiction.
That said, I am heartily recommending "Supersize Me," the new semi-mockumentary that focuses - by picking on a fast-food mega-giant - on the plague of ill health that can be attributed largely to the modern American's love of unhealthy, overly fat-laden fast food.
I eat my Dick's Deluxe once a week, and get fries with it, too.
Once a week.
But "Supersize Me" shows the ill effects of a fast-food-only diet.
It occasionally strays into Michael Moore territory but ultimately steers clear of lies and half-truths.
Friends who work at area hospitals and nursing homes tell me about the addition of cranes - cranes - in operating rooms because so many patients nowadays are too big to be moved by two, normal-sized staff members.
There are also sitdown showers in some of our bigger hospitals because some people are too fat to stand up for their hosing down.
Now none of this applies to the 10 to 15 percent of folks who are just naturally big.
I'm talking about recent studies claiming that as many as one in three American children - shuttled to their schools in cars and buses, fed at least twice a day with fast food, given remote controls for their 27-inch televisions - are obese. Not overweight, but obese.
Genetics and heredity cannot be the only culprit. Laziness, sloth and food greed are the bad boys here.
No one who has read my column over time would call me a lover of corporations. I'm one of those who believe rapacious multinationals, and locally originated companies like Boeing, are cannibalizing the once-great economic power that was America with their exemptions, secret deals and such.
But if I were on a jury hearing one of these cases in which chronically obese people sue the fast-food emporiums they haunted until they couldn't fit through the door, I would not find for the fat plaintiff.
We are responsible for what we put into our mouth, our brain and our stomach.
I understood that at 6 years of age.
Gym memberships and fancy weight sets are not necessary. There are sidewalks all over Seattle, and there are beautiful things to look at while you walk off breakfast, lunch or dinner.
The saddest thing about this epidemic of fat is how obvious are its causes.
There was a really pitiful article in the May 27 Seattle Times highlighting what I'm talking about here: the American diet and the sloth of many of its people.
According to the Associated Press, immigrants who come to the United States live an average of three years longer than people of similar backgrounds born and raised here.
Black immigrants, for example, are three times less likely to smoke than American blacks. They drink less and exercise more, too.
According to this latest study, 30 percent of all Americans are now obese. Only 20 percent of immigrants fit that category.
But the next generation, the descendants of these immigrants, start fattening up and dying sooner, too.
"Assimilation often means assimilation into eating too much Cheez-Whiz," said Mark Krikorian, executive director at the Center for Immigration Studies.
More startling is that these longer-lived immigrants make up a disproportionate percentage of the almost 50 million Americans who now can't afford health care.
We are a sick people.
A recent Harper's Magazine Index item said that although Americans make up 6 percent of the world's population, we use 66 percent of the world's processed cocaine.
Another pithy example of greed and appetite run amuck.
Sometimes, living in Queen Anne or Magnolia, seeing all the joggers and such, we forget that America as a whole is exponentially growing larger.
But as someone who spends a few days a month in Kitsap County and in deep South King County working other jobs, I can tell you: the lard is on the move.
Health-care costs related directly to obesity rose 50 percent last year, according to a recent network television news special.
A large percentage of Americans are eating their poorer brethren out of house and home and medical care. Literally.
License is not freedom. Not in politics and not on the dinner plate.
License and lack of even reasonable will power is pathetic and shameful, not an example of freedom.
Take that money you would have spent on your fourth meal of the day and give it to one of the clinics straining to treat the overwhelming medical problems of the working poor who can't afford a doctor.
You'll feel better, inside and out.[[In-content Ad]]
