The Obesity Network

60 Minutes did a great piece recently about the auto industry's crack addiction to trucks. The lobotomized wonk who spoke on behalf of the car/truckmakers of course blamed the situation on the consumer, saying, in effect 'we don't want to hog up all the resources and melt the polar ice caps, our customers demand more and more power.' Well, there is an element of bread and circus I will grant them, but come on, this frothing piggery is not just the manifestation of some unencouraged human instinct.

A similar thing seems to have happend on the Food Network of late: it's become the obesity network. First, the Barefoot Contessa showed up. Whose great idea was it to bring on a mutated cross between HR Puffenstuff and Suzy Homemaker and have her make mountains of meat and sweets? The show itself is hysterical on a number of fronts. They never just shoot her standing there making food, they always have shots of her running in and out of her stores and then back to the reactor where she 'works' on her next explosion. Just saw an episode of a new 'home cooking' show with another mountain-sized sow adorning a serving for a giant with a huge additional scoop of ice cream, cooing so much it was more like auto-erotic food porn.

As forensic detectives, we are a sorry lot. We wait until things blow up and then we just prepare our defenses. The only thing that is funnier than the fact that auto executives were able to sell a truck for every car in the US, is the fact that no one riding this wave could see that there is nowhere good for it to go. We don't live in a state of the sound and reasonable on one side being led astray (as the wonk would have it), but a case of two crack addicts, unclear about their addiction, the treatment or the recovery. This is the wildcatter, the prospector: the key is to light the fire then make your killing, on the burn or the extinguishers, who cares.

Fat pigs rushing around in their trucks, emptying the oceans, filling the rivers with crap is in a way a unifying vision of America in which metaphor has reached a new level of clarity, but it is also posits a bizarre diagnosis about the forces driving this latest phase of mania. Did we give up on our narcissistic notions of holding a deed on immortality? No, we have convinced ourselves that we can be complete pigs and if something of consequence blocks our going forward, a cost-free bypass or angioplasty will be provided. A mere detour.