New Jersey, What Were You Thinking?

Posted on November 4, 2009
Filed Under Obesity and rationing |

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Despite DrRich’s appeal to them just yesterday to do the right thing, the voters of New Jersey have done the unthinkable. They have elected a fat man as governor (and, one is tempted to add, by a “wide margin”).

Commentators in the major media all across the land are now speculating that Governor-elect Christie’s victory over Governor Corzine may spell trouble for President Obama’s healthcare reform plans - but only in the way that McDonnell’s victory over Deeds in Virginia also spells trouble. That is, they are looking at it simply as a political matter - that the resurgence of Republicans in states that Obama took handily only a year ago may (by putting the fear of God into Blue Dog Democrats) render a victory on healthcare reform much more difficult. In other words, the major media, one and all, are entirely missing the point.

The point, Dear Reader, is that New Jersey has elected an obese person as governor!  And this after a prolonged, all-out campaign to demonize the obese, conducted with great energy by everyone who matters - the government, academia, various covertly-funded consumer groups, and numerous industries and enterprises whose success depends on lots of fat people becoming desperate to lose weight. That a rotund candidate could emerge victorious despite such an onslaught - and not, as the breathless conjectures of our professional punditry suggest, a Republican resurgence - is the real threat to healthcare reform.

DrRich has pointed out before the critical importance of the anti-obesity movement to healthcare reform. Demonization of the fat provides us with a fundamenal mechanism by which we can cut our healthcare costs - that is, by which we may covertly ration healthcare - under any reform plan.

Government-funded healthcare (by whatever subterfuge we finally get there) permits - nay, demands! - that we declare to the obese that their unsightly physiques are no longer a matter of personal choice, but are now a matter of legitimate public concern. The choices they are making - that is, their gluttony, sloth and all other manner of self-indulgence - are placing unwanted and unsustainable demands on us purer, svelter, fellow-citizens.

By their own selfish actions, then, the obese become fair game for whatever manipulations our government can devise to cause them to either lose weight, or pay for their sins. Such maneuvers may begin with simple taxes on foodstuffs favored by the obese, but the sky’s the limit. A special “carbon tax” based on their BMI would be legitimate, for instance, since it will always cost a lot of energy to move a fat person from point A to point B, whatever the mode of transportation. The periodic mandatory “weigh-ins” such a tax would require would serve the useful purpose of public humiliation, an important incentive to weight loss. And it goes without saying that the ultimate censure - already employed in more enlightened cultures like Great Britain - would be simply to withhold certain healthcare services if one is deemed too fat.

More importantly, ostracizing the obese sets an important precedent for our central authorities to restrict, control and tax virtually any human behavior they can claim may lead to an increased risk of healthcare expenditures - which, really, encompasses virtually any human behavior you can think of. Furthermore, successfully dehumanizing the obese will establish that our society may, whenever it needs to, discriminate against the lower economic classes (since these classes are well known to indulge in becoming overweight). And finally, since obesity (despite our decision to blame it on personal failings) is largely determined by genetic predisposition, our success in dehumanizing the obese will give us a useful tool which we can later employ to withhold healthcare expenditures for other genetically-mediated medical conditions.

It is clear successfully demonizing the obese is a vital pillar of healthcare reform.

Now perhaps, Dear Reader, you can see why the election of Christie in New Jersey is such a potential catastrophe. It is his obesity, rather than his Republicanism, that poses such a threat to healthcare reform and thus to the Obama administration.

Perhaps it is easy to see how such a thing might happen. After all, if all the overweight and obese voters in New Jersey had simply decided to support their own kind, Christie would have won by a far greater margin than he actually did. (Have you been to New Jersey lately?) Fundamentally, to be successful the anti-obesity movement needs to create sufficient guilt and self-loathing among the fat to induce them to vote their prospective persecutors into office, and to do so reliably and repeatedly.

The results of the New Jersey election, then, clearly indicate that the anti-obesity movement, despite concentrated, coordinated and sustained efforts to make the overweight feel subhuman, has not done enough. The election of Christie - wherein the electorate of a Democratic state have raised up to prominence a fat guy, despite the damage that does to the prospects of the healthcare reform that is being advanced so vigorously by their own party - is a real blow.

But it is not a fatal blow. There is still time. With a redoubling of their efforts - perhaps employing some of DrRich’s previous suggestions, such as promulgating an Obesity Creed - reformers can still bring the obese (and perhaps even some other recalcitrant citizens) back into a state of submission, and the agenda can proceed as planned.

Comments

2 Responses to “New Jersey, What Were You Thinking?”

  1. Al Neustadter on November 8th, 2009 9:18 am

    As someone who, for better or worse lives large, it will indeed be a pleasure to see Governor Christie traversing the New Jersey State House rotunda.

    President Obama has only himself to blame for sending the voters a mixed message - campaigning for Corzine on the one hand, while at the same time allowing the morbidly obese to get to the front of the H1N1 line, right up there with pregnant women as a high risk group. Evidence of dissension from his medmal lawyered ranks?

  2. sideshowjim on November 15th, 2009 2:58 pm

    I’m sorry, but what the buggering hell are you going on about?

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