You Keep Using That Word…

There’s a famous joke that occurs in the classic movie “The Princess Bride,” where the leader of the bad guys keeps saying the word “Inconceivable!” with regard to their enemies catching up with them, climbing up the cliffs, and so on. Finally, one of his henchmen responds in consternation “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” This was essentially my reaction to one of the most recent pronouncements from a pretender to leadership of the Tea Party Movement this past week; I’m just worried about what will happen if more people start making the same malapropos…

You can find the story on TPM here if you want to, but I’ve cross-checked the story on some other sources, and it appears to be correct in the particulars. On Wednesday of this week, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips put out a list of what he called “Liberal Hate Groups” – in other words, groups that he and his followers (assuming he has followers) believe hate them and their values and possibly America into the bargain. It’s a direct reaction to the Southern Poverty Law Center (number 4 on Mr. Phillips’ list) declaring some of the hard-line conservative religious/political groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association onto its list of Hate Groups because of their opposition to same-sex marriage and the abolition of the military “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, along with more basic civil rights. Other groups named in the same fatwa include the NAACP, the Department of Homeland Security, the ACLU, and the SEIU, all for the same general sort of refusal to adhere to a conservative Christian Euro-centric cultural view of the U.S. It would be even funnier if it wasn’t so clear that the Tea Party Nation has no idea of what a hate group actually is…

Now, in fairness to everyone, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list includes groups like the KKK, and having a political organization whose goals you agree with end up a list like that would certainly anger most people. But calling them a hate group because they take exception to organized (and well-funded) groups trying to deny millions of people basic civil rights is a little silly, and putting DHS on the list because it supports the current Presidential administration is asinine unless Mr. Phillips actually wants Federal agencies to declare open rebellion against a lawfully-elected government. The ACLU is just as stupid; the only rationale given is that the ACLU hates America (according to the Tea Party, anyway) and is therefore a hate group. By the time you get to the end of the list, it’s clear that whoever came up with this spew has both the intelligence and the manners of a spoiled child. The problem is, they’re also the nominal leadership for a group that numbers somewhere between five and thirty million people – and they don’t appear to be kidding…

It would be nice to end the year on an up note, and maybe sometime in the future I will, but for the moment, I read this sort of thing and a cold wind goes up my back. Because when those in power (any kind of power, I don’t care!) start calling their enemies “un-patriotic” and demanding that they be disenfranchised, imprisoned, or destroyed outright, I recall the lessons of history and what happened the last time a national government was co-opted by such people (reference Germany, 1930 to 1945, if you didn’t catch it), and I worry for the future of this Republic. In five hours or so it’s going to be 2011 – let’s all be careful out there…

Plummeting to the Bottom

I’ve done a number of posts so far about the excesses of junk food – and institutional food in general – and I want to be clear that I’m not going after the industry as such. I believe very strongly in personal responsibility, and thus I feel that if you are eating a nice 2,700 calorie entre and then washing it down with a 990 calorie milkshake and a side of 1,730 calorie waffle fries, that’s your business. Unless you happen to be 7 or more feet tall, work as a professional athlete, have the metabolism of a hyperactive weasel on speed, or all of the above, I believe that you should also accept responsibility for the obesity that will likely result from eating six to eight times the recommended calorie intake each day. But what about the people who have no choice in what they ingest, either because their meals are selected for them, because they have no income to purchase healthy options, or because they’re too young to know what a calorie is in the first place?

A recent study from thee Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, as cited by the U.S. News & World Report website examined kid’s meals from some of our better-known national junk food chains, and come up with some remarkable results. You can read the attached article (or its parent study) if you want to, but let me call your attention to the worst product offering cited: the cheeseburger kid’s meal available at Dairy Queen, with 973 calories. Obviously, no one goes to Dairy Queen to obtain health food, but 973 calories is a reasonably large meal even for me (it’s a third of my recommended daily intake), and I’m 6’2” and 250 pounds – no one’s choice for a small person. It seems a bit much to be giving a pre-teen, let alone a pre-schooler…

If that sounds like an isolated case, consider the Sonic chicken strips kid’s meal, at 708 calories, or a Taco Bell bean burrito meal at 760. In fact, Taco Bell did not offer any kid’s meals that the Yale team was willing to acknowledge as “healthy” for the purposes of the study; most of the other national chains at least had low-fat and low-calorie options that, if not exactly healthy, were at least probably no worse than any other form of lunch. It’s probably also worth noting that the offerings the study criticizes the most are also the ones that actual kids are most likely to eat – certainly, it’s harder to sell kids on macaroni and cheese with apple slices and milk than on a cheeseburger with fries and a soda, especially if you’ve gone to a junk food stand to obtain them…

Now, no one is saying that everything kids eat has to be healthy, or that there’s anything wrong with the occasion junk food meal. In that classic phrase, I’ve been eating the stuff all of my life, and I’m not dead yet. But at the same time I can’t help thinking that 973 calories (and the attendant amounts of fat and sodium) is a lot to put up with in exchange for the relatively small amount of food described. Even as a small child you could probably have talked me into a Happy Meal (at only 385 to 650 calories), and I suspect that modern kids aren’t that different – especially if they get the toy they really wanted in the package. I’m just suggesting that if eating habits are really learned in childhood (and all of the current research suggests they are) it might be possible to start teaching children to get the most from their calories and fats at the same time we start teaching them to get the most for their money and time, and give them the chance to opt out of both the massive health problems associated with obesity and the massive social problems of being a health food snob while there’s still time…

Because if we don’t, the next generation is going to be plummeting to the Bottom right along with us…

Point and Counterpoint

Over the past few years we’ve been hearing an increasing number of stories about atheist groups renting billboards claiming that there is no God and they’re all doing fine without one. A lot of religious people seem to take these as a direct attack against them, or at least against the institutions they belong to, while the atheists themselves see such messages as a counter-attack against all of the religious billboards, radio spots, television commercials, bus benches, movie trailers, and propaganda pamphlets (to call them by their right name) that most major religions spread around. Consequently, neither side seems to understand why the other side is mad at them – the atheists see their ads as nothing more than a demand for equal time (in the sense of publicly proclaiming their beliefs, just the way the religious advertising does), while the religious groups believe that the atheists are trying to destroy them (and in extreme cases, to turn the entire world over to the demonic forces of the Adversary) and everything they hold dear, and must be stopped at all costs. In at least one case, literally…

A story being reported by the Fox affiliate station in Dallas tells about how an anonymous group of “pastors and businessmen” has hired a number of mobile billboard trucks, equipped with Christian advertising messages, to follow the Dallas city busses that carry the atheist billboards around. I don’t know enough about advertising to say for certain if this campaign is likely to be effective; as a strategist, however, I can see at least three problems with the idea. First, the mobile billboard trucks are calling far more attention to the atheist billboards than they would ever have gotten on their own. Second, a lot of people don’t like mobile billboard trucks, religious advertising, or being proselytized in the first place; combining all of these things into a single event seems ill-advised. And third, who on Earth do they expect to influence with such a gesture? Anyone who is likely to convert to their particular brand of Christianity because of a proselytizing billboard has almost certainly already seen one, and the atheists already dislike efforts to convince them of the error of their ways, so directly attacking their advertising seems particularly useless. And that doesn’t even address the fact that this gesture directly contradicts mainstream Christian ethics in the first place…

Consider, for a moment, the huge amount of money that these billboard trucks are costing the consortium every hour they are on the road. Then ask yourself, how many poor people could be fed, clothed, sheltered, healed, medicated or educated with that amount of money? More to the point, perhaps, what is more likely to convince someone that your beliefs have meaning, the fact that you fed them when they were hungry and cared for them when they were sick because your faith demands that you treat all people as your brothers and sisters, or the fact that you hired a large diesel-powered billboard to shout down someone whose beliefs differ from yours?

Some years ago, the great American musician and folk singer Cheryl Wheeler wrote (of evangelical Christians of her acquaintance) “If the Lord is telling you what to do, that’s great. If the Lord is telling you to tell ME what to do, we’re going to have a problem!” To date, this remains the most sensible thing I have ever heard anyone say on the subject of religion in general and evangelicals in particular. For all you or I know, the Dallas consortium may be absolutely correct in both their beliefs and their interpretation of what their creator wants them to do; it might even be that renting those billboard trucks will get every one of them a free ticket to Heaven and ten free games of skeeball when they arrive. But in terms of civility, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, tolerance, or even the ethical structure of the very religion they claim to be champions of, this is nothing more or less than a diesel-powered entry in our Race to the Bottom…