December 19, 2006
Cotton Mather Redivivus, or, Sumptuary Laws Return to Massachusetts Bay Colony
Just got back from the laundromat. On the television there — a "television" is a glass-fronted box stuffed with more imbeciles than a sane man would imagine possible — the "news" was on. Some gibbering, hyperactive, toothy, chirrupy psychopath of a woman bleated "how many fingers, Winston?" and then yammered the following:
A new law may pave the way for area restaurants to serve delicious meals like this [cut to photo of a glistening multilobate horror on a plate, candied tumors in badger's lymph perhaps], trans-fat free!
No. Wrong. No, this cretinous law will make no food feasible that was not feasible before. That is beyond the power of the state entirely. It will instead "pave the way" for area restaurateurs to be fined for serving perfectly normal food that their customers, mentally competent adults more often (slightly more often) than not, choose to pay good money for, of their own free will. The mentally incompetent adults are perfectly free to crawl around in the woods grunting and rooting in the earth for tubers — organic ones — if that is how they choose to live their worthless, humorless, clenched, sphincterish, sterile, denatured, timid, epicene, unmanly, snivelling, safe little lives. I care not.
NYC perpetrated some imbecile ordnance like this just recently, or announced the intention; no doubt the morons up here have been inspired by the example. Fifteen years ago, when I predicted that anti-smoking hysteria, if successful, would without fail be followed by laws banning fatty foods, people laughed. Who's laughing now, Pollyanna? Motherfucker.
First they take your guns, then your cigarettes. Disarmed, weakened, and helpless, you will at long last be powerless to resist when they come for that most precious thing of all: Your fat. It is un-goddamn-American, is what it is, is all. For fuck's sake.
Will no-one rid me of these troublesome body-Nazis?
UPDATE
AAARRRGGGHHH!
Comments:
I cling to hope that my Portland will hold out longer than yours, but they've banned smoking in bars there — in bars for the love of God — so I'm not optimistic.
Jesus, even the French are turning against smokers. The French. WTF?! But they'll never surrender their fat, will they? They can't. They just can't.
Or maybe it's just a neologism for 'the life of an asshole'?
gial - ok i agre that was radundent aftar i said 'tv'.
iain - pracisly! teh framars of the consistutiojint saw this comging. its in the fedralist paperers somwhere.
Better yet, they could take the Canadian route and put pictures of morbidly obese people on the menus as a deterrent.
Actually, that wouldn't work. I'd go out to eat WAY more often if it meant I got to see pictures of the über-obese.
Instead of complaining you should get out ahead of the game and sue your employer for making you pay the same insurance rate as all the fat smokers.
sean - u tlak taht libarterian stuff aruond he're an youl be tar5ed an fe4tyhard.
duno abuout suign my employar though. a) thats me! an i myself am one a our few asets b) i smoke.
I'm so upset, I'm off to smoke a pack of menthol cigarettes and drink some bathtub gin and eat a tub of lard.
Bastards.
The joys of mortages and the federal tax code are subtle...so subtle indeed that I fear I will never be able to fully appreciate them.
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