Sad Butch Patrick story:
Every year in Philly there is a massive haunted house attraction run out of Eastern State Penitentiary. It seriously is one of the biggest crowd-drawers of the season in the area. At the end of the haunted house there's a little area where people can buy souvenirs, food, halloween-themed stuff, get zombie makeup put on their faces, etc.
This year (and I hear, many years prior though I never noticed) Butch Patrick was one of the post-house attractions. Sitting by himself. With pictures of himself as the little Munster. Waiting, desperately, for someone to recognize him or ask him for his autograph. Like, he was there, specifically, to sign autographs for people and out of a monstrous crowd not one person was interested for the whole 10 minutes we were hanging out in the area. It was the single saddest thing I have ever seen.
Then when we got closer and passed him on the way out I got a better look and realized people were probably avoiding him because he looked COKED OUT OF HIS GOURD.
The only celebrity whose continued existence I am forced to deal with by fantasizing about unleashing SNES-Era Street Fighter moves on her.
I find picturing her on the receiving end of Sagat's Rising Tiger Knee incredibly therapeutic.
I like it when things coalesce into real discussions!
I also tend to eschew the word "privilege" when I mean it in the context of race or class privilege since in my experience, framing real issues of racism and/or classism that way only leads to people being defensive and missing the point. For example, I agree that white privilege exists but I think it's foolish to open any argument about race issues that way because it implies that the privileges that white people enjoy in this country, rather than the fact that minorities are denied those same things, is the inherent problem. The fact is, it's easier to have an argument about elitism and snobbery than it is to actually think about and admit ambiguity in the issues, which makes me extra glad we've veered from sort of the former to almost the latter.
As such, when I said that having the time and resources to be focused on ones' health is a privilege I meant it strictly in the non-social-justice sense of the word: some people just legitimately have too much else going on to blast their abs, even for just five minutes a day.
And of course, as you mention, the arguments about circumstance can go both ways - your immediate experience with those residents of halfway houses who demonstrate exactly the kind of lack of personal responsibility that leads to the "fuckit I'mma get a double down" nutritional mentality are part of the equation. So is the mother of two kids whose only viable option to feed the family on $5 at the end of a work day is a box of fried chicken, but neither is the whole story. There's a social history and context to both of those situations and they share much of it, but there are also always individual lives and choices in play.
It's the whole fallacy of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" that, as penny mentioned, has long been trumpeted as a compassionate conservative ideal. They tend to ignore that, even admitting everyone in this country is constitutionally equipped with metaphorical boots and straps, some of us are wearing anti-gravity money boots and some of us are wearing lead blocks. The truth for most of us is somewhere in between.
Anyway, thanks for sticking around for some debate. No one could have been this civil on the Marie Claire forums for this long.
PS. I do have to vehemently disagree with one point - canned chili over pasta with cheese and beer on a daily basis is NOT going to allow someone without a 20-something's metabolism to live healthily for very long. Holy crap, dude.
Woah. Sorry guys, realized I'm having a hand in turning a comment section about fucking Maura Kelly into seriousgum.com.
Back to topic: Who is letting their 7th grade publish articles for Marie Claire?
Fair point about the context being a Marie Claire commenter in the overall discussion.
And yes, I think you should get that growing up (presumably middle-class) in the suburbs makes you more likely to want to be "in shape" than someone in North Philly. Not because people don't like being fit, but because the ability to make that something you focus on and value can only exist in the absence of other, somewhat more pressing shit to worry about. It is easier to buy and cook food that is bad for you. It is easier to not exercise. It is a privilege to be able to spend money and time in an effort to make your body look and feel good because our environment and the way we live don't naturally jibe with what makes a healthy person anymore. It doesn't make it wrong, but it is wrong to pretend it isn't a choice that is easier for people with resources to make. "Staying healthy" to you has probably never meant staying safe from physical violence, or having to avoid a prevalent hard drug culture, or trying not to get sick because any kind of medical care at all would break your budget for the foreseeable future. Your life is yours, but everyone's life exists in a different context - they are handed different circumstances to work with, and it's completely myopic to believe that it's an equal playing field or anything approaching that.
Take your example of living on 7k a year. Yes, that's below the poverty line, but it's not too far off what a lot of people in a poor neighborhood might take in. You said you were living on couches, so I'll assume you were paying very little if anything in terms of rent and utilities. I'm also going to guess you were close enough to a grocery store that there wasn't a significant transportation expenditure associated with getting to and from it ($4 subway or bus fare to and from would have doubled your daily food expense immediately). And I'm assuming you were using those wages only for yourself and not attempting to support other members of the household.
Your 7,000 looks a lot different from 7,000 to someone with rent, utilities, and possibly other mouths to feed, which I'm sure you understand rationally but didn't seem to think factored into your argument. Of course, government help is available for people in that kind of poverty but even THAT is more readily available to people who have a baseline of shit together that can be expected of a young person from the middle class but the importance of which may never have been communicated to an under-educated person in the inner city (or a deeply rural area, for that matter).
I can't comment on the NYT article because I haven't read it, but I do have a personal experience with being recently diagnosed with a medical condition that's required me to make drastic changes to my eating habits. Aside from the fact that I would not even have had the resources to be diagnosed without the luck of my family's financial situation and would instead have likely died of liver failure 10 years or so down the line, I know for certain that my ability to get to and buy healthy food has played a big part in my ability to put my condition into remission without serious side effects, and I also know and appreciate that people with fewer resources than I have could not have been successful. Would I have made the same choice to change things, given my diagnosis, had I had less money? Of course. Would it have been as easy? Absolutely not.
Well, that's fine. But your anecdotal evidence of staying heroically in shape while being poor doesn't extend into general truth anymore than my anecdotal evidence of living in a very poor neighborhood and seeing how much more prevalent and cheap awful food was than anything of quality. The general truth is still in the statistics, which is that poor people are obese at a much higher rate than the middle class and the wealthy.
Also, I don't know your background and so am only making a guess based on the general difference between the pop-culture-blog-reading demographic and the inner city poor I was talking about, but that whole issue of health being a local cultural value or even on the list of daily concerns is different for someone who lives a few years of poverty vs someone who has grown up in a family and community environment with a history and expectation of it. You won't find many people in north philly who jog for their health, largely because jogging through their neighborhoods can present a direct threat to their health.
But, you know, "whine whine whine, poor people."
Well, I mean... being fit isn't really an elitist problem, but obesity does affect the poor at a much greater rate than those in higher economic brackets. Especially in the the inner city - I lived in a neighborhood in north Philly for about a year where I could walk a single block and get to a Crown Fried Chicken, a Checkers, a KFC, a McDonald's and a gas station that sold 64 oz sodas and hot dogs, but the nearest grocery store was a Whole Foods 20 blocks away that people who lived in my vicinity straight up could not afford to shop at. The more money you have, the better an area you live in, the better your options are for making healthy choices. Not to mention watching your sodium and trans fat intake is really low on the list of daily concerns when you live in an area with more than 50% unemployment, almost no local business, and a serious crime problem. So actually, being fit kind of IS an elitist problem? Especially when it is so much cheaper and easier to eat crap.
Brokeback Mountain: Two part-time cattle wranglers work together in the mountains, where they unexpectedly fall in love a ravine. They spend the rest of their lives emotionally physically crippled by the encounter.
The Absolute Worst Movie of Literally All Time is scheduled to be announced in December of 2012. There's a lot of oscar-gilded shit to wade through until then.
RIP Terrible Movies 1879 - 2012
I always assumed that the left hand was doing the jerking, and the right hand causing you to sin was the one creeping slyly towards your b-hole. And that the cutting off your hand was really about making sure you keep your nails trimmed if you're going to get after that.
Ugh, sorry.
I'm holding out hope that their willful lack of education will eventually stop that reproductive locomotive. They can't possibly know how to count much higher than 19, right?
lovea ravine. They spend the rest of their livesemotionallyphysically crippled by the encounter.