Intellectual Capital: Michael McGough / Picking on fat kids

Can an obesity 'epidemic' be targeted without making life worse for
overweight children?
Monday, June 21, 2004

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

WASHINGTON -- Although it won't be in the bookstores until tomorrow, Bill
Clinton's autobiography "My Life" has been extensively previewed. I was
most intrigued by the revelation in the review in yesterday's New York
Times that Clinton "does provide some telling snapshots of his awkward
childhood: a fat, self-conscious boy dressed in a new Easter outfit every
year."

This isn't the first time Clinton has obsessed about his childhood
chubbiness. More than a decade ago, it was reported that he unburdened
himself at a Camp David retreat for his new administration about how his
boyhood buddies had taunted him because he was overweight. That Clinton
might have, as they say, internalized the abuse is suggested by this
comment he made to a Republican leader, quoted by Time magazine: "I'm a lot
like Baby Huey. I'm fat. I'm ugly. But if you push me down, I keep coming
back."

Like Clinton, I had a chubby childhood. I'd like to think that fat kids
today have an easier time of it -- if only because their numbers have
increased. For a while I wondered hopefully if the increase in child
obesity, the subject of so many apocalyptic news stories, might have the
silver lining for fat kids of destigmatizing their condition. No such luck.

Ask Josh Gee, an 18-year-old graduating senior at Seneca High School near
Erie who was the subject of a poignant story in the Post-Gazette last week
by Cristina Rouvalis. Josh, who once weighed 346 pounds, lost 136 of those
pounds after undergoing gastric bypass surgery last year. According to one
of Josh's friends, occasionally someone will tease Josh by saying, "You are
still fat." What's depressing isn't that Josh is still teased a little;
it's that he was teased so much before he lost weight that he was
prescribed an anti-depressant.

Fat kids much thinner than Josh are fair game not just in school but also
on national television. A few months ago David Letterman conferred a
Warholian 15 minutes of fame on Tyler Crotty, a 13-year-old boy who was
photographed yawning during a campaign speech by President Bush. Letterman
yielded yuks aplenty when he showed the footage of Tyler's operatic boredom
under the title "George W. Bush: Invigorating America's Youth."

To my expert eye, there was more to the Tyler tape than an opportunity for
Bush-bashing. As soon as I saw Tyler, I wondered if something else about
the clip might not have tipped the scales, literally, in making it Must See
TV. Tyler Crotty, you see, is a pudgy kid, and for many Letterman viewers a
pudgy kid looking goofy was funnier than a thin one would have been. (This
is, after all, the show whose official luncheon meat is "Big a.s Ham.") It
ain't funny till the fat kid yawns.

Making fun of fat kids is a comic convention that predates Letterman and
will survive him. If you believe the scare stories, fat kids are plentiful
in front of television screens. But they're scarce on those screens except
as comic relief, even when it would suit the premise for the star to be
fat. In real life, a Brainiac like the protagonist of "Malcolm in the
Middle" likely would waddle around the house, dodging taunts of "Fatso"
from his skinny brothers.

Washington is just as fat-phobic as Hollywood is, and the loathing of lard
is bipartisan. When President Bush moved toward replacing the portly
Lawrence Lindsey as his chief economic adviser with former Goldman Sachs
co-chairman Stephen Friedman, The Washington Post quoted a Goldman Sachs
source who noted that "Friedman is a fitness fanatic who works out daily,
something that could endear him to the health-conscious president, who
travels with a treadmill on Air Force One and recently appeared on the
cover of Runner's World magazine." Last year Senate Republican leader Bill
Frist joined Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman in proposing a major federal
effort against childhood obesity.

Of course, these politicians would insist that in stigmatizing fat kids as
a national menace they're acting with the children's interests at heart --
but that's what parents say when they deny their chubby kids that extra
piece of pie.

It still hurts, especially when the media join in the scolding. Time
magazine led off its recent special issue on obesity in America with a
garish two-page "photo illustration" showing a fat father preparing to dive
into the family pool as his chunky children looked on.

His double-chinned teenage son is holding an ice cream cone with three
scoops -- because everybody knows fat kids are gluttons.

I can easily imagine that picture being cut out and affixed to the school
locker of a fat kid who hasn't undergone bypass surgery -- along, perhaps,
with a recent editorial cartoon by the PG's Rob Rogers. The first panel was
labeled "Yesterday's Rebellious Teen" and featured a skinny punk who says,
"I stole a pack of my Mom's cigarettes." Panel 2 showed "Today's Rebellious
teen," a big-bellied boy who stole a box of his Mom's Twinkies.

Yes, childhood obesity is correlated with health problems, including high
blood pressure and diabetes. But the psychological pain experienced by
overweight kids is arguably just as harmful, and the national campaign
against childhood obesity runs the risk of legitimizing that pain, without
any guarantee that fat kids will be scared skinny.

When Bill Clinton and I were boys, fat-bashers on the playground had no
excuse. Today they can claim to be striking a blow for the national
welfare.