Obama must level with Americans: We're disgusting pigs.
Sure, there probably was some giving of thanks, but that's not what anyone remembers. What we remember is the ugly, vicious, annual Thanksgiving eating contests between me and my cousins. The kind that taught me, and perhaps now the scientific community, that if you consume enough calories, you will actually black out just like you're drunk. Drunk on pie.We are a nation with a massive pie hangover, waking up after three decades of overconsumption. The great problems facing us -- the economy and obesity -- have the same cause: lack of self-control. We're eating more calories than we burn and spending more money than we earn. Only instead of doing it to impress our cousins, we're doing it in the hopes of getting a reality show on Bravo.
Sure, we have stopped spending for the moment, now that our jobs are in danger, our houses worth less and credit card offers aren't filling our mailboxes. But as soon as things start looking up, we will revert to the overeating, overspending ways.
The first person who pointed out this obvious connection to me was my friend Matt Tupper. He's president of the pomegranate company POM Wonderful, and usually votes Republican solely to lower his taxes. But this year he leaned Democratic, because he figured Barack Obama stands the best chance of breaking the overeating-overspending cycle. Also, Matt has done a lot of troublesome renovations, which required dealing with plumbers. John McCain would have gotten a lot more votes if he'd latched onto Joe the Lawyer Who Threatens Contractors.
"The problem is staring us in the face. Who are the people driving SUVs they can't afford? The ones who weigh 300 pounds," Matt says. Though I'm pretty sure that if Matt left his health food company to be chief executive of McDonald's, he'd place the blame for the recession on the fact that our children weren't eating enough meals that made them happy.
In addition to creating public infrastructure jobs, Matt believes that Obama also will have to level with Americans and tell us that we are disgusting pigs. Only he'll say it more like, "As a great people who have triumphed over tyranny from abroad, over bread lines at home, over our own prejudices that divided and weakened us, we must meet our greatest challenge: to stop being such disgusting pigs."
Sure, the government can combat the obesity epidemic by ending agriculture subsidies for corn and sugar and creating some for fruits and vegetables; it can encourage personal savings with tax incentives and a national sales tax; it might slow global warming with a massive increase in the gasoline tax. But what we really need is a leader who will tell us off. Why Matt thinks Obama is the man for this task confuses me. I would have given this one to the angry old man.
We don't need to ask what our country can do for us, or what we can do for our country, but what we can stop buying for ourselves. We all need to change our behavior away from competitive spending, so that when my mom's husband mocks my 4-year-old computer and CRT television, society makes him feel overindulgent instead of making me feel inadequate. Also, we need to change our behavior so that my dad is my mom's husband again. I'm thinking that once my parents hit their 70s, they'll see the error of their ways.
Obama is going to have to be the mean parent, eliminating adjustable-rate mortgages, zero-percent financing and anything smothered in cheese, deep fried and then smothered in cheese and deep fried again. He's going to have to somehow enable Americans to maintain the unfounded optimism that has made us the richest country in the world, while instilling some long-term thinking that will keep us there. I recommend some kind of song by Justin Timberlake about jogging while picking up coins on the sidewalk in some kind of sexy way, but I'm guessing the president-elect can come up with better ideas.
The truth is, I never feel more lucky to be an American than when I'm gorging myself at Thanksgiving, piling my shopping cart high at Costco, or gorging myself on stuff from my shopping cart at Costco. But Americans can't keep doing that every week.
Of course, that's pretty easy for me to say the day after I double-fisted fried turkey into my mouth just to psych out my cousins. Turkey I didn't even pay for.
jstein@latimescolumnists.com
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