Although I’m a big fan of Shakespeare’s Sister, I didn’t like her choice to include, in a post about that “I Am Man” Burger King commercial, a quote from Vanity Fair about Dick Cheney’s weight. Here’s the quote:
The extent of his atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries, which, if it extends beyond the heart to the brain, can cause hard-to-recognize changes in cognition) is unknown. Bypass surgery itself has long been associated with subtle changes in neurological function. At age 65, Cheney is easily 30 or more pounds overweight, seems to have slacked off on what was once a more rigorous diet, and appears to suffer from recurrent bouts of gout. At a roundtable lunch with reporters a couple of years ago, two who were present say, he cut his buffalo steak in bite-size pieces the moment it arrived, then proceeded to salt each side of each piece.
Uh-huh.
1) Why is this even here? SS’s take on the Burger King Ad, is that it says being a man requires eating unhealthy food. She then makes the leap from unhealthy to fat, because – why? No healthy people are fat? All thin people are healthy? All people who eat Whoppers are fat? All fat, unhealthy people got that way eating whoppers? She then jumps to Dick Cheney’s eating, because Cheney is “one of the manliest men of them all,” and he’s fat and unhealthy.
2) I really, really hate the way people feel entitled to monitor what fat celebrities eat. (And do I need to point out the obvious problems of observer bias and reporting bias?)
3) On average, folks who are 30 pounds “overweight” live as long (or slightly longer) than folks at the “ideal” weight; and there’s no evidence that losing 30 pounds would make Dick Cheney live longer.
4) Cheney’s fatness was dragged into the post because Cheney is a disliked political figure (just as Bill Clinton’s alleged chubbiness and overeating was, as I recall, brought up by conservatives back in the 90s). It is only in a climate of widely accepted prejudice against fat people that Cheney’s fatness can be used in this political fashion.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m still a fan of Shakespeare’s Sister. I don’t accuse her of bad motives or anything like that.
But it’s off-putting to follow a link to an ally’s site, going “oh goody, SS on the stupid Burger King commercial, this will be fun!,” only to have a metaphorical door slammed in my fat face.
***PLEASE NOTE***
Comments on my posts on “Alas” are fairly heavily moderated. If you’d like to avoid all that, leave a comment at the identical post on Creative Destruction.
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I agree with you on the fat=unhealthy, thin=healthy thing. What a crock.
I hate it too. I also hate theway people feel entitled to monitor what thin celebrities eat as well. And fat friends. And thin friends. And fat co-workers. And thin co-workers. Etc. Food/weight seem to be everyone’s business.
I agree with you that Cheney’s weight is irrelevant. However, I think that the important sentence fragment is:
…he cut his buffalo steak in bite-size pieces the moment it arrived, then proceeded to salt each side of each piece.
I find that a bit alarming, even for people without circulatory system problems. And I don’t think that has anything to do with the crook’s weight. It has to do with the healthfulness/unhealthfulness of the thing’s diet. Too much salt can be really bad for you. Granted, I’m a saltphobe who never puts salt on anything since I’m convinced that there is more than too much salt in the various prepared foods that I often eat.
I will readily admit to first reading that sentence as,”… his buffalo sized steak…” and being bothered by that. But it turns out that I read it wrong and the bolded sentence quoted in your post was about diet and not about weight. In fact I think that the penultimate sentence of the quote is the only one that refers to his weight. Overall, I don’t think that the quoted paragraph is primarily about the corrupt bastard’s weight – although the “30 pounds overweight” bit is gratuitous if the article is actually about his health.
Or am I missing a thing?
I assumed that “buffalo steak” means a steak made from buffalo meat.
I think that if Cheney was of “normal” weight, reporters wouldn’t feel as compelled to monitor what he eats. Plus, you really can’t know anything from what the reporters saw.
1) Was Cheney using salt or a salt substitute?
2) Was this how Cheney typically eats, or was it an atypical meal? The assumption – easy to make about a fat man – is that if you catch him overeating or eating unhealthily on a single occasion, that’s how he always eats.
But for all we know the steak was painfully bland or tasted bad, and that’s why he was salting it heavily. Or maybe he slipped for one meal from his fairly strict diet. Or maybe he does often eat like that. I don’t know, and neither does the article writer.
* * *
But you’re right – I can’t know for an absolute fact that a similar article (minus the one phrase) wouldn’t have been written if Cheney acted the same, but were 30 pounds thinner.
But that’s the way of most bigotry; usually it’s not provable. There’s ambiguity. My take on that is, just because these things have elements of ambiguity doesn’t mean they’re not worth talking about. I think this post at Granny Gets a Vibrator is extremely worth reading, on this subject.
The comment about Cheney’s weight in the Vanity Fair piece certainly is gratuitous, and picking on Dick Cheney for a single heavily-salted meal of buffalo steak seems a bit gratuitous as well. But to be fair to Shakespeare’s Sis, I think she repeated the Vanity Fair passage for the remarks about gout, and not for the reference to his weight, and I find the reference to gout to be much less inflammatory. Gout, after all, is pretty uncontroversially linked to eating excessive amounts of red meat. Red meat is high in purine, which the body metabolizes into uric acid. Improperly metabolized uric acid, in turn, causes the inflammation associated with gout.
I think Amp makes some good points. However, knowing the way fat is perceived in our culture I’m not surprised when more comments than not reflect something similar to what Jake said. My question is why is anyone’s weight or health anyone elses business but their own? Least of all politicians, celebrities, and public figures. What do you care how Cheney salts his food? Or what food Nicole Richie/Lindsey Lohan is or isn’t eating? How is that the public’s business?
I think what happens when we focus on something like weight (even when it’s euphemistically coded as “healthfulness”) we miss the bigger picture of the importance or impact that person has. Cheney’s fat. So what? He generously salts his food. Big deal. But what’s he done for this country lately or ever? Not a damn thing. Ahh, there’s the real thing we need to be talking about.
But then maybe I’m missing the point too?
P.S. — Amp, I agree re ambiguous bigotry, and thank you for the link to the Granny Gets a Vibrator post.
My question is why is anyone’s weight or health anyone elses business but their own? Least of all politicians, celebrities, and public figures.
I agree with the first sentence but disagree with the second. For some reason, people are obsessed with knowing all about public figures. What they think, who they screw, where they live, what they wear, what they drive, etc. Given that, it is not surprising to see the health and weight of public figures reported – particularly their weight if they aren’t very thin. Think of Elizabeth Taylor.
I think that if Cheney was of “normal” weight, reporters wouldn’t feel as compelled to monitor what he eats.
That depends. I’ve never seen Vanity Fair, so I have no idea how they do their profiles. But in The New Yorker, for example, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the health, weight, diet or a meal eaten with the reporter in an article. In fact, I’ve come to expect it. As a general statement, though, I do think that you’re right.
Salt is not fat. Duh.
Ampersand, your points are well taken. And I believe this one,
is pertinent. We expect more of those we respect. I love SS, too, she’s one of the regular blogs I read and comment on. I strongly suspect that if it’s brought to her attention, she’ll regret causing offense or pain and be more aware next time. We all have our blind spots.
Our culture’s association of fat with wickedness is indeed ubiquitous. Incredible, isn’t it, that an action (eating) imbued with no morality is fraught with such guilt?! I’ve thought a lot about this subject, since I started eating compulsively when my mother killed herself when I was 17. I had no outlet for my grief and horror, so I tried to fill the existential void with “good” things, like M&M’s, ice cream, donuts, bologna sandwiches. ☺ (The latter was a class thing!) Of course, at the time I didn’t view my binge-eating with compassion. I felt out of control and worthless. Instead of feeling sympathy for myself and what I was going through, I considered myself and my behaviour disgraceful.
I went from being a skinny teenager to a slightly plump 20-something, but in my mind’s-eye I was obese. The amount of time I spent obsessing on my weight, feeling guilty, dieting, and hiding away because I “was fat and ugly” was staggering. I look back at the few photos of myself and I was, if anything, some 20 pounds “overweight”.
Thirty-five years later, and I’ve come to regard fatness and eating with a lot more insight. My ex-boyfriend, whom I’ve spoken of here and whom I still love dearly, was fat. People dismissed him and judged him harshly for his size. In some cases, they feared him because he was also tall, pierced and Latino. I’d see white suburbanites shy away from him in public and here he is, one of the sweetest, funniest, gentlest, sexiest and most intelligent men alive!
Other than concerns over potential health risks (some of which are being debunked over time), people’s dismissal of him, and his own mixed feelings about his body, I loved his size! It suited him. It also was part of what made him so sensitive: being a big, fat, Latino gay man in Southern California is about as “other” as you can get, and for my ex, it was a doorway to emotional and psychological awareness and evolution.
Wish I could say that I’ve totally evolved on the issue of fatness, but unfortunately, I still judge myself harshly when I gain weight. And now, no surprise, my opprobrium relates to gender. Despite being rationally aware that fat is gender-neutral, when I look in the mirror and see curves, I freak out. This is a complicated issue, perhaps to be discussed at a later time.
As I wait in line to pay for my groceries and idly scan the covers of the publications there I invariably wonder why anyone spends any amount of time thinking about a celebrity’s height, weight, hair color, plastic surgery, marital status, sexual history or practices, or opinions on anything other than their craft.
However, calling Dick Cheney a “celebrity” fudges the issue. He is the second highest elected offical in the country. In that context, his health does have some relevance to the public. If something happens to President Bush, Cheney becomes President. Even in his present office as Vice President, the President apparently confides in him and has given him roles to play over and above his Constitutional ones. His health bears on his ability to execute his office, both physically and mentally. If his weight or his eating habits have the potential to affect that negatively it seems to me that it’s a legitimate public concern.
The weirdest aspect of all is that in obsessing about celebs or other public figures, the readers of these mags are invited, or compelled, to create a link between themselves and the subject of the article. Sure, magazines like US and People are full of talk about what the stars eat, but generally, they’re also full of talk (not to mention ads galore) about what the average reader eats, or should eat.
Amp, while I appreciate the point you’re making, I think there might be more going on here than mere fat-baiting. bean and Ron, particularly, make some good points. Also, am I always seeing old, out-of-date pictures of Cheney when I’m browsing the net or drowsing through Faux News ? Because he doesn’t look to me like a particularly huge guy. Sure, he’s not buffed, but obese ? Honestly, I never noticed.
Alsis said:
Alsis, you’ve made my day. I may have to print this out and tack it up in my cube.
What really gets me curious are the people who are celebrities seemingly for no reason. There are plenty of rich people who waste their lives in meaningless consumption. Many of them are physically attractive (either naturally or due to use of their wealth). Why is Paris Hilton’s activities tracked obsessively? It seems there are a number of people who are famous because … they’re famous? At least an actor or a singer has to participate in entertainment at a certain level of cultural acclaim before they end up in People or whatever.
RonF, your comment that the health of powerful public officials is “a legitimate public concern” interests me, but I think when it takes the form being discussed, it’s not at all legitimate. Several thoughts:
(A) the behavior of public officials is already scrutinized down to the molecular level, which might be limiting the pool of people willing to serve, to the point where the only people willing to put up with the scrutiny are probably insane for power and aren’t the best choice. Is it really reasonable to add scrutiny of their every meal to this?
(B) If their health really is a legitimate public concern, then let’s make policy about it and make it a requirement that to hold certain public offices you must regularly release a doctor’s health report so that your health as a WHOLE can be analyzed.
But picking on a public official for putting white crystals on his meat (I phrased it that way to pick up on Ampersand’s question whether it was actually salt) ONCE, TWO YEARS AGO, is not a legitimate way to address the health of public officials, even assuming the public does have a right to know details about their health.
There are so many actual things to object to about Cheney. If we want to get him out of office, is it a good political strategy to claim his atherosclerosis has made him senile? How will the consequences of using such a strategy play out in the future?
To be totally honest, I wasn’t trying to make a point about Dick Cheney’s weight. I was making a point about his refusal to stop eating meat (and highly salted meat, at that) in spite of his doctor’s recommendations to do so because of his poor health (heart problems, recurring gout, etc.). My whole post was about my frustration that men are being encouraged to do something unhealthy to prove their manhood–and Cheney’s habit seemed to fit that mold; eating meat is more important than maintaining his already failing health. That’s why I bolded the portion of the quote I did, to highlight his habit, not his weight.
I myself am fat and have blogged about the fact that being overweight does not automatically mean being unhealthy. In those posts (or maybe in the associated comments threads), I’ve mentioned a former client who owned several fast food franchizes and only ate at his restaurants. He was extremely thin, but had a cholesterol level so high that his life insurance premiums were outrageous. He was extremely, dangerously unhealthy, although very thin. On the other hand, I am overweight, but healthy.
As for choosing Cheney, well, I used him as an example because he shares many of the same health problems as my father, who also has the same habits and many of the same attitudes about meat being manly and vegetables being somehow girly. But for various reasons, I don’t write directly about my father on my blog.
In any case, I genuinely wasn’t attempting to make reference to his weight, and I feel badly that it came across that way.
RonF wrote:
The sun was in my eyes. :/
Celebrities and the public’s “obsession” with their weight — it’s Schadenfreude (taking pleasure in the misfortune of others). It’s pure nasty entertainment. This week Star has weight “winners and losers” taking up its *entire* cover; nearly every week this theme is one of the tabloids’ major features (and even in the not-quite-tabloids like Us, for example). People are amused by and enjoy seeing celebrities get fat or get too thin. It’s a nasty sport. This form of entertainment isn’t exclusive to weight of course — anyone ever notice that the tabloids thrive on the stupid things celebrities do? Who gets cheated on? Who’s face has been carved up with plastic surgery and actually looks worse? The ugly fact is that we as a nation don’t love or even like our celebrities. What sells is Schadenfreude.
That is to say, Vanity Fair’s puff piece on Jennifer Aniston last summer where she “Finally Speaks” was considerd within the industry with the same regard as one of her movies (which is to say, it was a stinker). Nobody (except stalkers and maybe preteens) really gives a rip about celebrities, despite the misperception celebrities have about this fact. No, what the public wants is dirt — dirty nasty make-them-look-as-bad-as-possible entertainment, the celebrity set as soap opera/gossip in a world where no one knows their neighbor anymore but they know Brangelina as a universal starting point for light conversation. They don’t want the puff piece on Jennifer Aniston. They want the tabloid with an enraged-looking Aniston on the cover under the headline “She Wants Revenge!”
I think the larger point that the VF article was making, is that Cheney is a glutton. Not just in terms of food, but also in regard to smoking, drinking, and money. his atrocious personal habits (the buffalo steak story is a glimpse into his “soul”) led to an MI at the age of 37 for goodness sake. we know he is a cardiac cripple, with gout, congestive heart failure and an implanted defibrillator.
his rapacious war profiteering and interpersonal relations (shoooting a friend int he face, telling a Senator to go f himself) are merely the most visible public examples of a man who is utterly without an internal moral compass, driven mad by his lust for power and riches.
Very good points.
Being fat, however, has become conflated with these traits, when in reality, any association is merely coincidental. Consider the caricature of the rapacious capitalist ( here).
“Fat ” has become code for greedy, degenerate, out of control, grasping. When it’s merely a physical condition which people of all moral persuasions can experience.
I think Laylalola really nailed it on the use of sellebrities–scapegoat as much or more than idol. Don’t see how all the money in the world could compensate for being under a magnifying glass like that. When some of your relatives criticize this or that, it’s nasty enough, but when the whole country does it, well, it sounds like you’d need a skin thicker than all the rest of you to stay sane.
I am somehow reminded of earlier societies that would deify/pamper a person or animal and then ritually kill same, for their religious rites. Not a perfect analogy, of course, but reminiscent. When we get jealous of rich people, however they got their wealth, we like to speculate on their downfall. Some of that may be a natural tendency but that still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep an eye on it.
Excessive concern with another person’s habits I suspect might also be linked to anxieties about one’s own routine–possibly concerns that one doesn’t want to face up to, e.g. body-hatred. That’s just a guess.
Thanks also to Stef for pointing out how overscrutiny of public officials could select for bad apples. That might explain a few things!
My comment was aimed at the general feeling that Amp and others expressed about obsession with celebrities, especially their weight. In this particular instance, I thought that while I agree with the general idea, this particular instance is different because of his status as a high elected official.
The health of elected officials has come into play here in Illinois recently. Cook County is the most populous county in Illinois; the City of Chicago is in it. The County government is mismanaged, with the priorities slanted more towards supporting the friends of the County President and others than towards supporting the interests of the county residents. The County president went so far as to allow (arrange for having?) the new County hospital named after himself. Provision of healthcare for the indigent is a major responsibility of the County government.
The County president had a very credible reform candidate run against him in the Democratic primary, someone who had successfully reformed the public housing authority in Chicago. Ten days before the primary, the County president had a stroke that left him incapacitated and unable to campaign. Yet, as is their right, very little medical information was released to the public. He made no public appearances or statements after his stroke. He won, the reform candidate lost. It didn’t help that the County President is black and his opponent is white; exit polls and interviews seem to support that apparently the 25% or so of voters who turned out were more concerned with the races of the candidates than their positions on the issues. In any case, no one in the family or the party cared to make an honest assessment on whether or not he would be able to serve if re-elected.
Now that he’s re-elected (in Cook County, winning the Democratic primary is tantamount to election), it is generally conceded by all that he’s never going to resume office. His successor will be selected by the Democratic party leadership. His son is campaigning hard for his seat. He actually said, “If the white politicans can leave their offices to their children, why can’t we?” There actually was a similar case in my own Congressional district, where my Congressman resigned after winning the primary and arranging for his son to take his place. The only alternative would be for the Republican candidate to win. The man is not a whack-nut right winger, but that doesn’t matter; in Cook County, Jesus couldn’t win an election if He ran as a Republican.
Oh, yeah; the County Board President is NOT in the hospital named after him. Guess that it’s good enough to put his name on, but not good enough to actually get healthcare at.
BTW, folks, it’s interesting that the article noted him eating buffalo steak. Buffalo meat is promoted as being much healthier for you than beef; I don’t know if he eats the stuff regularly out of a concern for his health, or if his consumption of it in this instance was an attempt to promote to people that he was adopting healthy eating habits.
I get a little nervous when people make moral issues of other people’s eating habits and health problems. It’s one thing to say that eating a lot of red meat can be very unhealthy for some people, and that it’s irresponsible for marketers to link unhealthy eating patterns to our ideas of “manhood.” It’s quite another to say that it is morally wrong for people to make unwise dietary choices, or to assume that an MI at the age of 37 must have been caused by immoral behavior. Leaving aside the fact that a person who suffers an MI at that age probably had a number of risk factors visited on him by the accident of genetics (which makes the causation argument problematic anyway), this kind of thinking has some disturbing ethical and practical implications. After all, health care providers are already primed to penalize people for “unhealthy” behaviors, and to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving sick. And I don’t think I need to point out that these distinctions are made all the time by ordinary folks.
Imho, buffalo meat tastes really good. Even Cheney might have an ordinary human motivation.
Last I heard, some people’s blood pressure is strongly affected by salt, but most isn’t.
Heck, I eat a lot of stuff with salt. I call it my “low blood pressure” medicine. But I do drink an awful lot of water, too, so I probably flush it out.
Well, on celebrities I’m basically saying it’s meta-entertainment: they’ve themselves, sort of as characters but with real-life celebrity personas, become the entertainment more than the entertainment vehicles — movies, TV, music, whatever — they practice their art in. Again, Jennifer Aniston is far more valuable as a character in this real-life nasty entertainment sports-viewing than she is as an actress in any movie (and so is Ben Affleck, and Brittany Spears, and Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton, and on and on.)
Politicians-wise — health started becoming a public-interest issue, according to the reporters who wrote the articles anyway, about 25 years ago or so. Whether it was Mondale’s age if he became president or Reagan’s seeming senility while still in office or, most recently, Dick Cheney’s health, especially with regard to his heart, as he’s one heartbeat away from the presidency (and as we know, many people think he actually runs the presidency right now).
Then there is the Vanity Fair article, which is some combination of the examples set forth in the first two paragraphs of this post with the addition of something more: the vanity of the writer who (1) wanted as much for people to know he/she was in tight enough with people who could report such personal things as what and how Cheney ate it and (2) wanted to infuse the scenerio with some sort of metaphor that may or may not have anything to really do with Cheney’s personality (but it would read on paper like the reporter did know something and was trying to convey it as metaphor in the eating episode). Virtually any out-of-context eating scenerio can be used as metaphor for a characteristic of any person if you want it to: tidy, fast eating; voluptuous, sensuous eating; captialistic or gluttonous eating and over-salting; nitpicky extreme perfectionist who has to have the water NO ICE ROOM TEMPERATURE IN A BOTTLE or else he/she will bite the head off the wait staff. Whatever. Whatever.
Oh yeah. And as one person above commented, it was also just a plain cheap personal shot at someone the writer obviously greatly dislikes and had nothing to do with professional journalism.