Coastal Reefs versus Taking a Walk

On average adult Americans are 24 pounds heavier per person today than they were in 1960. If we were to take this additional avoirdupois and use it to construct 1960-size American people, we would increase the current U.S. population by 42 million. It should be pointed out that 42 million people constructed entirely out of reclaimed American fat would look a great deal like many contemporary Americans.

The laws of basic physics tell us that more energy is required to move obese people from Point A to Point B than would otherwise be the case. Additional force is necessary to displace a more massive ass than a toned, tight ass on which one can bounce a quarter. Thus, the huge engine in the Escalade must do more work to transport the 5'4", 185-lb. American mother of four equally gargantuan children to McDonald's than her 1960 counterpart, who smoked and popped Dexedrine while her husband in the Gray Flannel Suit went off to work for Acme Corporation, all as God intended.

But I digress. One salutary approach to America's crises of health and energy is to decrease the total human mass that we ask our cars, planes, trains and buses to displace over distance. Our toned, fit and increasingly Green-oriented President, George W. Bush, spoke in the Rose Garden today about the problem of high gasoline prices (the Dow went from -80 to -100 while he spoke) and urged the "Democrat Congress" to open up the Alaskan wilderness and American offshore sites to oil exploration and to move ahead with new refinery capacity. These were his principal recommendations. These are, of course, long-term approaches to the problem and will do nothing for years to ameliorate the energy crisis. W said nothing about asking his tubby subjects to drop a few pounds as a more immediate solution. Doesn't he care about the airline industry? Not only do our carriers have to pay exorbitant prices for jet fuel, once they fuel up they have to lift Americans seven miles into the air.

One can't blame President Bush for the prevalence of auto overuse in the United States, and I make no such accusation. Certain perceptive researchers, such as Professor Richard McKenzie of the University of California at Irvine, have noted a positive correlation between a decreasing real cost of gasoline during the 1990's and the growth of two other American social phenomena, the sale of large sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and the gut/ass/upper thigh complexes of American citizens. The SUV problem is taking care of itself as both the new and used markets for these gas-guzzling dinosaurs fall through the floor. The other positively-correlated artifact, obesity, is obviously more intractable.

High gasoline prices, however, will obviously serve as a goad to walking and biking places instead of driving, and the long-term approaches suggested by President Bush will do nothing over the next few years to alter the price of gasoline; indeed, it seems more likely that demand/supply/speculation dynamics will continue to put upward pressure on the price of oil. At a certain point, Americans in economic distress will be reduced to using cars (if they still own them) for absolutely essential purposes and returning to more primitive forms of ambulation for everything else.

Two-thirds of all Americans are overweight and one-third are obese (defined as a Body Mass Index higher than 30). The unaffordability of gasoline will probably begin immediately to affect these statistics, while any ameliorative proposals which either Congress or President Bush can suggest for the price of gasoline cannot work for perhaps a decade, at which point it is doubtful that the gasoline-powered vehicle will actually be the prime mode of transportation in this country anyway. Which is another way of saying that the politics being played by George W. Bush and John McCain have as their real object the very short-term economic advantage of American oil and oil field equipment companies, such as Halliburton and other usual subjects. And that is another way of saying that nothing at all has changed and that the President remains committed solely to the welfare of Big Business, first, last and always.

But for his cellulite-encased subjects, deprived of any help whatsoever from their president or Congress (as always), a means of waddling through has been presented. This is a chance to shed 42 million people we are currently carrying around on our backsides. It may feel so good we decide to go swimming at those beaches instead of turning them back into oil-soaked strands, as Santa Barbara was in 1969. We can leave ANWR to the great moose and caribou herds as our svelte loins carry us to the local Safeway to load up on soy substitute for the meat we can no longer afford. Forget Congress. Forget Bush. They have no answers. They work for someone else, not you. Inside all that jiggling fat resides an American Rebel who, setting out on an unfamiliar trail, will stride fearlessly onward to a new, leaner American Arcadia.