Asterix said:
Truncy, we haven't chatted in awhile, but I wanted to let you know I was wrong in not appreciating your sense of humor, however odd it is. Child obesity is rampant in North America, largely from eating junk. You want to follow suit, go right ahead.
I like humour that sheds light on serious things in the very act of making light of them ("it's funny 'cause it's true"- the principle of all satire). Now child obesity is probably a very serious problem. However, I'm suspicious of any attempt to postulate
bad taste as an explanatory variable in the study of epidemiology. The hypothesis that vulgarity is a disease vector (the result of trying to force-fit elitist ideologies of consumption onto the science of medicine; the former has its own distinctive, and decidedly unscientific, theory of disease transmission) has in the past given rise to such distinguished scientific accomplishments as the theory that comic books cause criminality, or that rock and roll causes brain damage. It isn't a coincidence that comic books and rock and roll, like "junk" food, are distinctively American and popular in character, and associated with young people and children, but I digress. Today we take the effort to read subliminal homosexual propaganda into
Batman comics, or construe the dance style of the 1950s as a type of epileptic seizure induced by the backbeat of Elvis and Chuck Berry records, as standalone satire in its own right. What's not so funny is that incalculable public resources were wasted on debating these and other imaginary problems while very real problems (the astronomical spike in crime rates which that era saw) continued unabated.
