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A fugue on the theme of big cars and Big Gulp  By JOHN MACLACHLAN GRAY Tuesday, January 21, 2003 – Print Edition, Page R1 Growth: Amid the current war fever, any liberal American columnist whose function is to Sense the Pulse of America and who needs steady employment (meaning, neither Lewis Lapham nor Ariana Huffington), will have to perform some fancy metaphorical footwork for the time being. Political correctness is one thing; but become too politically incorrect -- meaning, incorrect in a way that offends somebody important -- and you will be out on your ear, having been labelled as incorrectly political incorrect, like Bill Mahr, when the key is to be (ITAL)correctly(ITAL) politically incorrect, like Mark Stein. Nor can you count on the normal essay format - a logically formulated argument, backed with statistical and historical fact. That sort of writing will only mark you as an "intellectual" - worse, an "elitist" - and nobody wants to be one of those. (You'd think policy-makers were grain farmers, not millionaire lawyers and executives with degrees from Harvard.) Nor will sincerity do any good, if you're sincere in the wrong way - in other words, sick. Infected with the liberal germs: self-delusion, naiveté, hypocrisy. Welcome to a taste of the Soviet Union, where party leaders made much of their connection to the land and their rapport with the plain, honest workers of the world; where liberals such as Gorbachev and Bulgakov were mocked, marginalized, or both. In such a climate of know-nothing righteousness, you'd think satire would wither and die, only that isn't what happened. In fact, Soviet anti-intellectualism had precisely the opposite effect on its target, thanks to figures of speech - metaphor, hyperbole, irony -- plus the mysterious human capacity to speak in, and delight in, code. In cabarets all over the USSR, a satirist could make a devastating point with a simple juxtaposition of facts, no comment whatsoever. A comedian could elicit howls of laughter by delivering a monologue showering a party official with excessive praise. Sometimes it was sufficient simply to read an article from Pravda, deadpan, to bring down the house. The right framework, the right theme, the right juxtaposition, the right audience and the right psychopaths at the helm, and the facts spoke for themselves, leaving the messenger in the clear and party censors scratching their heads over the transcript. I'm beginning to see how this happens -- how, in victory, an ideology makes itself ridiculous. Take the following narrative, culled from two articles in one issue of The New York Times: The International Auto Show in Detroit this year, as always, featured "concept cars," pointing to a brighter future. Ford's Model U had a hydrogen engine that uses sunflower-seed oil and a body made of vegetable products (in an emergency, you can eat your car); yet the Model U was easily upstaged by a Cadillac four-seater with a V16 producing 1,000 horsepower; which was, in turn, overshadowed by the Chrysler Tomahawk -- a red, silver and blue motorcycle named after the cruise missile (and nicknamed "the crotch rocket"), with a 500-horsepower V10, able to reach 100 kilometres per hour in 2.5. seconds. In the quest for bigger engines, manufacturers plan a new generation of 10- and 12-cylinder gas-burners. "Partly, it may be a patriotic thing," muses an executive from Ford; while a psychologist with Chrysler who consulted on the PT Cruiser calls it "the return to pride and power." Response has been overwhelming. No major publication has failed to snap a picture of these Brobdingnagian machines. Chrysler now plans to produce a few hundred Tomahawks, at a quarter-million dollars apiece. As Chrysler's CEO put it, "Grown men fell to their knees and wept." Okay, fine, now this: Americans, 60 per cent of whom are overweight, are the fattest people on Earth -- deliberately, by design. It seems that, with advances in seed production, fertilizers and crop yields, the American food supply grew faster than the American population, so that, in order for the industry to enjoy healthy growth, each American must now eat 500 more calories a day more than he did 30 years ago. The solution? Bigger servings. Given that the cost of American food -- pop, sugar, potatoes, hamburger -- represents a tiny fraction of its retail price (compared with labour, packaging and advertising), the Big Gulp, the Big Mac, the Jumbo fries proved the way to go. As well, psychological studies have shown that with bigger portions, people will eat up to 30 per cent more than normally (lest someone chastise us for failing to "clean our plate"). Other industries have responded to this growth pattern with larger seats in restaurants, larger turnstiles and recalibrated sizes in men's and women's wear (wouldn't want the consumer to become depressed in the dressing room). Meanwhile, Type 2 diabetes and heart disease have produced excellent revenue streams for the medical and pharmaceutical sectors, while growth opportunities abound in the legal profession with class-action lawsuits against fast-food chains on behalf of morbidly obese clients. Just the facts, ma'am. I have no further comment on the above, or on the Pulse of America, except as a kind of fugue, or variations on a theme -- of growth, power, hunger and dread.
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