LUDIC LOG

The IRS has recently announced that it will allow for the deduction of expenses related to weight loss. While you might think this news would be welcomed by impoverished fatasses like myself, I'm afraid I just can't get too excited about the whole thing.

First, such tax deductions are largely useless to people like myself. I'm always a little baffled when the G.O.P. talks about how much this or that tax break will help the poor; working-class people, of course, get the majority of their income from salary or hourly wages, and have no need to itemize their taxes. It was for lumpenproletariats like me that the 1040EZ form was invented; the itemized deduction is largely a rich man's toy. Likewise, the weight loss industry -- especially where any expenses worth itemizing are involved -- is geared towards the upper-middles. The poor are happily fat, flab being a sign that at least you're not starving; the lower-middles are too busy working to worry about looking good; and the very rich are ever unconcerned with appearances. It's the wealth-maximixing, foreign-coffee-drinking, condo-buying, Jetta-jetting American man and woman who keep Bally's Fitness Center, Seattle Sutton and Jenny Craig in expensive carpet and business cards.

(Speaking of Bally's Fitness Center, their commercials have long set the standard for socially acceptable pornography (after all, the factor that drives the weight loss industry isn't the idea that you'll be healthier, it's the idea that you'll get laid more often); there's a distinctly Los Angeleno softcore vibe to them, from the slightly rented feel of the sets to the burly, shaven-chested men dripping with sweat to the women who are always seen just emerging from a swimming pool in convenient slow motion. Watching them is sort of like seeing the poster section from a Spencers' Gifts, circa 1986, come to life. But the thing that always cracks me up, in the sense of filling me with hatred and contempt, is that all the women in the ads have enormous tits. Which is pretty funny, considering that what makes tits enormous [in the absence of surgical enhancement, which is certainly a factor in play here] is fat -- the very thing that you are presumably trying to banish with intensive regular exercise. Indeed, female athletes and other particularly fit women tend to experience a decrease in bust size. Which just goes to show you: Bally's knows exactly what it's selling, and it ain't fitness.)

What I really want to know is this: whatever happened to prole drift? Whatever happened to the truism that our national culture was inexorably swirling down the toilet? When did we, as a country, start falling up? The mean American is no longer a middle-aged, bloated moron swilling PBR. and watching wrestling; he's a slender 25-year-old hipster quaffing Anchor Steam and playing pool with his goateed friends. Not only isn't he on relief, he's not even salaried. He's probably a venture capitalist. The only six-pack he ever gets is the one on his stomach, and he wears a bowling shirt, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't bowl.

I used to sort of aspire to the least common denominator. The fat loafer watching ballgames on TV and eating food from a can was always a negative ideal to which I could aspire. And now that I've finally achieved it, they went and changed it around on me. Can we go back to the way it was, please? The Dumbing of America wasn't without its drawbacks, I admit; but the Scumming of America is really creeping me out.