Present Imperfect

We're Short and Everyone Hates Us | April 02, 2004

Good, little, lazyass, middle-class, bleeding-heart liberal that I am, I subscribe to The New Yorker in order to pretend that I am doing something to fight social injustice instead of just reading about it. Anyway, there's always something juicy in there, but two articles in particular caught my eye recently.

In the April 5 issue, there's "The Height Gap," about how Americans are getting shorter while Europeans (particularly Scandinavians) are getting taller. Why? Because America is starving her poor and feeding her rich disgusting fast food, and the gap between the two groups grows wider every day. Check it out:

As America's rich and poor drift further apart, its growth curve may be headed in the opposite direction, Komlos and others say. The eight million Americans without a job, the forty million without health insurance, the thirty-five million who live below the poverty line are surely having trouble measuring up. And they're not alone. As more and more Americans turn to a fast-food diet, its effects may be creeping up the social ladder, so that even the wealthy are growing wider rather than taller.

Yay, America! Keep it up! Just when I think there are plenty of indicators that this country is completely fucked up, up crops another one. This time, the Man is making us shorter. And isn't it interesting that Scandinavian countries are having a growth spurt when their wealth is more evenly distributed? Hmmm...

In the March 22 issue, there was an article about Martha Stewart, which I very nearly skipped entirely because, come on, it's about Martha Stewart. However, this piece is about how her defense team was so sloppy in and out of court that Stewart's travails will end "with a judge deciding how long--not whether--she will go to prison." Anyway, the article turned out to be pretty interesting, until the final paragraphs dealing with a few public figures' views of the trial and its outcome. Then it got infuriating...at least for me.

See, there was a quote from Naomi Wolf, who I believe has gone off the deep end of late (see her accusations concerning Harold Bloom, who almost certainly did put a hand on her thigh at Yale, but why did she wait 20 years to tell anyone, and why did she vomit in response? I mean, wouldn't you just laugh at the drunk old fucker? It's not like he'd remember when it came time to write you a letter of recommendation.), that says Stewart's fall was attributable to "a social taboo against women being too powerful, too wealthy, too successful without being attached to a man." Um, what? I do feel that Stewart was made an example of when there are far bigger fish breaking far bigger laws all the time, but what did being a woman have to do with lying to the Feds? The bottom line is, she lied and she got caught. Bummer when you're a multimillionaire and the kafuffle is over a measly $50,000 (roughly my annual salary, just for a dash of perspective), but too bad, so sad.

Maybe I'm being too hard on Naomi, and I agree that there is and has always been bad sexual harassment mojo going on in universities across the country, but waiting 20 years to report an incident only makes you look like either a liar or a drama queen, and that's exactly the pickle Wolf is finding herself in now.