A Puritan's path to weight loss and happiness
August 10, 2005|By Garrison Keillor, Tribune Media Services.
My plan to become slender and willowy and alluring is not working out, and the reason
seems to be that though I go for days and days eating only celery and RyKrisp and a soup
made from birch twigs and lichen, I black out occasionally and when I regain
consciousness, I am crouched over the half-eaten carcass of a gazelle and my hands and
face are red and sticky and I'm disgusted, of course, and yet very rare gazelle does taste
good when you're hungry, and the exertion of chasing one and bringing it down does make
a person ravenous.
When I tell people I want to lose weight, I wish they'd look at me in slack-jawed amazement
and cry, "You? Lose weight? Are you mad? You are the very picture of slim-hipped
elegance." But people don't. They say, "Have you heard about the North Shore diet?" or "I
was reading something about losing weight while you sleep." So there seems to be a
perception out there that less of me might be a Good Thing.
The North Shore diet involves herring and boiled potatoes and butter, but it also involves
rowing a boat for hours a day in heavy swells and I don't have the time. The sleep method
uses a metabolism-enhancing drug that raises your heartbeat rate to that of an adolescent
hummingbird, but it's only available by mail order from a P.O. box in Juarez.
There are weight-loss groups one could join, such as Men Coming to Terms with Their
Bodies, in which hefty fellows sit in a circle of folding chairs and drink coffee from Styrofoam
cups and talk about how happy it made Mom to see her boy grow big and strong and so
they ate like farmhands for 30 years and now they're not strong, just big, and before they
can start becoming smaller, they need to face the risk of Mom's disappointment. There is
weeping that goes on in these groups, and I am all for men weeping so long as it's other
men doing it.
There is, of course, surgery. A surgeon can trim off all the wobbly parts and the scarring is
minimal, nothing that can't be concealed by a turtleneck and a poncho. But strange things
can happen in the O.R. I know nurses and they talk. Your bellybutton might wind up in your
armpit. Your butt could come out lopsided and you'd have to wear orthopedic pants so you
wouldn't list to starboard.
Probably there are legal medications that would help me lose weight easily and also make
me giddy with happiness, and if I worked in a drugstore and had a long weekend when I
didn't have to operate a motor vehicle, I could experiment with a few drugs and find the one
that's right for me, but I don't want to be on meds, I want to rely on Strength of Character.
That is the only way to lose weight: to look in the mirror and decide that weight must be lost
and declare a white alert--no more white food--and put a zero-dessert policy into effect and
rule out any food that had eyes. Mainly, you skip all the food you like. It's the end of BBQ,
the beginning of BBC (braised bok choy). There is so much that can be done with lentils!
But the time to start is now. Otherwise I should plan on becoming an attraction in the
carnival, lying in a tent under the sign "PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE FAT MAN. NO
PHOTOGRAPHS. POSTCARDS ARE ON SALE IN SOUVENIR SHOP."
"But, good sir," you say, "food is one of life's beautiful rewards--the standing rib roast, the
chocolate truffles soaked in bourbon--anticipation of the evening repast is all that keeps us
going through the endless dreary afternoon on the corporate treadmill. How shall you find
the strength to persevere, knowing that your supper will be bok choy?"
How shall I find the strength? Through the power of self-righteousness, that's how. I will sit
with my celery consomme and undressed salad of bitter greens and look across the table at
your gazelle au jus and think, "I used to be a helpless glutton like these pitiful idiots and
thank you, Lord, for lifting my feet from the miry clay and pointing me to the heights that I
currently occupy."
Pure airtight self-righteousness is a powerful engine. There is a bony blue-nosed bulleteyed Puritan inside each one of us and I intend to find mine and put him to work.
---------Garrison Keillor is an author and the radio host of "A Prairie Home Companion."
Published on Sunday, September 1, 2002 in the Observer/UK
A Puritan on the Warpath
The Biblical zeal with which the US President is waging a
moral crusade against Saddam Hussein owes much to the
dissenting protestantism of America's original settlers
by Tristram Hunt
As America's war drums beat ever louder, the Bush administration has
embarked upon an unprecedented exercise in diplomatic softening-up.
Under the fashionable rubric of 'public diplomacy', the White House is aiming
to legitimize war in Iraq by explaining to a global audience the selfless
idealism of the American way. While Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
appeal to the 'kick-ass' militarism of the US mainstream, new more subtle
pro-American radio stations and cable channels proliferate throughout the
Middle East. In Washington, the urgent need to challenge hostile media
perceptions has seen the public diplomacy spin unit moved from the State
Department to the White House West Wing.
Yet none of this will make the slightest difference. As this week's coverage
has shown, America will continue to be resented as brash, imperialistic and
arrogant. There can be no global improvement in the United States 'brand'
so long as George W. Bush remains President. For with a resonance
apparent in few other republics, the bearer of the US presidency defines the
American image. With Reagan it was the frontier spirit, with Bush senior East
Coast Waspishness. The current President Bush regards himself as
America's Churchill, but he is in fact heir to a far less attractive aspect of the
Anglo-American heritage - Puritanism.
From the landing of the Mayflower, those Pilgrims who fled the tyranny and
irreligion of Stuart England believed they were establishing a new moral
order. America was to be the Promised Land, the New World free from the
decayed corruption of courtly Europe. Its virgin wilderness offered a modern
Garden of Eden. And the model piety of the Puritan settlers would act as a
beacon for the fallen old world to follow. America was unique and its people
blessed.
Across the centuries the Puritan spirit, which helped foster an incredible
economic dynamism, a self-righteous moral certainty and, in seventeenth
century Salem (as later in the hands of Joseph McCarthy), a frightening
propensity to crush free-thinking, has remained quietly resilient in American
political discourse. Now in the character of George Bush, and most
spectacularly in the form of Attorney General John Ashcroft, it has come to
dominate America's public image.
Bush's presidency was built on Puritan legend. He placed the story of his
own personal redemption at the heart of his political narrative. As Clinton
was the boy from a broken home who battled against an alcoholic stepfather, Bush was the man who at the age of 40 saw the light. His youthful
alcoholism, his rumored drug abuse, and his numerous arrests were
forgotten as he swapped the bottle for Bible study with librarian wife Laura.
Dubya had lived and loved in darkness but he saw the error of his ways,
embraced the Lord and the slate was wiped clean. A true Pilgrim's Progress.
Brilliantly, the Bush campaign projected the morality of this Puritan journey
on to the American body politic. After the decadent excesses of the Clinton
years, it was, as Bush repeated over and again, 'time to scrub the Oval
Office clean'. America had to purify the Presidency if it was to reclaim its
status as the Promised Land.
Once in power, the Puritan culture flourished. John Ashcroft undermined
centuries of church-state separation by demanding his office staff join him in
Bible readings. Inside the White House, Bush insisted on smart dress and
smart manners and in contrast to Clinton's late-night policy rambles he rose
early each day for a two-hour work-out. According to accounts published in
the New York Times, a glamorous evening with President Bush consists of
'dinner at seven, coffee on the Truman Balcony and bed by 10'. Where
Clinton reveled in the metropolitan intellectualism of Martha's Vineyard, Bush
has made the bleak philistinism of Crawford, Texas, his spiritual home.
Such puritan mores were of amusing if parochial interest until the events of
11 September. In the administration's ensuing reprisals on the Taliban and
broadening 'war on terror' against al-Qaeda, Bush claimed to have realized
the divine calling of his presidency. He was involved not in a legitimate
defense of the national interest but a Manichean struggle between good and
evil, black and white, fear and freedom. In language strikingly redolent of his
Puritan forebears, Bush accepted it was his destiny to fight 'this crusade, this
war on terrorism'. The President declared himself and the nation engaged in
a life and death struggle with 'the evil one', Osama bin Laden. A man who
was not simply a terrorist with messianic delusions, but 'an incredibly evil
man'.
As crusades have a habit of doing, the war on terror has widened its remit.
Bush is now committed to conquering an entire 'axis of evil' as sinful,
backward and fallen as Puritans once regarded the old world. And according
to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the White House is ready to do this with or
without old world, European support. America has rediscovered its unique,
special calling - to drain the swamp of terrorism and 'let in the light' of
Western democracy and free market economics. The Puritan heritage of
unilateral moral righteousness has resurfaced as never before.
This hubristic moral certainty now defines the global image of the United
States. Across the world, post-11 September sympathy is evaporating as
Bush embarks on a unilateral war on terror which interprets geopolitics as a
seismic struggle between good and evil. A struggle which would in the
Pentagon world view have regarded the armed resistance of the African
National Congress (ANC) as evil just as it now believes Ariel Sharon to be 'a
man of peace'.
But behind the Puritan righteousness, there is as ever the whiff of hypocrisy.
As recent reports have indicated, if in the early days of the administration
Bush hadn't been so concerned with rubbishing the Clinton legacy rather
than following up intelligence reports, or John Ashcroft hadn't prioritized
combating pornography above fighting global terrorism, Osama bin Laden
and the al- Qaeda network might have been dealt a lethal blow.
Yet just as debilitating for America's long-term global interests is the damage
Bush is doing to the predominantly progressive legacy of American political
history. Among the anti-globalization European young and across much of
the Arab world, the radicalism and inspiration of the American story is being
pushed out by impressions of big business, unchecked militarism and
imperial hegemony.
It isn't just a question of forgetting America's extraordinary force for good
throughout most of the twentieth century. Rather, Bush is endangering a
greater legacy: the revolutionary idealism of George Washington and the
enfranchising liberalism of the founding fathers, who sent the language of
autonomy and self-respect around the world. A political language that
secured human rights and peacefully undercut authoritarian regimes across
the centuries. Equally at risk is the introspective spiritualism of the American
tradition. In an administration over-shadowed by oil and B52s, the
individualism of Henry D. Thoreau as well as the humanitarian dignity of his
intellectual heir, Martin Luther King, is forgotten. America's legacy of civil
society, of environmental activism, women's rights and identity politics will
count for naught with a President who snubs the Earth summit while
unilaterally planning war on Iraq.
America's progressive heritage, its surest route to a positive global
reception, is being jettisoned by the regressive Puritanism of the Bush White
House. Yet the President blunders on incredulous at any expression of
disquiet. The worst move he could now make is to relocate those charged
with 'selling America' from the State Department to the West Wing. For it is
Secretary of State Colin Powell who alone in this grisly administration
manages to embody a remaining vestige of America's true greatness.
© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2002
George Will
Blame the Puritans
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | ORANGE CITY, Fla. — A mob of shoppers
rushing for a sale on DVD players trampled the first woman in line and knocked her
unconscious as they scrambled for the shelves at a Wal-Mart Supercenter.
— Associated Press
In sorting out the sociological significance of the fact that rival shoppers, according to the
trampled woman's sister, "walked over her like a herd of elephants," note that elephants do
not behave that way to others of their species. They would not behave that way even if they
were stampeded by a 6 a.m. siren announcing, on the famously anarchic day after
Thanksgiving, open season on a finite supply of $29 DVD players. But, then, elephants do
not have Christmas celebrations.
Conservatives, in their simplistic way, will blame the Florida trampling on facets of human
nature to which the Christmas story pertains — mankind's fallen condition, meaning original
sin. Liberals, being less judgmental and more alert to the social causes of things, will blame
Wal-Mart. They already blame it for many flaws in creation, from low wages in Asia to
America's "loss of community." By this, liberals mean the migration of shoppers from largehearted Main Street merchants to the superior variety and lower prices at the Wal-Mart on
the edge of town.
But at the risk of sounding like Ebenezer Scrooge, who was not the character in English
literature who said, "We shall soon be having Christmas at our throats," consider this
possibility. Perhaps, as liberals like to say, the "root cause" of modern Christmas
discontents is the ruinous success of Puritanism — ruinous, that is, to Puritanism.
That Christmas-at-our-throats fellow is a character in a novel by P.G. Wodehouse, who was
as sweet-tempered as Scrooge was not. If the Christmas season, as it has come to be,
could cause the preternaturally amiable Wodehouse to pen such a dark thought, how did it
come to this?
That God works in mysterious ways is not news, but it is particularly puzzling that the birth
of Jesus occurred when Romans, who then set the tone of the times, were celebrating
Saturnalia — think of a Wal-Mart at 6 a.m., plus wine, women (wearing less than those little
Wal-Mart vests) and songs that are not carols. Songs that would not have been amusing to
Oliver Cromwell, whose piety caused him to ban the celebration of Christmas.
He did the right thing for the wrong reason. A Puritan scold and a killjoy, he thought
Christmas had become too much fun, which is not our problem today, unless getting
trampled is your idea of merriment.
Today's problem, in addition to the toll taken on the body by seasonal wassailing and
gorging, is shopping that includes stocking up on "retaliation presents." They are used to
counter unexpected gift-giving by persons not on your list, which by now includes family,
friends, the stockbroker who got you out of Enron in time and the person who cleans your
gutters.
The first Americans included a number of Cromwell's fellow travelers, who, like him, saw the
long arm of the papacy behind Christmas festiveness.
It was, they thought, a short slide down a slippery slope from liturgical "smells and bells" to
jingle bells and mulled cider. But in a delicious dialectic, the modern hedonistic Christmas
emerged from the cultural contradictions of Puritanism.
Puritanism inculcated Scrooge-like asceticism, deferral of gratification, green-eyeshade
parsimony and nose-to-the-grindstone industriousness. But those led to accumulation,
investment of surplus capital and, in time, prodigious production and a subversive — to
Puritanism — cornucopia of material delights.
Soon there were department stores, those cathedrals of consumption. Against their plate
glass windows — prerequisites for "window shopping"; precursors of the holiday shopping
catalogue — were pressed the noses of the Puritans' descendants.
Those noses no longer detected a sulfurous stench of damnation wafting from the stores'
perfume counters. Those counters, you may have noticed, are strategically placed on the
stores' first floors, to start the shoppers' pleasure synapses firing.
The Wal-Mart stampede style of Christmas was a long time coming. It was, for example, not
until 1885 that federal workers were even given Christmas Day off. Which, come to think
about it, is odd. Here in modern Washington, Christmas Day is one of the minority of days
that are not like Christmas elsewhere — not devoted to the lavish disbursement of gifts.
At least a portion of the government's largess can be considered a gift because part of the
cost is debt that will be paid by others. By future generations. They are not consulted, but
surely they will pay cheerfully, in the Christmas spirit.
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