Читать книгу Grumpy Old Men: New Year, Same Old Crap - David Quantick - Страница 47

Once – as we are always being told in the sort of columns that tell you things you could have worked out for yourself if you weren’t so busy reading columns – it was a sign of wealth and importance to be fat. (Even though most paintings and statues and so on of interesting historical figures – Jesus, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Napoleon, Florence Nightingale – show them to be of slender to average build. And also even though most of history’s gits – George III, Mussolini, Nero, Michael Moore – have clearly dined often and on lard.) Whatever the truth of that theory, these days it is clear that rich people are thin and poor people are fat. The difference is so marked that banks no longer ask your income when you apply for an account, they just weigh you.

It’s completely wrong. Setting aside the horrible irony that the very poor of the world are starving while the moderately poor could live off their own body fat for years at a time, it suggests that not only do the superwealthy have all the dosh, they also have all the healthy food. While the lowerly waged spend their lives sticking ‘pizzas’ (i.e. flat loaves of bread covered in dinner snot) and burgers (claws and beaks and fins) and fizzy drinks (carbon dioxide in a diluted sugar sauce) into their surely weeping digestive systems, rich people are living on nice green food and fresh fruit.

The life of a peasant was famously, again in one of those columns, said to be ‘nasty, brutish and short’. These days, the life of a poor person in the West is what? Boring, brutish and obese? Ears and eyes filled with bad telly and guts filled with bad food?

Perhaps it’s deliberate. By adding mass to the masses, they can’t rise up and overthrow the ruling classes because they can’t get off the sofa. Feed people enough chemicals and E numbers and they’ll settle into a state of such comatose apathy that only the sight of a Big Brother contestant actually exploding on television will wake them up (see REALITY TELEVISION). Or maybe the aliens who really rule the world are just fattening us up.