Black Lamb

Assassination history

February 1st, 2003

Column: Don't Ask

BY LANE BROWNING

Dear Don’t Ask:
I just heard it again, some complaining tubby saying that overweight people are the last OK-to-ridicule minority. Come on! What say you?

It’s a fallacy as large as those espousing it.

Look around you, big folks. Check out the fellow with the inch-thick glasses, or the bald guy, or the woman with the Deep South accent. Spend a few days with a really short person. Try facing the world with severe acne, buck teeth, facial scars, a massive nose or huge lips. Trade places with the profoundly shy, the physically clumsy, the tobacco addicted and tone deaf and dyslexic and mentally slow. Walk a mile in the moccasins of the tattooed, the stuttering, the men who never develop facial hair, the women with microscopic mammaries. Yes, fat people get called names, and yes, it’s tough. But they’re not the last anything — torment and exclusion are available to everyone! You think it’s year-round open season on fatties? Well, dozens of “minorities” spin on that carousel every day.Disease, deficit, lifestyle choice, low IQ, low income, addiction — makes no never mind, all persuasions are welcome. Even lower primates deride the different. And at least fatness is epidemic, so the “plus sized” have camaraderie, activism, research and celebrity empathizers. In fact, they’re no longer even a minority in the United States, so they blend right in. It’s thin people who will soon need attorneys and advocates.

I say to the size-challenged: try being, for even a day, a person of color. Better yet, try being a person of color who is overweight. And in a wheelchair. And bald. And from Georgia.

Yes, yes, we enlightened types condemn insensitive, belittling clods, discrimination, cruel judgmentalism. But I reject utterly one particular sub-group: the one that erects for itself a martyrdom pedestal on which is engraved “Last Unprotected Minority.”

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Browning, Don't Ask | Link to this Entry

Cowards & penises

January 1st, 2003

Column: Don't Ask

BY LANE BROWNING

Dear D.A.
As political violence has become more prominent and publicized, I find myself really irritated at world leaders whose vocabulary shows so little imagination. Every time there’s a suicide bombing or some kind of “terrorist” event, presidents and prime ministers have to condemn it as a “cowardly” act. Maybe I’m dense, but what’s “cowardly” about flying a plane into a building or detonating oneself on a commuter bus? Isn’t a coward someone who runs away?

I feel the same way you do, but Bill Maher got pilloried for saying it takes more guts to smack into a building than to drop a bomb from miles above. The last two U.S. presidents have been particularly guilty of this repetitive verbal compost. Clinton used “cowardly” in reference to the Oklahoma bombing, the embassy bombings, and the 1995 explosion at the World Trade Center. George W. Bush couldn’t wait to denounce as “cowards” those who destroyed the twin towers in New York and those who punched a hole in the USS Cole. Bush in particular has maybe a three-page thesaurus in his head, but Clinton and other leaders should know better. Call such “activists” monsters, sub-humans, scum, dirt, slime, sickos, demons or even zealots if you wish; use “heinous” sparingly and “cowards” not at all.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Browning, Don't Ask | Link to this Entry