Abandoning The Pursuit Of Excellence & America’s Fascination With Pooh-Poohing.
I took some time today to shoot the breeze with an acquaintance who I hadn’t spoken to in quite some time. After he picked my brain on a few business topics, he poked the bear in me and asked for my sociopathic – cough, sociological – opinion on the whole anti-body consciousness movement. When I prefaced my opinion with “speaking as a fat man myself,” he practically lost his sanity laughing and telling me to be comfortable with myself. What came out of my mouth next, however, should make any thinking person stop and evaluate the symptoms of a broader societal abandonment of virtue.
Yes, I am fat relatively. Years of shining a chair with my rear end for 12 to 20 hours a day have seen to that. I poke fun at myself, acknowledge a problem, and fight for time in my day to pursue a solution. I regularly tease friends that I am preparing for the most eligible dad bod contest in the world. In other words, I am honest with myself and the world.
Woe betides you though if you dare to call another person fat. You are now body-shaming – a moral evil almost as bad as your white male privilege. Imply that someone needs to work on his or her physique, and you become a sinister body-shamer – a designation almost as evil as being a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Ask Peloton. It found out the hard way.
Common courtesy would counsel against me ever calling someone fat to his or her face unless I had an established verbal jousting relationship or they asked for my opinion on their physique. I, however, will not condemn anyone for expressing candid opinions when evaluating someone else’s physique.
The anti-body consciousness cancel movement makes me wonder if American society is gradually abandoning the pursuit of excellence and becoming enamored with pooh-poohing. Candor and criticism have become evil in America. Society no longer pushes people to confront their problems and find solutions to them. Instead, subpar standards become sanctimonious celebrations of a false focus on superficial courtesy, and candid criticism dies on an altar of pooh-poohing.
Slut-shaming is another example. Tell a woman that she’s dressed like a street walker, and the liberated whores mafia will prepare a social cement kimono for you. Question whether a skimpily clad woman has the personality and virtue to attract a man, and you could find yourself tied to a cannonball faster than you can say Ticonderoga. Criticize the whores who crash the town on a weekend night and spread their legs to every pig rooting in the gutter will sign your own death warrant. In other words, candidly commenting that women should show a little more class, virtue, and personality to attract mates is a violation of the pooh-poohing code.
Controversial examples, eh? The list goes on and on.
Categories of pooh-poohing are merely symptoms of a bigger problem though. Society has lost a moral compass and a barometer of excellence. Faults and flaws are no longer the problems and struggles of those who possess them. Instead, candor and criticism are unforgivably evil faults and flaws of the folks who dare to pursue those virtues.
Thus, America’s new fascination is to chase the next opportunity to pooh-pooh. It’s sad to see a society give up competing for excellence and pander to imperfection through holier-than-thou pooh-poohing.
