“… who will not outlive their parents.”

I am sitting here listening to this shite [such a useful word] on Michigan Radio. There is, I have just been told by an actual physician, an obesity emergency among the young people of our state. She is telling the interviewer in a serious and alarmed tone that children are dying over this horrible immoderation.

You know, it would be reasonable—and even frightening—if only I knew no history. Hyperbole like this does not grow more palatable as one gets older.

It just pisses you off more, until you get shrill.

If the doctor in question is being serious, then she ought to be sent back to get an actual undergraduate degree. Because obviously she wasn’t paying attention, neither in history class nor in statistics, nor epidemiology. Given the lower extremes of intellectual quality of the pre-med students I have encountered through the years, that would be unsurprising. But irregardless (as she might say), she shouldn’t be on the fuckin’ radio spouting such nonsense.

Even if it’s in the cause of a serious and real problem.

If on the other hand the doctor is using intentional exaggeration to drive home her point, then she ought to be made to read the exact same words from historical tracts, when they were applied the last times to childhood drinking, childhood tobacco use, childhood masturbation, childhood disobedience, and childhood in general: that the [large-scale geopolitical unit]’s children are worse now than ever before.

Yes, sure, we’re fat. Fat, rich people. Lazy ones, too. And many of us will die for reasons associated with that latter, I expect, rather than the former.

But regardless of McDonald’s and Coca-Cola’s sins, and the swelling tide of Liberal Temperance growing in this here Global Union of Democracy we’re infecting the world with: this is still one of the first generations of children who will, on average, outlive their parents.

I would like to take this moment to propose that there is a horrifying stupidity emergency among the nation’s physicians. They act and speak as if they were scientists, when in fact they are the shoddiest of mere engineers: they work primarily on hearsay and received wisdom, camouflaging their incessant cavalcade of gross mistakes and tacit compliance with marketeers under the guise of constant emergency and our imminent demise. I say that they should all be assigned a professional intellectual conscience, a constant companion who advises them not to make any decision or utterance that is not informed with direct experiment or real statistical evidence. No prescriptions without real, specific cause; no admonishments or blandishments without proof the hearer is a representative example from the clinical trial they’re invoking; no insistence on treatment without a detailed exposition on not only the risk of death, but the risk of unnaturally continued life.

They might, at least, learn to keep their mouths shut and let things run their natural course more often. And might even bring about less of the very morbidity that their ignorance encourages in their patients.

So, Doc, you think I’m painting with a broad brush? You think you’re more careful, more conscientious, more effective than I’m implying?

Talk to the lady on the radio.