Morford: "Obese American Tourists, Ho!"

[Yollam]

After reading this sneering piece by The San Francisco Chronicle's Mark Morford, I didn't quite know how I felt about it.

While it's clear that as a nation we have an obesity problem, whose causes Morford touches on, I'm not sure I like his premise that San Francisco is some island of health floating in a sea of flab.

He ridicules people from flyover country for having "1994 haircuts", "mullets", "fanny packs", etc. etc. Honestly, I can't remember the last time I read an article in a major paper that was so snotty and immature. Who cares if inland folks are less-than-cutting edge? I live here in San Francisco, and must take exception with his characterization of this city as being full of nothing but lithe, toned, yoga-practicing spiritualists. I have seen plenty of people so obese that they have to ride on those little scooter things here. At the McDonald's at Haight & Stanyan, you can see a collection of people with WAY too many unsanitary-looking piercings, scab-covered meth addicts, people with dreads so filthy, you wish you could wash your eyes after looking at them - any day of the week. Maybe everybody is beautiful and happy in the trendy Hayes valley neighborhood Morford lives in, but I see plenty of people on the Muni everyday who look neither healthy nor happy. Maybe it's paying $1500 to rent a 400 sq. foot studio that's bringing them down...

And since he singles out white, middle-class folks in his piece, I would point out that whites are a minority in this city, slightly outnumbered by Asians, who are well-known for their trimmer, smaller frames. And if you look at the demographics of the whites that are here, they tend to skew younger and gayer than in most cities.

And Mr. Morford, have you ever raised kids? Because I can tell you, I found it much easier to keep trim when I was single, reading the right indie papers, going to the coffee houses, pretending to be hip. Raising a family changes priorities and fitness often takes a back seat.

As I've detailed in posts in the Lounge, I've personally been battling back from obesity and have lost 50 lbs so far. I hope everybody can be fitter and feel better, wherever they're from. I just don't see how some some snotty column by a single, childless writer living the trendy life in an insular burg like San Francisco is going to help them do it.

Anyway, here's his little column. See what you think of it.




Obese American Tourists, Ho!

One vacation to the Baja coast is all you need to see the staggering downfall of the country



By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, February 22, 2006

I have seen deep azure seas and delicious star-addled skies and crazily overdressed mariachi bands playing "La Cucaracha" for drunken tourists so many times in one night the poor bass player looked like he wanted to be shot.

I have seen the classic American mullet and the epic Mexican mullet, both shockingly alive and well and for some ungodly reason flourishing like angry time-warp ferrets on the heads of beefy simpleminded men so utterly lost to time and space they should be in some sort of institution. I mean, my God.

I have seen white tube socks with brown sandals, dark tube socks with white tennis shoes, the unholy and relentless use of fanny packs with terrifying Jesus-themed T-shirts, big gnarly dudes from Midwestern Screwyouland wearing giant Harley-Davidson muscle shirts tucked way, way into high-waisted denim shorts (true), walking around the pool and smoking Marlboros and sucking in their massive bellies and trying to look as if they weren't as confused and discomfited as a water buffalo on the moon.

I have seen more awful tattoos on more sunburned sacra of more terribly drunk blank-eyed 20-something girl-women than your average Jenna Bush sorority pool party. I have witnessed the wide-eyed tourist throngs flooding in from the massive cruise ships anchored just off the Baja coast, tumbling onto land with their bright name tags and their 1994 haircuts and their cruise-ship logo hats to buy Mexican trinkets and have their pictures taken with a large exhausted iguana in a tiny sombrero.