Monday, October 13, 2008

The United States of Steroids.

The promise of steroids, of course, is like the promise of all drugs. They give you something, size, pleasure, penile-enhancement, you don't have to work for.

Some time over the last fifteen years, that became our national mantra. Something for nothing became our ethos.

Some time over the last fifteen years, everything grew out of control. Cattle got hormone enhanced and roughly doubled in size. A bottle of Coke, fifty years ago was 6.5 ounces, in my childhood it was 12 ounces, now a standard bottle is 20 ounces. Ballplayers who had never hit more than 17 homeruns were all of a sudden smacking four or five dozen. Barry Bonds who for fifteen years was 6'1" and 180 lbs over night ballooned to 240 lbs. His head looked like a quarter on the body of a watermelon.

The same has happened to movies. Bigger explosions. Bigger special effects. Bigger everything (except of course bigger story-telling, emotion, dialogue, plot, etc.) All this, of course, brings us to the stock market where everything got too big, too fast.

The issue with America today isn't merely the economy. It's how as a society we became drug addicted to 22-oz. steaks, 32-oz. Big Gulps, 7,200 sq. foot homes, 6,000-lbs. vehicles, 300-lbs. 9th-graders and $125,000,000 separation packages for failed executives.

What Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) yelled at Kaspar Guttman (Sydney Greenstreet) we could all be yelling at ourselves, watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeDNlXT7HdA

"You imbecile. You bloated idiot. You stupid fat-head you."

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