Which brings me to this question. Why are Americans so obsessed with everything being big? Especially when it seems painfully obvious that our obsession with bigger is highly dysfunctional, even destructive? Have we learned nothing whatsoever from Katrina?
Big cars, big ass trucks, big highways, big boats, big houses,big skyscrapers, big churches, big stadiums, big cities, bigger suburbs, big credit lines, big deficits, big bank balances, big profits, big hair, big tits, big dicks, big storms (CNN and The Weather Channel love this shit), big disasters, big stories, big hits, big victories, big home runs, big offensive linemen, Superbowls, big game (ever seen a hunter in a pic next to a squirrel?), big lawn tools (there’s a new leaf blower coming called “Katrina”), big stores (ever been to a Super Wall Mart?), big meals, Big Mac’s,big pizzas, big turkeys, big drinks and on and on and on.
We Supersize almost everything.
Of course, there are some things we don’t like big. Although we have a lot of them, big waist lines are not “in,” and a certain segment of our society is intent on holding women to some unrealistic, even unhealthy ideal of weighing 104 pounds for their entire adult life. We don’t like big electronics, unless it’s tee-vees. We like small iPOD’s and itsy bitsy cameras and small speakers with big sound. We don’t like big words, because we’re basically a stupid nation, preferring to stick with the elementary diction and guttural utterances made popular by our President. And we apparently don’t like big populations of buffalo, grizz or wolves, and certain groups don’t care for big populations of blacks, Chinese, Indians, Mexicans or Jews.
Thanks to the growth economy, we’ve cast aside small towns with cottages and bungalows and replaced them with megacities with megahouses on tiny plots of land.
This all adds up to societal stress, melting ice caps, rising seas, unhealthy ecosystems, unhealthy bodies, unhealthy economies and bankruptcy. In other words, a big mess.
“In Fourteen Hundred and Ninety Two, Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue….”