Westminster Council are considering cutting benefits paid to obese claimants who refuse to lose weight and enrol on authorised fitness programmes. Evidence, one might suggest, that if Tory politicians and their rich paymasters hate the poor and the unemployed, they positively despise the poor and the unemployed who also have the audacity to overeat.
For as Baudrillard pointed out thirty years ago, when obesity was almost an exclusively American phenomenon, the super-sized display the truth of the very system that produced them; its greed, its empty inflation, and its lack of shame.
The obese accept the challenge thrown down by contemporary capitalism: 'You want us to consume? Ok, we'll consume everything until we are no longer fit to work and we swallow you and all your money.'
When there's no hope of revolution or active resistance, then there can only be a passive-aggressive (and potentially suicidal) response to the violence and obscenity of the culture we are all a part of. Obesity, in other words, is a fatal strategy: an ironic transpolitical counter-challenge to the morbidity of the fat cats.
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