Priorities.

I read today that two retired US generals have joined forces to complain about the high level of obesity among American children. It seems their concern is not for the children’s health, which would be perfectly reasonable, but the fact that they’re too fat to fight. Obesity, they say, is a security issue.

My reaction was a bemused smile and a shake of the head. I wondered whether there’s more to the story than the brief report suggested. I wondered whether the two men in question are just typical hawkish rednecks and actually mean what they say, or whether there is some arcane agenda behind it. I considered whether it is yet another symptom of the rule-by-fear principle, a sign that the obsessive preoccupation with threat is achieving a level of tolerance redolent of McCarthyism. Or is the military’s need for canon fodder simply finding itself at odds with the commercial machine’s desire to feed kids rubbish until they burst? What a strange world.