Carholics Anonymous

So yesterday, out of the blue, an ardent Catholic reader of VDARE, an alt Right site, brought the love of Jesus to this wretched sinner by commenting on this photo on my FB wall*:

You’re not morbidly obese yet so you can turn things around. Just stop eating garbage in excess and move more. You’re an embrassment to us other Carholics.

He continued in that vein for some time, bringing in important comments about my genitalia which I will spare you.  He did it for Jesus because he was, he informed me, super concerned about how my witness as a disgusting gluttonous fatso would affect his sons and the Faith he was working to instill in them.

He then went on to this photo of my totes adorbs grand-daughter (Charlotte Rose, posted here out of sheer grandfatherly self-indulgence)…

to add something to the effect that “She’s screaming because her grandpa is such a big fatass.”

Now I hate to be an embrassment to Carholics. Believe me.  I’ve been right on the edge of the Carholic abyss myself.  Once I was at this party and this hot chick handed me a car. Told me everybody was doing it. I was hesitant. She asked if I wanted to be a “square” or fit in with the “cool kids”. I was “hep” to her “jive”, “Daddy-O”.  So I tried a “hit” off the exhaust pipe. It was psychedelic. But I thought of my mother, came to my senses, and got out of there before I became “honked” (as the kids say).

Still and all, I appreciate my reader sharing his wisdom from his own background with addiction. Carholism is a serious health issue. I’m glad he is getting the support he needs from other Carholics.

But seriously folks, one of the curious things about super-Catholics is that they seem to *love* Fat Insults. Now, I enjoy a good fat joke as much as anybody.  As a fat guy myself, I have always acknowledged the ordinary human wisdom of fellow fat guy G.K. Chesterton who said, “To be fat is to be laughed at, and that is a more wholesome experience for the soul of man.”  Indeed, Chesterton came up with some pretty good fat jokes himself.  Confronted by a woman during WWI who demanded to know why he was not out at the front, he replied, “Madame, if you go round to my side, you will see that I am.”

Being laughed at for being fat is part of the human condition.  People have always done it and always will.  It would be a colder, darker world if we couldn’t laugh at Falstaff, Oliver Hardy, or that One Thin Mint sketch by the Pythons.

But at the same time, for heaven’s sake, do it right!  Don’t be like that meathead in Cyrano de Bergerac who says, “Your nose is rather large!”

So come on! “Fatass”? Is that the best you can do? Try something like “I’m not saying Shea is fat, but he does have his own gravitational field” or “I hear the portly Shea is publishing a new book called A Sphere Mercy.” Ah me! I slay me!

It is the predicament of Uber-Righteous Christians that they must always wrap their burning hatred of others in moralism. They can’t just say what they really mean (“I hate your living guts, you fat son of a bitch, and I want to hurt you as badly as I possibly can for hate’s sake.”) because the Best Christians of All Time aren’t allowed to just hate people’s living guts like that. “Love your enemies” gets in the way of that naked hatred. So they have to wrap it all in some moralistic preachment about gluttony and the “witness of the Church” and “I’m saying this because I care about your health–fatass” and so forth.

I run into this repeatedly from Super Catholics (and, curiously, only from them, which is odd since it is typically the Left that moralizes about food the way the Right moralizes about sex). Uber-Catholics love the playground taunts about my weight but, sensing that at some level they look like third graders, they always dress it up in moralism about The Sin of Gluttony. They do not stop to ask if I have, in fact, lost weight (I’m down 80 pounds from my high of a few years ago). They do not pause to inquire if I am still attempting to drop more weight. Nor do they consider that there may be other issues, like diabetes, involved. Nor do they consider all the other fat people they hurt as collateral damage in their public attempts to hurt me. Nor do they consider the possibility that St. Thomas Aquinas and Pope St. John XXIII may have some tart words for them when they get to the Pearly Gates. Because, despite the moralistic pose, all they really want is to scratch the eyes out of somebody they hate with the fury and purity of an eight year old.

But their primitive Uber-Catholic theology gets in the way. So they can’t just say what they really mean. They have to dress it up in Christianese. And so, hilariously, they strain at the gnat of bourgeois propriety while swallowing the camel of black satanic hatred. They take care not to use Bad Words like “I hope you burn in hell, you fat bastard” while conveying exactly that contempt and malice in nice Puritan language and fake Concern.

Very Fat Chesterton bade us Break the Conventions and Keep the Commandments. In contrast, Breaking the Commandments and keeping the Conventions is the essence of Puritanized Reactionary Hate Piety. I’ll take Chesterton any day over that.

*The photo is of the extremely cool–and now tragically vandalized–Bicycle Tree on Vashon Island, which you can read all about here.