The View from a Drawbridge

In anticipation of my upcoming trip to Italy (assuming Musk hasn’t fired all the air traffic controllers before my plane even leaves US air space), I have been listening to travelogues via audiobook during my long commutes to and from work. I always enjoy my trips much more when my experiences have more context in the form of other points of view or historical perspectives that I wouldn’t normally encounter. You might say I’ve wandered through Italy before I’ve even packed my bags, so in some ways this trip will feel like coming home to a place I’ve never been.

Recently I finished an audiobook entitled, “My Venice and Other Essays” by Donna Leon. I highly recommend it, whether you’re headed to that fair city or not. It’s a book of about 50 essays, only some of which are about Venice, but after a certain point, I ceased to care that it got off my intended topic. Her writing style and subject matter were so entertaining and relatable that I couldn’t help but continue on. I was sad when it ended.

One essay, in particular, really hit me where I live. It was entitled “Instincts”, and it was about how the Italian legal system gives quite a bit of weight to the concept of “momentary insanity”. From what I gather, this is a handy catch-all excuse for when a person (usually a man) commits an uncharacteristically heinous act. You know the drill. “He couldn’t help himself.” “He was not fully responsible for what he did, as he was not in his right mind.”

I have always hated this temporary insanity gambit, because it seems to absolve the perpetrator of any responsibility for his actions. The victims, most often women, are then expected, and often required, to shoulder the burden of mitigating any damages that these out-of-control men might visit upon them. The men are out of control, but somehow that becomes the fault of the women, and they’re expected to do the dusting up afterward.

I once got into a debate with someone about a blog post I wrote about women who wear chadors. My stance is that women (and all adults, for that matter) can wear whatever they want, so if a woman genuinely wishes to wear a chador, due to her own religious convictions or for any other reason (which, by the way, requires no justification), then more power to her. But I suspect, simply due to the fact that chadors are so often black and are being worn in the hottest parts of the planet, one could argue that they are quite often not being worn voluntarily. Also, how quickly they are sometimes removed once women fly beyond certain borders is a massive clue as well.

In response to my post, though, a woman (a woman!) said that she had to dress that way because men cannot control themselves otherwise. I had to practically wrestle my knee-jerk reaction into submission. It could have gone either way. It was a very near thing.

What I wanted to say was, “So, society has taught these grown-ass men that they don’t have to behave accordingly. Instead, it falls upon the women to live their lives cloistered within their own clothing while the men run buck wild. Nice.”

Instead, I simply suggested that perhaps she might consider that, like most women, most men can control themselves. It’s just that they choose not to. And they choose not to because they are supported by a system that allows them to get away with it. The author made a very good point when she said that if a man were experiencing an irresistible urge to rape a woman, you have to wonder if he’d be able to resist said urge if the woman said, “I’ve got AIDS.”

Ms. Leon also wondered why, if you look at the stereotypes, men’s “irresistible” urges often resulted in violence and harm toward others, whereas women’s seemed to be more along the lines of eating too much cake. (Come to think of it, that, ultimately, is self-harm. Maybe we should start forcing the cake down men’s throats instead. The violence might not be immediately apparent, but the results could eventually prove fatal.)

Naturally, that made me wander off onto one of my many mental side streets and think about the concept of empty calories, as in food with no nutritional value. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we Americans ate more junk food than any other nation on earth. That would certainly explain why we struggle with obesity.

Interestingly, according to the Global Obesity Observatory, If you look strictly at adult males in the world, only 9 countries have higher obesity rates than the United States, and all of them are Pacific islands. But if you look at only females, America drops to number 36. So even when it comes to food, women appear to have more control than men do. I’d hate to think that that’s due to societal bullying in the form of body shaming, but I have my suspicions. Still, even when faced with chocolate truffles, we come out on top. Fascinating.

America in general is the land of empty calories. And that extends far beyond food. Excess abounds. We are an all-you-can-eat society. We want our money’s worth. Why stop at one when you can have two or ten? We have a president who eats junk food and spews nonsense that poses a danger to the world, and a large portion of us seem to think that that is just dandy. He is surrounded by sycophants, and he thinks he is loved and admired when in fact he’s being used. His ego feasts on empty calories.

More and more of us seem to be living lives without purpose, or with a purpose so selfish as to be meaningless in the overall scheme of things. People go to work and cash their paychecks whether or not they have done their jobs. We justify this by asserting that CEOs make sure that those paychecks are smaller than they should be, so why make any effort?

Civic duty and pride seem to be a thing of the past. We watch news that resembles the tabloids you used to only see in the grocery checkout lines. We believe in conspiracy theories, and have lost the art of critical thinking. We keep busy, yes, but what do we really accomplish? (And the irony is not lost on me, Dear Reader, that I’m writing this to an audience of, I’m guessing, 3 or 4 people on a good day.)

We have been habituated to empty calories, and our primary urge these days is to consume as many of them as we can, on every possible level. It’s as if America has climbed into a greasy old potato chip bag, has eaten itself sick, and, having let out a self-satisfied belch, is now loudly snoring. Because the urge was irresistible.