Hunger Hokum
HUNGERHOKUM Vice president Gore wants you to know that the executive branch he represents is the finest, best intentioned, most effective in history. Gore is a proud man. But he is a thoughtful...
...You're thinking that the Centers for Disease Control's annual "Births and Deaths" report for 1996 has American life expectancy at an all-time high and American infant mortality at an all-time low (considerably less than half what it was in 1970...
...No one in the United States, tonight, tomorrow, or the next day, for reasons of finance, faces a measurable danger that he will "starve...
...Quick: Someone "glean" these boys a half-eaten idea...
...You're also thinking that far from wasting away, Americans at all levels of income are growing markedly obese...
...The whole little episode makes such a neat, pathetic commentary on the emptiness of second-term Clintonism in general...
...You will not even be surprised to "learn" that among these chronically "hungry" Americans are 185,000 households—with almost 700,000 individual members—who have annual incomes exceeding $40,000...
...The survey's own authors point out that clinical measurements of the "physical sensation caused by a lack of food" do not provide "sensitive indicators" of any problem as it is "primarily experienced in the U.S...
...The Left, for its part, has traditionally made crude appeals to the American heart with Dickensian fantasies about current conditions of poverty...
...That's not what's most interesting about it, though...
...It's become a fixed routine...
...You're thinking that Americans in every economic category are able to spend ever lower percentages of their income on food—to the point where groceries are less a budgetary burden on the poorest Americans than they are on middle-income Europeans...
...Now, we know what you're thinking...
...And until recently, Democratic-party liberalism has always encouraged such sentimentality in order to advance some hard-boiled, real-world design—some new or expanded social program or entitlement...
...And other federal statistical instruments consistently establish the following link between personal income and portliness: The less money you earn, the more likely you are to be fat...
...So you will not be surprised to "learn" that there are a whopping 11.9 million "food insecure" U.S...
...But he is a thoughtful man, too, a teller of unpleasant truths...
...This land is your land, it is supposedly choking with privation, and the Clinton administration politely suggests that you should donate your half-eaten sandwich to a local community kitchen...
...And it hopes, all the while, that no one notices how little his administration actually dares to do about anything...
...So what in the world is the vice president talking about...
...It is happy to pretend that little children with distended bellies will shortly begin wilting in our streets...
...But they are extremely rare, almost statistically unde-tectable...
...So he must remind us, as he did at a special "summit" meeting in Washington on September 15, that despite four-plus years of Clin-tonite achievement, it remains sadly the case that "all is not right with America...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Did you ever eat "less than you felt you should," or a nutritionally unbalanced or low-cost meal, for purposes of economy...
...In fact, there are "millions of Americans," the vice president reports, "who are simply not getting enough to eat" because they cannot "figure out how to make ends meet, how to get food on the table...
...The president—any president, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican—would be obliged to place full federal power behind a rescue...
...In simplest terms, they are referring, very loosely, to some nifty new numbers jointly baked up by the departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services—what Gore is pleased to call "the first-ever baseline study of the scope of hunger in America...
...Every household responding yes to at least three such catchall queries has been officially designated at risk, or "food insecure...
...waistline since the late 1970s...
...The technical term for this kind of social-science project is: garbage...
...But the only practical response our ostentatiously "concerned" vice president can muster is a public service announcement featuring folk-music retreads Peter, Paul & Mary on something called food-waste "gleaning...
...At the very least, you would expect our current president, Bill Clinton, to demand an immediate expansion of federal food-aid spending, which now stands at $35.6 billion a year...
...Every year, to be sure, there are circumstances of more than incidental hunger—medically observable malnutrition—in our population of 260 million...
...Why, on any given evening—here "amid our amber waves of grain and our fruited plains" (and our million-dollar DNC soft-money fund-raising galas)—there are American children who lie awake in bed, tormented by a "sore pain...
...The Clinton administration administered this survey in 1995 during the one calendar week average Americans are most panicked about money: April 16 through April 22, right after tax time...
...The percentages of children and adolescents who are overweight have roughly doubled...
...This is "appalling," a "tragedy," a "blight on our nation's soul...
...And Al Gore will . . . not...tolerate it: "We cannot stand by and let people in this nation starve" Yes: "starve...
...You're thinking that CDC's "National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey" has found no significant protein, calorie, vitamin, or mineral deficiency in any major segment of the nation's population...
...But those good old days are clearly over, and something hard and cold with calculation has taken their place...
...But you would expect wrong, and that's the kicker...
...Only it turns out this "cornerstone" research isn't really about hunger per se...
...Just for starters, you would expect the president to call out the National Guard for distribution of bread and soup...
...Politicians have been exaggerating civic needs, and then proposing to meet them, since time began...
...context...
...households 58 questions largely designed to measure certain "characteristic affective states"—anxiety and uncertainty—involving food budgets and consumption...
...Messrs...
...The Clinton administration is happy to pretend that more than 11 million American stomachs are growling for lack of nourishment...
...You're thinking that hard evidence of this American starvation-through-poverty crisis is curiously missing from all the established statistical tables...
...What, for that matter, can Clinton agriculture secretary Dan Glickman possibly mean when he says that one in three American children "live in families that do constant battle with hunger" and are "at constant risk of malnutrition and the lifetime of chronic illness that can accompany it...
...households, comprising 34.7 million people...
...Clinton and Gore are now surviving on the very barest minimum daily allowance of ideological nutrients...
...Think, for a moment, what it would mean if almost one in seven Americans truly were, as the vice president ludicrously suggests, at serious risk of starvation...
...It would be a genuine national emergency...
...You would expect him to do something appropriate to scale...
...A full 35 percent of American adults are now overweight—up from 25 percent...
...There is otherwise no serious evidence of endemic and persistent American hunger...
...They're starving...
...The most recent data, reported by CDC in March, describe an impressive expansion of the U.S...
...At some point in the last 12 months, did you worry that the refrigerator would go empty before you could restock it...
...Or that 4.2 million of these households (11.2 million people) are now assumed by our government to be living with actual "resource-constrained hunger...
...The sore pain is hunger...
...And they are most commonly and directly associated not so much with poverty, but with alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, child abuse, or comparable individual or family pathology...
...So instead, the government has asked a representative sample of U.S...
...It asks the public to love and admire how much the president "cares...
...In other words, you could walk from sea to shining sea and never find much hunger, which result would make for a very dull vice presidential announcement, indeed—dull even by standards primarily experienced in the Al Gore context...
...This White House wildly and cynically hypes—or outright fabricates—a domestic-policy "crisis...
Vol. 3 • September 1997 • No. 3
