With some politician’s proposal that morbidly obese children be taken away from their parents and put into foster care, viewers are being treated to debates about this issue yammering on over video “fat cam” images of fat people, from the neck down, walking down the sidewalk. This is common practice these days, especially on cable news programming, where noise and posturing and exaggeration and tabloid formats rule the day; but even so, there is outrage over this practice. Of course I’m referring to my own outrage over the “fat cam” footage. (I just made up the term “fat cam” so everyone would know what I’m talking about, and I hope it’s clear.) For you see, only about half of the people in that footage are really fat anymore! At least half of these people are just a bit chubby or a smidge chunky, and that’s hardly what I’d call morbidly obese! (Cheaters! They want to be treated like morbidly obese people without having to earn it! It’s disgraceful!)
So what’s going on here? Are all the fat people catching on and not walking down the sidewalk anymore? I wouldn’t if I were obese! After all, it’s an insult, and they’re cashing in on it! There are probably companies specializing specifically in B-Roll of anonymous fat people, and they don’t deserve that business if only half of the people they’re filming (or less, in some cases!) are actually obese! We’re being gypped out of all the fat we’re paying for, right? And if the “obesity epidemic” really is an epidemic, then how come they can’t get more fat people in these stock shots of fat people?
I think I may have the answer, however, and it comes down to money again. (See? Capitalism really is evil, and hurts us all by depriving us of the higher percentage of fat people per second we deserve in our stock fat-person B-Roll images!) See, it’s most likely one of two things that’s causing this problem. The first is that perhaps the “fat-cam” film companies are gouging for the really good stuff! So if you don’t meet their exorbitant demand for cash, you won’t get all the obscenely obese personages you crave. And perhaps as the obesity epidemic intensifies, their excessive demands for cash will only grow exponentially worse! So after a while, if you don’t meet their price, you’ll only get film of people with like love handles and stuff; and you’ll never be able to have any credibility arguing about obesity over film like that! People simply won’t buy it! (They won’t buy it {the argument} if you don’t buy it {the primo, expensive film of ultra-fat people}!)
Now that was the first possibility for why we’re not getting all the morbidly obese people in the “fat-cam” films anymore: hyper-inflated fat film fees! Now, the second possibility also has to do with this cost issue, in how these news agencies are trying to battle these exorbitant prices from “fat-cam” companies: perhaps they’re trying to make the “fat-cam” B-Roll themselves! But you see, these fat-cam obese-o-rama filmmakers are true professionals! You can’t just show up on a sidewalk and expect to get primo obese people film clips right off the bat! So they’re just getting crappy shots of moderately fat people, simply because they have neither the patience nor experienced professionalism to achieve the same scintillating results as the super-slick, expensive fat-person filmmakers. And so we’re being denied the obesity we crave, simply due to budgetary constraints, and I think that’s wrong.
You know, if this problem persists, pretty soon we’ll have to become obese ourselves, and film ourselves in the mirror or something. But never fear: with the obesity epidemic snowballing like it is, it won’t be long before we can all do this without having to make an effort to gain weight: it will simply happen all by itself! And that’s a relief.
Here’s the story from ABC News, so I’m not making it up (But they don’t have that awesome fat footage!):
There is, by the way, an odd quote in this video from a girl with obesity issues, who says something that sounds pretty ironic: see if you notice what it is (a hint: It has something to do with surrounding doctors).
