Lifestyles of the Sick and Pudgy

The United States is no longer the most totally awesome nation in the world, according to the World Economic Forum’s new Global Competitiveness index.

In fact, we’ve fallen to 4th on the list, which is designed to quantify long-term economic viability, fiscal health, and overall coolness.

It tends to reflect each country’s overall quality of life by measuring strength of infrastructure (our pristine roadways), commitment to innovation (new iPhone apps that mimic lava lamps), and public confidence in government institutions (let’s not go there).

Just two years ago, we were sitting pretty at Number One. Everyone wanted to be us.

What the hell happened?

I’ll tell you what happened. They stacked this whole ranking system against us.

According to WEF analysts, we declined because of increased debt. In case you weren’t paying attention, our government just went and borrowed an asinine amount of money to sidestep a “depression” in favor of an “economic downturn” (a less alarming euphemism for “recession that should end any year now”).

This was on top of the previously asinine amount of money borrowed to fund a pair of wars, along with untold billions of debt accrued to pay for rebuilding doorways for our giant fat arses to fit through.

According to Forbes Magazine, the U.S.A. is the 9th most overweight nation on Earth, with about 74% of us sporting a Body Mass Index more than 25. A BMI of 30 qualifies as “obese.”

The eight nations heavier than us on the fat scale are all tiny Pacific Islands you’ve never heard of, where people survive on leftover SPAM shipped from Australia, and they can’t go jogging because it only takes 45 steps to cross the entire country.

As the fluffiest industrialized nation in the world, we find ourselves at a severe handicap when it comes to competitiveness. Switzerland, which claimed the Number One ranking in global competitiveness, checks in at a svelte 50% of its population overweight, good for 63rd fattest in the world.

In Singapore (3rd most competitive), anyone using a public restroom has their excess body fat trimmed off with invisible lasers.

Aside from discriminating against fatsos, the competitiveness index also favors smaller countries. Most in the top ten have around 5 million people or less; at 310 million, we are easily the biggest country in that range, with more than twice as many people as Japan (8th).

No other large countries even come close. China and its 1.3 billion people ranked 27th, not too far from Iceland, which just saw its entire banking system collapse like a poodle carrying a lawnmower, only faster.

But what is the most glaring flaw in the WEF measurements? They completely ignore the fact that all these other so-called “prosperous” countries are on the way to bankrupting themselves by offering universal healthcare.

The United States is the only nation in the top 30 on this index that does not offer government-paid medical services for all citizens.

Come on. Did these “world-renowned economists” get their diplomas out of a Happy Meal or something? Don’t they see how the U.S.A. is positioning itself for continued world domination by basing a massive chunk of its economy (17.5%) on exploiting the sick and pudgy?

I say we ignore the World Economic Forum and its twisted anti-American agenda. Carry on as normal. If things get really bad, we can always invade Switzerland.

Life’s a Breach... of Communication

I didn’t feel like going to the beach. My wife didn’t feel like going to the beach. Our five-year-old wasn’t in the mood for it, either.

So how did we all end up speeding down the highway against our will for an afternoon in the sun, sand, and waves?

The idea first came up well after noon. “It’ll be 2:00 by the time we get in the car,” I said. “It’s not worth three hours of driving for so little time to spend there.”

My wife’s response to this highly logical and irrefutable point -- this is the critical part -- was to argue against it.

She started talking abouProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

low tide and finding starfish and this possibly being our last chance to enjoy a sunny day at the beach before fall.

Listening to all that, I stupidly concluded that my wife wanted to go to the beach.

What was actually going on, I found out later, was that she felt ambivalent, and adopted the position opposite mine as a way of trying to figure out what she wanted.

In other words, she was not saying what she felt, just trying stuff out. How bass-ackwards is that?

Anyway, we went back and forth for a while, and eventually I decided that I didn’t care that much, so if she wanted to go to the beach that badly, we might as well go.

So I said, “Alright, let’s go.” She interpreted this to mean that I wanted to go, and decided she might as well go along with what I wanted, since she couldn’t make up her mind.

To be fair, the words “I want to go to the beach” never left her mouth, and I never asked, “Do you really want to go to the beach?” Still, that was small consolation once we were being serenaded with “are we there yet” and “I’m bored” over and over and over.

By now I’ve been married long enough to have more or less forgotten what it was like to be with other women.

So it’s hard for me to know if most women view communication as a tool for experimenting with ideas and torturing their husbands, or it’s just this one woman who agreed to marry me, presumably as an expression of her actual intent. (If you have any insight on this question, please pass it along.)

At any rate, we ended up spending a fabulous couple of hours at Popham Beach, where the image of my daughter delightfully dancing and cartwheeling along in the shallow waves became my most vivid summer memory.

So I can’t really complain.

Especially since the love of my life would be quick to point out some of my own communication flaws. For example, she often complains that I don’t seem to be listening or paying attention to what she’s saying.

I have a simple explanation for this: my genitals.

In the book “A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication,” Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker explain how how men and women are trained to use conversation cues differently.

For example, when a woman says “yes,” or “um-hmm,” to someone to whom she’s listening, she is likely to mean, “Okay, I’m listening. Please continue.” When a man uses them, he probably means, “Please take off your clothes.”

Ha! Just kidding. They mean “I agree with you.”

The authors say this type of misunderstanding explains why men can never figure out what women are really thinking, and women feel like we’re never listening.

Of course, it could have something to do with a little trip to the beach...