Journalist Ron Rosenbaum, who visited the Writers Institute in 2006, offers a critique of an American cultural phenomenon he calls "fat guy authenticity" in Slate this past Monday.
"Jersey fat-guy authenticity is a subcategory of Generalized Fat-Guy Authenticity, and you can trace the roots of Generalized Fat-Guy Authenticity all the way back beyond Falstaff to the Buddha with his fat bellyful of aphorisms. I always wondered about that: The Buddha preached abolition of worldly appetites, yet judging by the many representations of his bloated belly, the guy seems never to have missed a meal. Maybe there’s a mystic lesson there."
"But let us not get lost in the mists of time. Let us look at the evolution of fat-guy authenticity, and the recent rise of the Jersey Fat Guy as an icon of authenticity, the trope that has endowed Chris Christie with his heavyweight hubris." More.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
The Jersey Fat Guy Authenticity Thing
