Anything goes?

Chestnut was disappointed when he couldn’t surpass his record of stuffing down 74 hot dogs in 10 minutes, even though he did win this year, with 72. (What has always intrigued me was how does he know when to stop). Don’t his fans realize that this disgusting contest is a threat to Joey’s health and those who may try to imitate him? Don’t they see that the contest should be banned — especially so that mindless and impressionable people (especially the young) do not imitate him? How many children, after seeing that on TV might try something similar? Does he have any idea what this practice may be doing to his health? Brings to mind a quip by George Price: “Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t the fine line between sanity and madness gotten finer?” — George Price.

It was gratifying when the news anchors on Channel 2, after reporting on Chestnut’s orgy, said that watching that made them feel ill and like they never wanted to eat a hot dog again. Making some kind of hero out of the winner of this contest is irresponsible and such behavior disgusting! It’s a blatant example of how our cultural standards are deteriorating. Any standards that we may have had are going down the tubes as so many people make heroes of even the most egregious examples of humanity. Like the news anchors, anyone with any sense of decency is sickened by such gross and inappropriate behavior.

As reported in the Mercury News, sportscaster Peter King disparaged competitive eating when he tweeted: “A shame that as at least one in five children in America go to bed hungry nightly, they’re highlighting — treating someone who overeats excessively as a competitive athlete. ... Truly disgusting.”

Why this is even allowed, much less supported and publicized? How far will it have to go before it is ended? Are we waiting for catastrophe before the danger is taken seriously? As Maxine Schnall wrote in her very insightful book, “Limits”: “We must remember how our actions can effect others — how everything that we think of doing is not necessarily something to be emulated.”

Another July event that boggles the mind is the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain. It got more local publicity this year because on the first day a man from San Francisco was gored in the neck. Just viewing a bit of it on TV is enough to make you wonder what makes so many men turned on by running down the street with a bunch of wild animals and similar fanatics. It blows the mind when we read: “The nine-day San Fermin festival in which six bulls are run every morning in the city’s narrow streets before being killed in afternoon bull-fights draws 1 million visitors annually, including many from the United States.”

As Maxine Schnall would explain: “We have set ourselves free to do virtually anything we choose, but we have no way of judging the validity, morality or even sanity of our choices in a culture where everything is right and nothing is wrong.” … “We must break our silence on those moral truths that have not been eroded by time or social change. However unsure we are of how to meld them with the particular circumstances of contemporary life, we must still speak out for the major human values embedded in our collective conscience throughout history — honesty, responsibility, decency.” 

Seems Albert Einstein summed it up when he declared: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I’m not at all sure about the former.” 

Since 1984, Dorothy Dimitre has written more than 1,000 columns for various local newspapers. Her email address is gramsd@aceweb.com.