The Deadly Spins series first appeared in The Yukon News in 2000, and was expanded for Common Ground in 2004. I have updated it for GeoffOlson2.0.
Gluttony. Lust. Sloth. Greed. Anger. Envy. Pride.
In premodern western culture, clerics warned against “the seven deadly sins.” The modern era has inverted Christianity's soul-eroding scourges. To monopoly capitalism, the deadly sins are profitable states of mind; virtues rather than vices.
Gluttony and lust fuel billion-dollar industries of the flesh. Greed drives the quest for profit at any cost. Envy is a mainstay of the fashion industry and marketing as a whole. The revenge fantasies of anger are filtered through professional sports, video games and army recruitment advertisements. Pride fuels the educational and management bandwagons of high self-esteem. Even sloth, in its original sense as a torpor of the soul, has found a new, profitable form as clinical depression.
The age-old deadly sins have been rebranded as states of mind conducive to consumption. Sin has been spun. Hence, what I call “The Deadly Spins.”
The series begins with the first of the Deadly Spins, Gluttony.
- Geoff Olson
––––––-----–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Gambling with Cholesterol
One day, in the far-off future, archeologists will come across the remnants of the Statue of Liberty. Nearby, they’ll dig up a Sphinx, and further north, a pirate ship. The archeologists may well wonder what kind of civilization they’ve found. Yet the scene they’ll be diggin’ won’t be civilization, exactly – it will be the remains of Las Vegas.
On the outskirts of today’s Vegas, sagebrush dots the dry nothingness like Don King clones buried up to their hairlines in dirt. The fastest expanding suburb in the US is spreading into this Nevada nothingness, but Vegas could send its suburban tendrils out for decades to come before it makes a dent in the surrounding desert. But then there’s the water issue. The gambling mecca is already turning into a cautionary tale for the Anthropocene. As California, Nevada and the western states jockey over diminishing water reserves from the Columbia River, the terrifically thirsty Vegas looks set to become a political flashpoint.
From the air, the red plain surrounding Vegas resembles Mars. Looking down, you realize why Nevada was a longtime choice spot for the military to drop bombs - and the mob to dump bodies. The off-world setting makes Vegas itself seem like a geographical non-sequitur, a seam of fool’s gold running through the US Defence Department’s sandbox.
Las Vegas, even in its latest, mob-free incarnation, is a theme park for the Deadly Spins. It’s here we find excess in all its red-blooded, corporate-branded, all-American glory. Figuring prominently in the mix is food.
Retreating into the MGM Grand Hotel one sun-baked afternoon, my friends and I discover the buffet. If the sophisticated traveller can ignore the decor - a Wizard of Oz theme filtered through a Chuck E. Cheese sensibility, topped by a Mafia housewife’s colour scheme - the MGM Grand’s epicurean display looks very appealing.
Inside the mammoth buffet area, there’s a sneeze guard converging to a vanishing point at the other end of the room. Heaped into great stainless steel sarcophagi are immense portions of lobster, crab, prawns, beef Wellington, and filet mignon. For dessert there’s chocolate mousse, cheesecake, black forest cake and every imaginable form of confection.
There is so much culinary overkill on display it beggars description and put the muscle on metaphors. Since I’m not gambling while I’m here, I figure I should maximize my vacation dollar by eating as much as I can. I’ve never won a pie-eating contest or anything of that sort. In fact, I’ve never attempted a damn-the-torpedoes act of gluttony before this. I’m in the right place for the challenge, it seems. I fill my plate and chow down. I fill it again. I return for dessert. And more dessert. And then a third trip for dessert. My friends are amused, then mildly horrified, at how much is disappearing down the Olson piehole. So what? The only thing I’m gambling with on this trip is my cholesterol level.
Gluttony. Of all the original deadly sins, it’s the one that hardly seems deadly at all, at least in the spiritual sense. Yet Pope Gregory the Great certainly didn't take gluttony for granted. He had no doubt it was a deadly sin. In fact, it was Gregory who put it on the list we use today.
A Praetorian Guard of the Flesh
“Superbia, ira, invidia, avaritia, acedia, gula, luxuria.” Gregory compiled that list 1,400 years ago. Pride, or superbia in Latin, heads the list, followed by envy, anger, avarice and sloth. These are all sins of the spirit, of the mind, the soul: the true or higher self. Gluttony, or gula in Latin, is near the end next to lust. These are the carnal sins of the flesh, the body or the lower self. Gluttony may not head the list, but that doesn't mean Pope Gregory thought it a minor player in his hit parade of sin.
To Catholic clerics, carnality meant a focus on bodily desires that displaced spiritual concerns. Gregory would have blown his miter over the MGM Grand's seafood buffet, an abomination if there ever was one. For how can anyone properly contemplate Higher Things with a dessert tray fit for Herod taunting them?
“The belly, when it is not restrained, destroys the virtues of the soul,” Gregory wrote. “It is not food, but the desire for food that is the cause of damnation.” And damned if I didn’t feel great after my third dessert. Finishing up from my buffet binge, I loosen my belt and rise from the table with some effort. My friends and I amble past the slot machines in the MGM Grand, where the scene is Gary Larsen by way of B.F. Skinner, with the beer-bellied and helmet-haired working the levers like lab rats. Stumbling out into the harsh Vegas sunlight, we make for Las Vegas Boulevard. My friends are walking normally, but after my fit of gluttony all I can manage is a modified gallumph. It almost pains me to put one leg in front of the other.
Outside the Mirage Hotel, we stop to admire a large bust of famed animal trainers Siegfried and Roy, one of whom who became a chew toy in an unrehearsed tiger-taming routine. As I waddle on, it occurs to me that Vegas isn’t so much a middle-class Rome as it is the Vatican City of secularism, where the big payoff is promised for this life rather than the next.
But back to the official, papal take on gluttony: as Gregory said, it was not food per se that concerned him, it was the desire for it. Not surprisingly for a medieval cleric, he got a bit carried away in his assessment of the risks:
“It is plain to all that lust springs from gluttony, when in the distribution of the members the genitals appear placed beneath the belly. And hence when the one is inordinately pampered, the other is doubtless excited to wantonness.”
Undoubtedly! Gregory, with little more than work of the ancient Roman physician Galen as a guide, imagined a fearsome alliance between the gastrointestinal tract and the genitals - a Praetorian guard of the flesh.
Yet it would be wrong to disregard the excesses of Catholic theology without considering their historical roots. The Essenes and the Gnostics, along others who hammered out earlier forms of the Christian faith, emerged under the shadow of the Roman Empire. These Judaic sects would been familiar with the excesses of the Imperial City, of the bread and circuses meant to bribe a reckless, fickle mob into compliance. The citizens in Rome were amused to death daily with spectacles that outdid today’s Vegas, at least in brutality. So in some ways the mortification of the flesh, and the retreat into contemplation, were a natural course for the early Christians to take.
If the personal has always been the political, this religious equation of sensory delight with sin allowed Christians to quietly oppose Rome without the messy and highly dangerous route of overtly political acts.
Fat is Phat and Thin is In
Today, gluttony stands in a entirely different position in popular culture. There is such a superabundance of food available, along with an endless repetition of advertising for it, that we rarely think of gluttony as a culturally problematic state of mind, in the way we do with greed or anger. Yet with calorie-laden fast-food building sumo-sized bodies, the North American diet has never been worse.
Desire for food - especially bad food - is pushed at every available opportunity by advertisers. Over the next decade, millions of Canadians are expected to develop Type 2 diabetes, a lifestyle disease preventable by good nutrition and physical exercise. In the US, obesity is now second only to smoking as a cause of mortality. Obesity and diabetes are the two comorbidities most associated with COVID-19 deaths. In fact, clinical data suggests COVID fatalities would have been greatly reduced had been a global Manhattan Project pushing fitness and nutrition, and promoting that allopathic anathema, vitamin supplements.
At the same time, the idea of overeating as sin persists, pushed by the multibillion-dollar diet industry, and the thin-is-in fashion scene. Sin has become spin. Not since the time of Gregory have our attitudes toward eating, food and the human body been so contradictory and ambivalent. And never before has our bipolar attitude toward food been more profitable to the economic engine of hypercapitalism.
Next installment: FROM REMINGTONS TO DINNER PLATES
Hi Geoff, in the "Deadly Spins, you have certainly (accurately) captured these qualities of human nature. A friend has relayed her comments back to me, too: "Great article thanks! Interestingly in Biblical End Times it says that good will be looked at as evil, and evil as good....I think we're there....(or moving in that direction.)"
Thanks for your creative observations.