KEY POINTS:
You wouldn't expect to come across the name Earl Butz in a roll-call of Americans who changed the course of history.
It just doesn't have the right ring. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt. These are dignified, substantial names that roll satisfyingly off the tongue, appropriate
names for men who shaped a nation.
But Earl Butz? He sounds like a hillbilly, a banjo player, one of those hapless rubes who get blown away in No Country For Old Men, or a particularly doltish character in sitcoms like Green Acres and The Dukes of Hazzard. However Butz, who died this year aged 98, played a major role in two of the key socio-cultural developments of our time.
As US Secretary of Agriculture from 1971 to 1976, his mission was to usher in an era of cheap, plentiful food. To this end he championed the rise of agri-business, telling farmers to "get big or get out", and encouraged massive planting of commodity crops, especially corn.
In Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People on Earth, author Greg Critser argues that Butz in effect kick-started the fast food revolution. The fast food giants switched from cane and corn sugar to much cheaper and sweeter high fructose corn syrup which enabled them to provide more for less - bigger portions at lower prices.
There can be little doubt that the resultant obesity epidemic has fuelled anti-Americanism. We associate ultra-fatness with greed and stupidity, thus the bloating of America reinforced the stereotype of the Ugly American, the gluttonous consumer too focused on self-gratification to sense or care that the world is recoiling in disgust.
Butz's political career ended in ignominy. Unwinding with what he assumed were kindred spirits - God, Mom and apple pie entertainer Pat Boone and former White House counsel John Dean, fresh out of the slammer for his part in the Watergate scandal - Butz recycled a tawdry old joke suggesting that Afro-Americans were far too absorbed with their attire, sex lives and bowel movements to give any thought to the issues of the day.
Dean, who'd already contributed to Richard Nixon's downfall, shared Butz's idea of a joke with the readers of Rolling Stone magazine. Butz had to resign, thereby becoming the first victim of what came to be known as political correctness. For generations men had been telling dirty jokes and racist jokes to anyone who'd listen - it was part and parcel of being male - but suddenly they had to watch what they said to strangers and acquaintances.
It may soon be unsafe to go there, as they say, even with your best mates. In the name of fighting crime and terrorism, the British Government is considering creating a massive database to hold every text, phone call and email and to track all internet use. The police and security services would supposedly need permission from the courts to access this information but compromising material has a way of getting into the media, especially when public figures are involved.
Which raises a few questions: Is this the end of privacy? Will text and email banter with close friends carry the risk of public disgrace? Could a lifetime of impeccable public behaviour be undone by one scurrilous outburst solely intended for a friend's amusement? Is the nightmarish concept of Thought Police envisaged by George Orwell in 1984 about to become a reality?
A case in point is the long correspondence between novelist Kingsley Amis and poet Philip Larkin, two major figures in post-war English literature. The object of the exercise was to amuse, deflect intimacy and serious discussion and, above all, avoid being a bore, and there were no lines that couldn't be crossed in pursuit of these goals. Thus we get what critic Ian Hamilton described as "yards of leering porn, mostly to do with what lesbian schoolgirls might, or should, get up to." We get foam-flecked dismissal of other writers' work, from Beowulf ("a heap of gangrened elephant sputum") through to their contemporaries ("shameful shagbaggery, bumblock of the highest order"). We get a schoolboyish preoccupation with their toilet activity ("Have just delivered a reeking billet of turd into the lavatory pan.") And we get racism.
With both men six feet under and having left behind bodies of work free from taint, the Amis-Larkin correspondence was largely excused as two slightly unhinged curmudgeons letting off steam. In the current environment, where extremism in the name of tolerance and equality is sometimes touted as a virtue, one suspects that less latitude will be granted to those whose private rants and raves find their way into the public domain.
