It was revealed this month, as no surprise to anyone, that southern belle Paula Deen has type 2 diabetes. What the surprise was is that she’s using this opportunity throw her weight behind a diabetes treatment drug produced by Nova Nordisk. What you now get are two camps of people. One that is criticizing Paula Deen for using her disease to cash in, instead of promoting healthier eating or an alternative to a diabetic lifestyle. Another camp criticizing the criticizers telling them to leave good ol’ Paula Deen alone, like they’re protecting their maw maw or something.
It’s a tad ludicrous, coming from the camp that finds Paula Deen’s turn disturbing, to support and defend a woman who lied and hid her disease for three years. All the while pushing her delicious diabetes inducing recipes, media empire and products associated with her name. Being raised by a gaggle of southern Baptist ladies, I indeed know the awesomeness and sheer deliciousness of cooking and baking everything with sticks of butter and metric tons of sugar. Most of my “side-moms” also wound up getting cancer and diabetes from their lifestyle. This isn’t an attack on Paula Deen, the woman. This is an attack on the hypocrisy and profits over people mentality that allows for Paula Deen to come out of her sugar shack and start hocking a diabetes treatment drug. That her clout could be better put to use promoting healthy living and lifestyle choices. You can eat most of what Paula Deen’s antics come up with, you jut can’t gorge on it, or eat mass quantities of it every day…for decades.
It’s the same mentality that let people like Suze Orman and Jim Cramer pretend to be stock market and finance gurus when they are not even remotely experts on either, and lean more towards media personality, which in recent memory they’ve more than graciously embraced. You’d think we as a public would shed our cult of personality ways and call a corporate whore a corporate shill whore. We have no problem calling out Kim Kardishian, Snooki or any of the other famous for being famous “celebrities” when they’re gallivanting around, whoring themselves to any products that would have them. Because Paula Deen looks like a saintly gran-ma she’s no less a hypocritical, money hungry whore?
The camp that defends Paula Deen also want to relate this to an issue of personal freedom. To them, deep inside Paula Deen, next to her failing organs, is a majestic freedom eagle with it’s wings spread as wide as it can push against the fatty tissues of Paula Deen innards. Give me a fucking break! Three years! It’s not like diabetes is a shame or pox on society that should be hidden away or dared to be spoken of. It’s fast becoming a national epidemic that needs more high-profile people, like a Paula Deen to shed light on it and help fellow man prevent it. This isn’t to say that all philanthropists are out to help their common man through their charitable giving’s, and are more interested in the long term personal gain if there is to be one. But they do not, nor should not ever, be defended if they are found to be hypocritical. Perhaps it is too fine a line.
The defenders of Paula Deen and enablers that allow their children to eat garbage and forego physical activity need to realize that no one is toppling their freedoms. First Lady Michelle Obama’s "Let's Move" campaign is constantly being futility connected to Hitler Youth and other socialist camp activity when she just wants the little buggers to get off their ass and move for 60 minutes a day. She wants schools to provide a more nutritious meal, because lets face it, parents either aren’t around, too busy for the most part, or are completely unknowledgeable about good, nutritious food. To say nothing on actually providing that on a daily basis, it wouldn’t hurt to get a little heat behind this idea.
Ultimately, "Paula Deen" is a character and that character is the one that’s going to take the bulk of this criticism. Paula Deen the person is going to laugh all the way to the bank. That’s something the critics of Paula Deen understand and the defenders do not. So when Anthony Bourdain says he's thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business, to profitably sell crutches later, he makes a salient point about the whore nature of celebrity chefs and their chosen endorsements.
With the revelation this week that Paula Deen’s publicist quit over her opportunistic shenanigans, it drives that point further. Celebrities are elevated to a higher plane of exposure. Whether they like it or not they are given a platform and how they use it can and will come under scrutiny. Paula Deen is allowed some privacy, but when it comes attached to the very foundation of her platform, all bets are off. No one is attacking Paula Deen for being diabetic, she’s under attack for being the opportunistic, money hungry whore she is. She ain’t your mawmaw being hounded by strangers for being overweight and diabetic, and should be held to a higher standard when she comes up short. The fact that she waited three years to tell the truth shows she knew the weight of her confession, and only found solace in it when she could buoy the backlash with sweet pharmaceutical sugar mounds of cash.
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