We like our obesity, so yoga nuts should back off

(EDITOR'S NOTE: The following column appeared in the Oct. 20 Mogollon Connection provoking a negative response from a couple of yoga proponents who obviously didn't get it.  It's called satire, and it's a style of writing I employ frequently.  "Satire," according to my Glossary of Literary Terms," is the literary art of diminishing a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking towards it attitudes of amusement, contempt, or scorn."  What the complainers didn't get is that the "amusement, contempt or scorn" is not directed at yoga or its practitioners but at the right wing whackos who see a left wing liberal conspiracy under every stone.  As I say in the column, The Consort is a yoga fanatic.  I live with The Consort.  It would not behoove me to make fun of yoga.  So to those who don't get it I respectfully suggest they try to develop or otherwise acquire a sense of humor.  I received many compliments on the column from yoga folks who have one -- a sense of humor, that is.)

Leave it to the Tucson Unified School District, located in Arizona’s lone bastion of liberalism, to add yoga to its curriculum. It’s another left wing trick to take away our guns and leave us weak and defenseless.

We know this is happening because we received a press release from one Rajan Zed of the Universal Society of Hinduism written in broken English. Here are some excerpts:

“Hindus have commended Tucson Unified School District in Arizona for introducing yoga in curriculum and have urged all schools in USA to do the same for their pupils.

“Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada today, suggested all elementary-middle-high schools of the nation to incorporate yoga in the lives of the students, making it part of the curriculum. Yoga was a mental and physical discipline whose traces went back to around 2000 BCE to Indus Valley civilization, he pointed out.

“Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, further said that although introduced and nourished by Hinduism, yoga was a world heritage to be utilized by all. Yoga, referred as ‘a living fossil’ and handed down from one guru to next, was based on an eightfold path to direct the practitioner from awareness of the external world to a focus on the inner.

“Rajan Zed added that besides other benefits, yoga might also help deal with the obesity crisis faced by the country. According to National Institutes of Health, yoga may help one to feel more relaxed, be more flexible, improve posture, breathe deeply, and get rid of stress. Swami Vivekananda reportedly brought yoga to USA in 1893, and according to an estimate, about 16 million Americans now do yoga.”

I’ll bet every last one of those 16 million is a flaming liberal. And I’m also willing to wager that Sarah Palin would have plenty to say about people in the US of A who do yoga.

One of them just happens to be The Consort, a rabid believer in the benefits of yoga. In fact, she has tried to introduce me to yoga on several occasions. (It’s insidious how they try to suck us true blue Americans in.)

In the interest of fairness, and to stay on The Consort’s good side, allow me to present the following tutorial on yoga which is based entirely on my personal observations.

From what I have learned by watching The Consort, yoga is the ancient art of stretching just like a dog and otherwise contorting your body in very unnatural ways. In fact they name some of their moves after dogs. Sarah would call that “bestiality.”

While there are 16 million practitioners of yoga in the U.S., it is almost the exclusive domain of women. I believe there are several explanations for this:

1) The guy who does a lot of the instructional yoga videos is Rodney Yee who wears nothing but this diaper/loincloth thing and is considered very hot by the ladies.
2) The women who do instructional yoga videos are not so hot, and I suspect do not shave their armpits and other strategic areas.
3) When you watch women doing yoga, it kind of resembles a very slow motion ballet. Real men do not do ballet.

If you’re a left-wing liberal, you’ll find it easy to get started doing yoga. All you need is a yoga mat (available at Target and other mass retailers for about $12) and the ability to repeatedly say “Namaste.”

According to one yoga master I located on the Internet, Namaste “represents the belief that there is a Divine spark within each of us that is located in the heart chakra. The gesture is an acknowledgment of the soul in one by the soul in another. ‘Nama’ means bow, ‘as’ means I, and ‘te’ means you. Therefore, Namaste literally means "bow me you" or "I bow to you." OK then.

Like anything else in this litigious age, the practice of yoga is accompanied by several disclaimers:

First, be forewarned that yoga reinforces the theory of evolution. Because if the human body can get into all those positions, it can only mean one thing – we really did descend from monkeys (and possibly dogs). Which reinforces the other piece of evidence in favor of evolution – that we behave much like monkeys most of the time. And I’m not just talking about the steady increase in banana consumption.

Second, do not practice yoga in the bathtub as it might cause death by drowning.

Third, if you get stuck in an unnatural position, all bets are off.

So that’s the end of my fair and balanced representation of yoga. Let’s get back to the left wing liberal stuff.

You have to wonder why the Universal Society of Hinduism is located in Nevada – home of Las Vegas, the sin capital of America. Since what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, this is not a good way to spread the yoga faith, but it sure does afford the president of said society with lots of recreational pursuits. See “Woods, Tiger.”

And who says we want to resolve the obesity crisis in America anyway? We like being fat. We like overindulging. We like supersizing.

Finally, I have enough friends who are “living fossils.” I don’t need any more in my life.

You know, this is kind of fun. I could really get into this right wing spreading-of-crap stuff.

Namaste…and keep your powder dry.