BULLETIN: Noted Physical Fitness Enthusiast Farrah Fawcett-Majors will appear in the tenth, 20th and 30th paragraphs of this article, jogging nude around the Central Park Reservoir, pausing every 50 yards to give a demonstration of rope-skipping. Aerobics points will be awarded to readers.
Strange currents flow for years in the deeps of the American society, then for reasons unclear suddenly roil to the surface, disturbing the waters and making reasoned discourse impossible. Talking to plants was a minor instance a couple of years ago. People who had always talked to their plants abruptly decided to come out of the closet, as if at a signal. Before the week was out, it seemed, the air waves and the public prints were awash with the commentary of glibsters who said that, by George, something, ; maybe whisky vapors, made talked-to plants grow better. By the end of a fortnight, sturdy, feet-on-the-ground Undecideds who knew the whole thing was bosh were talking to their plants just in case the lunatics were right.
Now physical fitness is upon us like a wet spaniel, bigger than talking to plants, more numbing in the fervor of its adherents than encounter-group therapy. This is a startling development for the nation that invented the electric golf cart, the pushbutton car window and the drive-in mortuary, but it is happening.
Night Jogging. Muggers tremble behind locked doors now, to avoid being trampled by housewives in striped training suits. Sports stores are unable to keep $36.95 imported running shoes in stock. (Adidas sells a white and orange model that glows in the dark, for night jogging.) Day hikers need permits to enter certain overused areas of New Hampshire's White Mountains. A slender, bemused fellow named George Butler, who produced the body-building film Pumping Iron, goes about saying, "The next generation of American men will be unrecognizable," and at the rate at which weight-lifting rigs are selling, it may not take that long.
If we lie down, will the fitness pass? And if not, why not? In a society that instantaneously hatches complicated recreational subcultures, complete with heroes, legends, artifacts and literatures (the skateboarding and CB-radio crazes are examples), to ask why all these people are running in the same direction may be to miss the point. A fad is its own explanation.
Still, it's hard not to see a clue in the fact that demographers, who in the '60s seemed to be saying that the median age of the population was something like seven, now pronounce that the U.S. is middleaged, and counting. Middle age is a sitcom joke no one wants to be the butt of, and the generation now turning 40 is the one that never trusted anyone over 30. Its members, who are among the most fanatical cyclists, joggers, iron-pumpers, lap-swimmers, rope-jumpers and cross-country skiers, were especially hard hit by the society's youth imperative. A few years ago, they turned that imperative against the society—youth was righteousness—and now it seems to be turned against whatever is not youthful in their own bodies.