Fat-slob Yanks are carrying wide loads.

It was a hideous sight that left me shaking and shattered.

It scared me worse than anything; even worse than the recurring nightmare in which I voluntarily join the Up With People singing troupe, grow a permanent smile, spread good cheer and try to see the good in people, even degenerates, politicians, bilingualists, bosses who refer to employees as “my people,” folk singers, and stingy bartenders who never buy a round on the house.

We were on vacation, racing east on I-80 through Nebraska on our way to Chicago to visit my sick ma when the kid said he was hungry and had to hit the john.

I was disgusted. The warm and now smashed bologna and American cheese sandwiches, stale potato chips and used beer cans filled with warm tap water I had packed weren’t good enough for him. And the wuss couldn’t hold it in for the 1,480 miles between Albuquerque and downtown Chicago.

“There’s an Applebee’s in the next town,” the 15-year-old said, shocking me with his ability to actually read highway signs.

“Applebee’s!” I yelled. “No chain restaurants for us. The running dog corporate pigs have homogenized too much of America. We’ll eat at a locally owned restaurant, have real food and see the real Nebraska and the great Midwest. You must learn that there is more to life than Disney-like chain and franchise restaurants.”

I veered onto the exit ramp, careened the car off a couple of guard rails, emptied the ashtray full of cigar butts out the window, rolled into York, Nebraska and scouted for a local place.

It didn’t take long. Down the road flashed the sign that set my mind to conjuring up delightful images of sod houses, sweaty men and homely-looking women with seventeen children: The Iron Skillet Family Restaurant.

“You’re in for a treat,” I told the kid as we walked through the door. “America in its purest, most honest and original form: hearty food and upstanding, self-reliant and sturdy farmers.”

The place was crowded that Friday night, but we found a table. It took only a few minutes for me to begin trembling. It wasn’t the seafood buffet with Alaskan crab legs in land-locked, middle-of-the-continent Nebraska that horrified me.

No. The place was filled with pigs—not the four-legged oinkers from which we get bacon, ham, chops and barbecued ribs, but with two-legged monsters.

Everyone was fat. The men were fat, the women were fat, the teenagers were fat, the kids were fat, the waitresses were fat and the cashiers were fat.

And they were slobs as well. Pregnant looking men waddled up to the buffet, and without bothering to get a plate or use the metal tongs, grabbed crab legs with their hands and lumbered back to their seats.

Bloated kids speared slices of roast beef from the cutting board with their forks and began stuffing them into their faces even before they got back to their tables. Women with bags of hanging fat where their triceps once were piled their plates with mashed potatoes, gravy and hushpuppies. Tubbos loaded up with chocolate cake and pudding pies. Chunks of meat and pieces of wilted lettuce littered the floor beneath several tables. One guy went to the buffet four times for crab legs.

We were at a feeding trough for human pigs. Maybe there was a fat slob convention in town, I said to the kid while quickly surveying the place for old girlfriends, relatives, former bosses and spouses of neighbors.

Maybe they were chubboids from the planet Fat sent down to overload the earth on one side and knock it out of orbit. Or maybe they were an advance column of foreign invaders sent here to eat all our food before the main attack.

The kid didn’t think much of my theories.

“They’re just fat. Everybody’s fat,” he said. “You should see how fat they are in Ohio.”

Having never been to that faraway, exotic state, I doubted the kid and dialed the cell phone to get my daughter and a second opinion.

“Oh, you should see them in Ohio,” she said. “They’re even fatter.”

Still not convinced, I dialed an old friend and told him where I was.

“And you should see the people here,” I said. “They’re all—”

“Fat,” he said, finishing my sentence.

We stopped in a few other small towns in Nebraska and Iowa and saw the same: Everyone, even kids, were carrying extra-wide loads.

“I don’t understand the mentality of stuffing your face with everything in sight,” my buddy said later. “But that’s what it’s come to. Americans are fat slobs. Pigs. Gluttons. Our men once worked in steel mills, foundries, machine shops and on farms, and the 12-packs and sausages they drank and ate after work didn’t even come close to replacing the calories they burned on the job. Now they sit in front of computers and burn three calories while dreaming up marketing campaigns and calculating how much money their corporations will save by outsourcing work to China and Pago Pago. It’s a disgrace.”

“And a threat to our national security,” I said. “Do you realize that if Americans tried to storm the beaches of Normandy or Okinawa today we’d never make it? Our landing boats would sink from the weight of our fatso soldiers. If an enemy invaded us we’d be too busy at the buffet to shoot them. The survival of the Republic, and human liberty, is at stake here.”

“No it isn’t,” my buddy said. “Our fat people are actually a secret weapon. We’ll be able to use them to scare the hell out of any enemy. Even Islamic terrorists will be terrified at the sight of our lard asses.”

“I realize that the sight of porkers shocks sensitive types like me, but I don’t think it’ll terrify battle-hardened soldiers or fanatical suicide bombers.”

“It will be when we dress them in tight clothes and spandex exercise outfits. We do that and we’ll be able to take over the entire world without firing a shot. I mean, have you ever seen anything more disgusting than fat people who wear tight clothes?”

He never got a response. I fainted at the thought and was out for three days.

When I awoke, I decided to do my part to keep America strong and safe: I headed for a buffet.