Ah, 2008. The year when the fat got lean and the lean got leaner. The year when the big fat lie led to the big fat crash. The year when the faked memoir devolved from the merely mercenary and narcissistic to the unbearably sad and pitiable. The year, more cheerfully, when Obama won and the Yankees lost.

Oh, well. We’ll always have our heroes to look up to.

Oops. Turns out, Diamond Jim Brady was a fraud. Or maybe just a garden-variety (make that stockyard-variety) glutton. Or maybe it wasn’t him so much as his image-mongers, who seem to have larded the truth like it was a prize-winning pie crust at the county fair. David Kamp, in a mortally funny piece of debunkery in this morning’s New York Times, has pricked Diamond Jim’s balloon, reducing his reputation like so much Slim-Fast: Turns out Brady was the bloated beginning of a reputational Ponzi scheme that leaves us tail-enders holding a severely depleted bag.

Granted, Brady’s an odd sort of hero in the first place — not a role model so much as a bigger-than-life phenomenon, a sort of Zeus (or maybe Dionysus) of the foodie set. Anything you could eat, he could eat bigger. And did, so the stories go, four or five times a day, in all-out cram-athons, often in the company of his gustatory inamorata Lillian Russell, the even more fabled songbird of the Gilded Age, whose appetites seemingly rivaled Catherine the Great’s.

In truth, it’s no big surprise. Even as we suspended disbelief for the sake of a good story, Brady’s reputation always seemed a little screwy, a little too audacious to be true. Now, on the final day of what increasingly seems to be this Year of Our Ford (a company that at least has so far declined a public handout, and is even rolling out a promising hybrid sedan at what these days passes for a rational price: praise Henry!) it seems somehow fitting to learn that Brady (1856-1917), the fabled railroad tycoon and devourer of copious amounts of flesh, turns out to have had a caloric capacity not quite so Brobdingnagian, after all. Our bubble has burst. We’re waking up from all sorts of dreams.

The legend of James Buchanan Brady is a bold one, not just for his rags-to-riches ascent, which is factual, but for his feats of appetite, which apparently have been fantasized. Kamp quotes John Mariani’s 1991 book America Eats Out on the way Brady allegedly began his day and kept it going:

… “with a hefty breakfast of eggs, breads, muffins, grits, pancakes, steaks, chops, fried potatoes, and pitchers of orange juice. He’d stave off mid-morning hunger by downing two or three dozen clams or oysters, then repair to Delmonico’s or Rector’s for a lunch that consisted of more oysters and clams, lobsters, crabs, a joint of beef, pie, and more orange juice.”

In midafternoon, allegedly, came a snack “of more seafood,” followed by dinner: “Three dozen oysters (the largest Lynnhavens were saved for him), a dozen crabs, six or seven lobsters, terrapin soup,” and a steak, with a dessert of “a tray full of pastries … and two pounds of bonbons.” Later in the evening, allegedly, came an apres-theater supper of “a few game birds and more orange juice.”

My goodness, that looks as tempting as a sub-prime loan. I’m especially admiring of Brady’s penchant for shellfish. Trouble is, as Kamp quotes one doctor who deals with obesity, a steady diet like the one Diamond Jim is supposed to have consumed is impossible: “That man would have exploded.”

In fact, in photos, Brady doesn’t really look like a man about to explode. (And Lillian Russell certainly doesn’t look like the Bloated Lady.) He has girth, yes; he’s a man of consequence — but by the look of it, he carries no more excess baggage than William Howard Taft or Grover Cleveland or Winston Churchill or Portland’s culinary favorite son, James Beard, and certainly less than the Cajun cooking legend Paul Prudhomme. Where is the physical evidence of Brady’s extreme gustatory excess?

Kamp quotes another expert — Josh Ozersky, the New York food writer whose blog is called The Feedbag — perhaps even more pertinently. “I think (Brady) and his meals have more in common with Paul Bunyan than they do with A.J. Liebling,” he says.

I’m happy to see a contemporary food writer recognize the redoubtable Mr. Liebling, a World War II correspondent and New Yorker writer whose memoir Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris has given me many a moment of pleasure and regret (and for the record, I’ve never fully believed the reality of Liebling’s Parisian meals matched the rapture of his memories of them). And I’m delighted to see Ozersky bring up Paul Bunyan, because I think the Great Logger strikes straight to the heart of the Diamond Jim Brady mystique.

Like Bunyan, Brady is mythical, even if he actually existed in the flesh: a repository of our American dreams and desires. As such, what’s true and what is fabrication become a confused blend, and maybe not even really very important. We want to believe he did what people say he did, because his deeds inspire us. He lives beyond limits for us, so we can stand the limits we accept for ourselves.

Did Dan’l Boone kill himself a b’ar when he was only 3? Could George Washington really not tell a lie? Was John Henry 6 feet tall and did he weigh 44 pounds on the day he was born? Could Annie Oakley shoot the shadow off a prairie dog at 500 yards? Did Babe Ruth eat 25 hot dogs on a dare, then go out and hit a home run? Does your favorite rock star really snort coke and have sex with three sets of twins every night?

We know these things probably aren’t true, at the same time that, in our dream-selves, we choose to sort of believe them. And part of me can’t help but wonder: Did our dream-selves want to believe in weapons of mass destruction, too, so we could aim our anger and justify our desire to strike back at someone, anyone? And wondering that makes me think that, yes, maybe Kamp’s debunking was a good thing to do. Even though, speaking for myself, I’ll miss the Diamond Jim Brady who never was. The New Gilded Age has come crashing to an end. Like George the Destroyer, Diamond Jim the Dinosaur is no hero for our new times.

I took a break from writing this post to cook some dinner:

A pasta sauce built on a mirepoix of chopped garlic, onion, carrots and celery; some pepper, a little salt, a dash of paprika, some herbs de Provence, mushrooms, a sliced red and sliced green bell pepper, a spoonful of Better Than Veggie paste, a can of fire-roasted diced tomatoes, a scatter of capers and some leftover red wine. Fettuccine. A green salad. A nice bread and some cheeses. And because it’s New Year’s Eve, a good, modest-priced bubbly.

So, hello, 2009.

Farewell, fat of the land.

Maybe I’ll trade you in for a slim volume of poetry.