A few weeks ago writer/director Kevin Smith was thrown off of a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat to fit into a single seat easily. He was on his way home from Northern California and had paid for two seats on his outbound flight but according to reports there weren’t two seats available on the return. This brings up a lot of questions, like why is Kevin Smith flying coach on Southwest. Doesn’t he have someone to book his flights for him?
I am ignorant of a lot of things but I try to hide that when I can. My dad told me that a lot of people might think you’re stupid but only you can open your mouth and show them they are right. Ms. Laura Washington, who writes for the Chicago Sun Times, a daily tabloid, might want to write that down. In a recent attack piece on writer/director Kevin Smith she starts by confessing that she has never heard of Mr. Smith. Now, that would be alright if she were a seventy year-old nun from Evanston but this woman is a writer for a major daily newspaper in a major American city! She should have asked her equally angry progressive colleague at the Sun Times, Roger Ebert. We all laugh when Jay Leno or Sean Hannity do man-on-the-street interviews and someone doesn’t know Joe Biden or Lady Gaga, but how can a reporter on a major daily newspaper not know a major Hollywood figure?
She then proceeds to attack him as a publicity hungry person trying to rise from his “obscurity” on the wave of his weight. She urges him to quit being comfortable with his “girth.” She goes on to deride a civil rights group that works for “fat acceptance.” Fat, that Ms. Washington claims, will kill him. I have an ugly message for Ms. Washington: something is going to kill all of us. I don’t know Ms. Washington but I am going to play Kreskin for a minute and guess she is a “progressive,” “liberal” or whatever label big brother loving health Nazis are calling themselves this week.
I make this guess for two reasons. First, Ms. Washington is swimming in the granddaddy of all Progressive myths: You are too stupid to run your own life and we know what is best for you. Second, is that she is unaware of the greatest of all American freedoms: We have the right to be as stupid as we want! If I want to eat Big Macs three times a day, 365 days a year and the only exercise I get is handing my money to the person at the drive-thru window, that’s my business! If you want to eat tofu and sprouts and wear hemp underwear to your to yoga class more power to ya!
You know what obscurity is Ms. Washington? Making your career writing for a dying, old media, left-wing newspaper. Combine that with a touch of hubris and a dash of stupidity and you get The Behavior Police telling the successful, well known Hollywood director Kevin Smith how to live his life.
Mike Royko is rolling over on his grave.
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