I loved Clerks and Mallrats when I was in high school, which makes thinking about Kevin Smith now particularly uncomfortable, like thinking about a bad ex-girlfriend. “How did I once love this person?” one asks, and the answer casts unsettling aspersions on the very notion of a self. It’s possible I’m overthinking this. My point is that Kevin Smith once seemed awesome and is now—for that reason and also because he made this and, Jesus, this—embarrassing. He is proof that anyone with enough gumption and perseverance can rise from obscurity to become a Hollywood hack, and that the things we love occasionally turn out to be, in retrospect, pretty awful—not that they remain wholly without merit. Also, I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but he’s really fat now.
Tag Archives: fat acceptance
Fat acceptance raises some big issues, which sit next to you on the plane
The enormous pink jacket industry received a windfall this week, as representatives from the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance lobbied Congress for a public health care option that would not consider excess weight a pre-existing condition. It turns out that when a bill is going around the House, it really goes around the House. Hey-o! Seriously, though, there really is a fat acceptance community, and according to the New York Times, they really do think that fat people are being unfairly scapegoated in the national debate over health care reform. Certainly, there’s no question that fat people get used as scapegoats. Every time a diving board breaks or one end of a park bench shoots straight up in the air, we look around for the fat person. The question is whether this scapegoating is unfair.