So director Kevin Smith gets yanked off a Southwest Airlines flight because he’s too fat. That’s the condensed version. The unabridged version is much better told by the man himself, and I recommend you catch up on it before proceeding.

I have fallen out of respect with Kevin Smith over the years, pretty much since he became a half-crazed stoner in a state of perpetual arrested development creatively. But he still seems like a cool guy, I still dig his speaking gigs, and needless to say he didn’t deserve to be singled out and humiliated by the Gypsy Cab of commercial airlines. There are a lot of perspectives from which I could write about the aftermath. I could rant about how we’re a society of star fuckers, and how it took a somewhat-celebrity to shine the white hot light on bad practices and worse attitudes. I could compose a meditation on corporate greed and the shitty state of customer service in our industries.

But I want to write about the incident itself and what motivated it. Because it caused me to feel something I don’t often feel.

I was disturbed.

It disturbed me, largely because I am very much that guy. If you’re in the row with me on an airplane you’re going to be a little crowded, but I fit just fine in a single seat with the armrests down and my seatbelt securely fastened. It disturbed me even more because I knew if I were in that situation, and there is a very real possibility I could be one day soon, I would not have gone quietly. The outcome would have involved a lot of air marshals and several pairs of handcuffs and possibly weapons-grade mace. An airport is one of the worst possible places to be arrested these days, and I am too pretty and too finicky about bathrooms to do serious time in jail. I was ultimately disturbed by the idea of being incarcerated because of some jetway monitor’s apparent retardation.

It didn’t disturb me as a fat person, however.

In point of fact, pretty much nothing disturbs me as a fat person. Because I neither define nor perceive myself that way and I couldn’t possibly give less of a syphilitic fuck whether or not you do and/or how you deal with it. In fact, it’s kind of amazing how little I care about your opinion of me as a fat person, particular the opinion of the 58% of people who sided with Southwest Airlines in a CNN poll about Smith’s humiliation. I don’t care how I might be “inflicting” my bad habits on you in such an instance. I didn’t build the fucking airplane. Take it up with management.

So it didn’t disturb me on that level, and for a very simple reason. I’ll share that reason with you here now.

I have the body of a young Dusty Rhodes.

I flashed on this fact fairly early in life, and I grew up a better man for it. Because, you see, in the eighties and into the early nineties “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes was the coolest motherfucker alive. He was thrice the NWA World Heavyweight Champion, at the time the most prestigious wrestling title in the entire world. In his hand a microphone became a stick of dynamite. His personality was bigger than his ass could ever hope to be. Many was the time he came to the ring in a silk robe with a feather boa and danced like a platinum blonde James Brown, funky like a honky monkey. He was a fat, lisping, homely Southerner who never tried to be anything but fat, lisping, and Southern.

He just owned it.

The American Dream taught me that a Dusty Rhodes body demands a Dusty Rhodes attitude. You have to own it. You have to have confidence in yourself and project it to all those around you. Dusty never played his weight or his body type for laughs, and every single fan took him seriously. I carried these ideals with me when I hit NYC in my teens to train as a wrestler myself at the legendary Doghouse in Queens, and I never had another bodily dysmorphic thought. Although unlike Dusty when I wrestled I opted out of wearing spandex briefs, a decision I stand by.

It was wrestling and New York that taught me the lessons most fat guys never learn, sadly. They taught me that being fat does not preclude you from being a warrior, and thus does not relegate you to being anyone’s victim. They taught me being fat and caring about your appearance is not a contradiction. I care about how I dress. I care about how my little fat guy beard is trimmed. I care about how I smell. I place far more importance on these details than on the circumference of my stomach or the size of my waistband, and it never once crossed my mind I couldn’t get a member of the opposite sex to fuck me because they were too thin and/or too hot.

Roman gladiators were fat fucks. Some of the most gorgeous women ever immortalized on canvas were fat chicks. When I was in the best shape of my life, working out literally every day, wrestling every weekend, sometimes three shows at a clip, able to go for thirty minutes full-tilt in the ring and able to go all night on the town afterwards… I was still fat. When I lose weight to help alleviate my blood pressure concerns… I will still be fat. I am 6’4” with a ridiculous frame. I will never be lean. I can be husky and well-conditioned or I can be shredded and have my body resemble a gargantuan puckered anus.

I gladly choose the former.

That is what you’ll call an adverse lifestyle choice. Because being fat is a lifestyle choice, which is why you don’t defend fat people. Don’t promote an unhealthy lifestyle. We want our country to be healthy. We don’t want to be perceived as a nation of overfed gluttons. We care about public health. We want to protect our citizens, their bodies, and their global image.

Cut the bullshit, will you? When you see a morbidly obese person you’re not concerned about their health, you’re disgusted by them. They ruin your day, your good time, your innate sense of coolness. I have friends, awesome people, who were literally raised not to respect fat people, to see it as a sign of low class and low character. How dare they forcibly inject that into your eye-line and into your consciousness. You don’t want to see a fat person on the beach. You want to see rock hard abs and big fake tits. No one wants to live in reality. They want to live in an old school beer commercial. They want to live in an MMORPG through a svelte avatar in a loin cloth. They want their life to mimic every slick, sexy media image whenever they can possibly manufacture a facsimile convincing enough.

And you know what? That’s fucking pathetic. You’re pathetic. You’re like a segregation-era redneck. You’re a sad little fuck with power over nothing except those who it is socially acceptable to treat like third-class citizens. So you do. Because it makes you feel a little better about yourself and your station in life. It makes your dick hard. That’s really what it comes down to. You despise a fat person’s weakness. It reflects virtually every bad thing you feel or think or worry about yourself. And when the opportunity to rain down punishment on a fat celebrity presents itself? Goddamn, you have won the false empowerment, self-deluding lottery.

You know who else is pathetic? Anyone who actively works toward cultivating or maintaining six-pack abs. Seriously. There is no medical reason for it. You are simply a vain, probably obnoxious, self-worshipping narcissist. You’ve achieved nothing. The health and fitness community is a disturbingly masturbatory, self-congratulating culture. I liken it to Bill Hicks talking about fanatical anti-smokers when he said, “I’d quit smoking if I didn’t think I’d become one of you.”

Now, does all of that mean I advocate washing down your dinner with a fifty-piece McNugget trough every night? Obviously not. A lot of fat people are really unhealthy and need to make better choices, not for you, but for themselves. A lot of people are currently eating their fat asses to death because of very real and fucked up psychological issues and they need to be stopped and they need help. But there’s also a fat guy out there right now throwing down and having a good time and maybe his heart suffers more strain than yours and maybe he’s going to have more unnecessary health problems as he ages but for all intents and purposes he’s just a guy carrying some extra entirely negligible weight. It’s not his fucking problem how it damages your own fragile, Aryan perception of reality.

There are many, many reasons for all kinds of people to lose weight, but you are not among them.

And so, in summation, we don’t need to boycott Southwest Airlines. You just need to stop being a prick.