Long story short: this evening, I was reading a book that mentioned the 1971 George Giffe Jr hijacking and murder-suicide. I wasn't familiar with the case, hit the internet and read the
New York Times' coverage first. In the article, they thought the man's obesity was freakish enough to be worth noting:
I dug around to find a photo. The marvelously fat fuck whose weight was so wondrous it bore reporting:
Brave new world we live in where, a mere fifty years later, this asshole could be considered normal-people fat and we have 1100 pages worth of examples of people who would dwarf him and, were he a woman, deride him as a privileged smallfat.
FA talking points always carry the tenor of mystification about them — like they can't imagine why people are aghast at the rampant and historically unprecedented scale of obesity we're witnessing and the only reason for our surprise at mankind's global supersizing is our unreflecting, conditioned hatred of fat people. There are even FA-inflected social media activist accounts (e.g.,
historicalfatpeople) that treat the subject by suggesting that deathfats and megadeathfats were simply somehow hidden from the historian's lens, shunned and left out of polite conversation the way gay people were because of the shamefulness of it all.
It's pure revisionist history, of course. Fat people have always existed, but fat people (deathfats and megadeathfats in particular) have never existed on anywhere near the scope and scale that they do today — a mere 50 years after a plane-hijacking suicide-murderer's 300 pound girth was so freakish and noteworthy it bore reporting on.
Obligatory disclaimer for any normie lurkers who can only hold one thought in their heads at a time: obviously this fat fuck's weight is unrelated and secondary to the heinous crime he committed.