In the wake of Carrie Fisher’s untimely death last December at age 60, the Terrible Left immediately went to work. Feasting off Fisher’s corpse before it could even cool, her body was immediately sharpened into a prison shiv for Social Justice Warriors, and no one was safe, not Cinnabon, not even poor Steve Martin. Weapon in hand, we were bullied and harassed into paying tribute to Carrie Fisher in only the “correct” ways.
There would be no mentioning of Fisher’s otherworldly beauty. Any word of that fantastic gold bikini was a capital offense. Only crypto-Nazis would dare refer to her as a princess. She was a general, you sexist, degenerate freaks.
Oh, and of course, Fisher died at the hands of the patriarchy. Because men run Hollywood and horny teenage boys buy movie tickets, and both tend to be turned off by chubby women (even aged 60), the patriarchy forced Fisher to lose weight, which in turn put so much stress on her heart, it exploded.
If the stupidity of blaming weight loss on Fisher’s death was not apparent at the time, the depressing results of the just-released autopsy have now laid that absurd lie bare. While Fisher’s official cause of death is listed as “sleep apnea and other factors,” there is no doubt the “other factors” included the drugs found in her system, a toxic mix of heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, methadone, alcohol, and opiates.
To their everlasting credit, Fisher’s family is not beating around the bush:
“My mom battled drug addiction and mental illness her entire life,” Fisher’s daughter Billie Lourd told People. “She ultimately died of it. She was purposefully open in all of her work about the social stigmas surrounding these diseases.”
My sister’s battle with drugs “slowly but surely put her health in jeopardy over many, many years,” Fisher’s brother Todd Fisher said.
And yes, sleep apnea is a well-known side-effect of excessive, long-term drug abuse.
Carrie Fisher’s death is a terrible thing. She was a bright, talented and beautiful woman who, had she taken better care of herself, had another 25 years ahead of her. According to some sources, in the same way chapter 7 focused on Harrison Ford and chapter 8 will focus on Mark Hamill, the final entry in the latest Star Wars trilogy was to revolve around her character, General Leia Organa.
But because addiction is just as terrible, the toll of decades of substance abuse took her away from us. And since we are being honest, let’s admit it did so even before she died. Bo Derek, Mimi Rogers, Dana Delaney, Geena Davis, Joan Allen, Kim Cattrall, and Paula Zahn are all the same age as Fisher. But unlike those women, Fisher became almost unrecognizable, the years of abuse turned her into a completely different person, she looked and sounded nothing like the one we knew just 25 or so years earlier in movies such as Soapdish or When Harry Met Sally.
Fisher’s own addictions and struggles are not the only cautionary tale here. So is a leftwing culture so venomous and bitter they would blame a relatively young woman’s death on … losing weight. Fisher did not lose weight to look like a super model or like she spent a decade in a prison camp. She obviously lost the unhealthy weight that contributed to her heart and sleep apnea problems. And when she was done losing that weight, she still looked like this, a healthy middle-aged woman.
Yes, you can gain and lose weight in unhealthy ways, but to do so is solely the choice of the individual.
Carrie Fisher was above all her own woman; an outspoken, brilliant, independent, and honest (oftentimes painfully so) woman with a mind all her own.
To blame Fisher’s death on anyone else is the true desecration of her memory.
P.S. My tribute to Fisher and her mother Debbie Reynolds can be found here.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.