The tension between the New and Old Testaments is still with us

At the Oscars this past weekend, as presumably everyone knows by now, millionaire actor Will Smith assaulted millionaire Oscars MC Chris Rock for a joke in poor taste by the latter about Will Smith's wife.  And by poor taste, I really mean lame and ill-considered.  

The media has been full of opinions and commentary but I have never watched the Oscars, have no interest in the Oscars, have little interest in the film industry and even less interest in the emo hot-house dramas among Hollywood actors.  

I think most might agree that Chris Rock was wrong for making fun of someone's physical ailments.  Punching down from a position of power is not admirable.  It is a reminder of the contrast with Ricky Gervais' fifth and final round of MCing the Golden Globe awards in 2020.  Gervais punched up, taking the mickey out of actors, directors, producers, and the studios and tech companies.   Now that was comedy with courage.

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I think most might also agree that Will Smith was unequivocally wrong for expressing his anger in physical violence.  Yet there are many vocal supporters from the honor culture angle - taking the view that because his wife was insulted, he was right to seek retribution.  There is a visceral tug towards this sentiment but it is still wrong.

The media's obsessive desire to keep discussing the non-issue was pitiable.  However, it did remind me of a template decades old.  

I was in university, living in a house with five or six housemates.  One of them was Dan Goodman.  He was perhaps a year younger than I was and in a different school.  He was a keen and accomplished nationally competitive debater in the Debate Club and an aspiring lawyer.

He died a dozen years ago, barely fifty years old, taken way too soon, as Deputy Criminal Chief of the Los Angeles U.S. Attorney's Office (a kind encomium here.) 

But when we shared a house, he was a bright, lean debater, kind and civilized in conversation but also incisive and informed.  No matter the issue, if you discussed anything with Dan, you'd better have clear logic and good evidence because he would find the weak points with polite ease.

People like Dan are among the best tutors.  Friendly and kind, they still hold you to a higher standard of thought than what you are accustomed to in ordinary conversations where custom and laziness can lead so easily to faulty thinking.  Having him find fault in your own sloppy thinking was almost a pleasure.  In fact, it was a competitive pleasure.  He was almost always correct in his critique and then it became a contest to see if you could still marshal a strong case for your position even if you knew it to be a weak position.  

In this instance I am recalling, there had been a tragic incident in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. a much smaller town then.  I forget the details now but the broad outline was something along the lines of:  A burglar breaks in to a home and is surprised by the owner, a doctor, and the wife.  The doctor confronted the intruder and was shot.  The burglar escaped on foot.  The doctor, despite his mortal wound, ran out to his car.  He drove the neighborhood, seeking his murderer.  Spotting him, the doctor chased his murderer down and ran him over, disabling him until the police arrived.  

The doctor died shortly after the police showed up.  The murderer was taken in to custody.

This would have been circa 1981 when the US was still climbing to its record high of violent crime in the early 1990s.  But there was much attention being paid to the spiral of violence enveloping the nation.  What to do to protect oneself from predators was on everyone's mind and this tragedy fed that sense of unease.

I expressed admiration for the doctor's persistence in capturing his murderer despite his mortal wound.  It demonstrated to me, a courageous effort.  The fact that, through the doctor's efforts, a murderer was captured and would likely be punished for the murder, was an additional bonus.  While I aspire to New Testament forgiveness, there still is one foot in the Old Testament with a hankering for smiting the wicked.

Dan immediately spotted two flaws in my argument.  The first was that the doctor might have saved his own life had he stayed home and called 911.  By pursuing the attacker while mortally wounded, the doctor perhaps created a tragedy for his wife.  True enough but, I think, a refutable argument.  

The second objection was more arresting.  Dan's argument was along the lines of "The man has suffered a mortal wound.  How reliable can we assume his identification of his assailant to be in the dark?  What if in his spiral towards death, he took out the wrong man?"  Now that is a compelling point.  What would my argument be if the doctor misidentified his assailant in the dark and ran over an innocent?

The Smith/Rock kerfuffle is weak tea but it has the same element of the tension between exacting vengeance and being the mature adult and turning the other cheek.  

The only good thing about this unpropitious drama is the pleasure of remembering Dan, a good man taken too soon.