Today’s post is by Stephen Hall. Thanks, Stephen!
I’ve been rather unmotivated this week, no interesting topics seem to come to mind about which I have really wanted to write, however, one can always count on social media to produce a sufficient amount of stupidity and foolishness to furnish material for an article.
So if you have been living under a rock or in a cave, you’ll know that some belligerent cretin hurled the insult of calling Christopher Cuomo by the name “Fredo” while his companions videoed the scene of Mr. Cuomo totally losing his cool and threatening to throw the man down the steps, ruin him, and hurling a barrage of expletives in response to the name thus called.
In an effort of full disclosure, I had never before heard the name “Fredo” much less heard it employed as an insult, having never seen the Godfather movies from which it was taken or read the book. In all honesty, I’ve never really watched any of the Godfather movies, though I did once make the attempt but got bored after about half an hour, crime movies have never held much appeal to me.
I gather that Fredo was a character who was rather stupid, that is actually having a rather low IQ and not merely foolish, who obtains his position and standing solely due to nepotism riding the coattails of his criminal family having no speakable talent of his own.
Understanding this, it becomes obvious what Chris Cuomo would take offense at the comparison, himself not being particularly bright and having ridden his family’s fame and notoriety to a cushy position as a news anchor, albeit on a third rate cable network like CNN.
From viewing the video, he appears to be with an entourage who are attempting to keep the situation from getting out of hand, or maybe those are just concerned bystanders, in addition to being with his 9-year-old daughter and his wife, while on the other side the man lobbing the insult in his direction also appears to be with several of his fellows who are capturing the events on video.
The fact that his daughter is present is an interesting factor, because it appears to heighten his emotional reaction as well as calls into question his wisdom in his choice of escalating the verbal altercation. What if a melee broke out between him, the other man, his friends, and the other man’s friends? One would think the physical safety of his daughter would be a more pressing matter than his wounded pride, as I don’t think a 9-year-old will really hold her own in an ensuing street brawl.
The situation was made much worse from a public relations viewpoint with the word Cuomo chose to justify his anger in his tirade by declaring that “Fredo” was a “racist slur” (apparently elevating Italians to a race rather than an ethnicity, comparing the word to the “n-word” as he called it, and if he had used the proper term “ethnic slur” he might not have quite proved the name-caller’s vicarious dig about his lack of intelligence) and returning the name-calling by calling the man a “punk ass bitch”.
One might be willing to excuse Cuomo’s vulgarity due to his anger at the use of such a vile “ethnic slur”, except it was not. A comparative reference of one person to another person, whether fictitious or not, is not a “racial slur” as it only disparages that particular individual and not the race or ethnicity as a whole. In much the same vein, many people imagine that calling someone an “Uncle Tom” is a “racial slur” when it is not, it is merely a personal insult. (An odd insult at that as the character used for comparison was not a particularly bad character, merely a bit obsequious.)
Cuomo’s virtue signal laden tirade was further revealed to be blatantly hypocritical with his assertion, that the use of the name “Fredo” was an insult to all people of Italian heritage designed to spur outrage, given that Ana “Nail-Filer” Navarro was shown on Cuomo’s show calling Don Trump Jr. a “Fredo” and Cuomo does not even react with so much as a raised eyebrow at this supposed “racial slur” offensive to all people of Italian decent. To Nail-Filer’s credit, like Cuomo’s name-caller, she was correctly using the comparison to proclaim her belief that Trump Jr. was not to bright and only got his position through nepotism.
(Oddly enough, many people have said the same thing about Chelsea Clinton, but there is no real female equivalent to “Fredo”.)
A number of people were applauding Cuomo’s reaction and desire to punch his name-caller and throw him down the steps, despite the physical danger it may have foisted upon his daughter. One can imagine a different view of the reaction if he were alone and standing up for his pride than in the company of his wife and daughter.
Early in our nation’s history it was not uncommon for men to engage in duels if they felt their honor, integrity, or reputation had been insulted, or even to defend the honor of a female relative or acquaintance. Vestiges of the Age of Chivalry which certainly made for a more polite society, but a practice which was subsequently outlawed in an attempt to curtail violence within society.
(As you can tell from the gang and drug related shootings and mass glory seeking shootings, it has been a rousing success at making our society much safer at the expense of basic civility and politeness.)
One may recall a certain dispute between one Alexander Hamilton and one Aaron Burr early in our nation’s history, that even a President, Old Hickory, had engaged in a duel or two, and even literary luminaries such as Samuel Clemens partook, however reluctantly, in the practice.
The common brawl, on the street, in a bar, or an Antifa demonstration, can be viewed in many ways as a less sophisticated duel though more prone to break down into a disorganized free-for-all. As such, the name-calling or insulting of another is all too often the prelude to a bout of fisticuffs, or dueling by pugilism, the desire for which was so readily expressed by Mr. Cuomo.
Of the finer legal niceties, an organized pugilistic match regulated as sport, is not considered assault and battery in large part because the participants have voluntarily agreed and assented to engage in conduct which would otherwise clearly fall under the definition of assault and battery.
The idea that a person may consent to an activity which would otherwise be illegal, and the state then sanction such activity, is always a legally ambiguous concept. Legally speaking, the victim of an assault is not even a party to a criminal, read civic, case as such cases are between the state and the accused. Just how far may a person consent to activity which would otherwise be a crime? (An interesting question, but not for this post.)
In the case of such a street fight, one should always remember that in many jurisdictions, the verbal provocation of the fight, the insult or name-calling, may be deemed to be the initiator of the altercation and not necessarily the person who threw the first punch.
WV Supreme Court of Appeals Justice Neely introduced the legal standard of “fighting words” into the judicial lexicon. “The traditional insult involves an epithet or slur which falls into the category of ‘fighting words’ and is frequently not uttered for the truth of the matter asserted.” Mauck v. City of Martinsburg, etc., et al., 280 S.E.2d 216 (1981).
The case involved a different matter than the one at present, but is of not for distinguishing the purpose of some words in some circumstance designed to insult an provoke rather than assert any true meaning.
We have been regaled with a number of stories where conservative officials and politicians have been accosted and insulted in public places, and driven from restaurants by the incivility of staff or patrons. Here we have the reverse where a leftist media personality was insulted and accosted just traversing a public street.
We’ve had worse, instances of acts of physical violence politically motivated, and the situation just seems to get worse and the rhetoric continues to get more vitriolic. People’s homes have been protested with mobs, even if non-violent they have certainly been threatening.
It is wrong to accost people publicly with insults, as distinguished from legitimate questions, and to place people in any reasonable apprehension or fear of physical attack. How one reacts to insults is often as telling of their character as well.
Do you turn around and threaten the people who threaten you, or do you turn the other cheek and let it go? There is no easy answer to this question. Each reaction might have the effect of diffusing the situation; or that same reaction might have the effect of exacerbating the situation.
Is the challenge accepted, or is the avoidance seen as weakness? This will not be settled with this incident, but I think it is a telling point in our culture that this event shows that such public confrontation will no longer be one sided, for better or for worse. We shall see.
