Slapdash

As loyal readers of this blog (are there any?) know, I have little truck with pop culture and the celebrities who dwell within. However, since the news cycle of the past week or so has been caught up with the implications of The Slap, I have had no opportunity to duck notice of it. The Slap, administered at the Oscars ceremony by Will Smith, an alleged actor, to the face of Chris Rock, an alleged comedian, was apparently in retaliation for the comedian’s joking about the medical condition, alopecia, of Smith’s wife.

To me, making fun of a person’s medical condition, disability, looks, or name (I had enough of “God help you if you get the answer wrong”) is totally despicable. The perpetrator of such remarks is beyond the pale. However, in the case of Smith vs. Rock I will plead agnosticism on whether The Slap was an appropriate response to the provocation.

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All of which brought to mind another case of a slur made against the wife of a prominent personage: namely, Donald Trump’s attack on Heidi Cruz, the spouse of Texas senator Ted Cruz, who was a rival of Trump’s for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

What, I wondered in recent days, would have happened if at one of the pre-nomination debates, Cruz had hauled off and slapped the fake-bronzed face of insult-monger Trump? “There you are for insulting my wife, you bastard!”

How would the crazed Republican voters, the party leaders, the babbling media types have reacted? Would they have sided with Cruz, seeing him as a knight in shining armor springing to the defense of an offended woman? Would they, on the other hand, have felt sympathy for Trump and his reddened cheek, viewing him as a victim of an unprovoked attack? Would there be loud calls for Cruz to be drummed out of the GOP, as there were for Smith to be ousted from membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? (He resigned voluntarily.)

Well, fascinating as it is to chew over this counterfactual scenario, the end result was that Ted Cruz, the master of Cancun, wimped out and eventually supported Trump. He (and his wife and family) even had dinner with his insult-tossing rival at the White House. 

Would have been interesting, though.