The Fear of God

By -

I was walking up the street in Carroll Gardens when I saw the mother of my friend, who we will call Johnny Vongole, on the sidewalk, upset. She was talking excitedly to a man on the sidewalk. Suddenly Johnny came bursting out of their brownstone. "What's up?" I can't hear everything his mother said, but it ended with "And he called me an animal!"

"Which one?"

"Black shirt and shorts?" Mrs. Vongole points to someone about a block down the street. Johnny takes off running.

I spun around and followed. As I was walking, Mrs. V. passed me, walking at a very fast clip. Meanwhile, Johnny was catching up to the fellow, and was shouting at him. I could now see the guy had half-a-foot in height on Johnny, and fifty pounds in heft. He turned around, expecting to have a shouting match and a little show of bluster, and then be on his way.

Johnny cold cocked him directly in the face. The guy backed up in shock. Johnny came at him again, but his mom had just arrived, and stepped between the two men. The guy got out his cell phone.

Johnny and his mom came swiftly back up the street. He stopped for a second and said, "Hey Gene! I gotta go: the guy is calling the cops, and I gotta be out of sight when they arrive."

Observations:

1) A very swift escalation into unexpected violence can make up for a lot of size disadvantage.

2) The mother's role was an integral part of the scenario. I described the event to my friend Frank, a neighborhood native, and he said, "Oh yeah, there's years of practice behind that. Her husband called it 'the fear of God.' The guy you hit has to believe you would kill him, except that some outside force intervened and saved your life. If Johnny's mother hadn't arrived, Johnny would have had no choice but to keep hitting the guy. The mother is needed to give him a way to stop without appearing rational."

Pete Leeson could probably write a nice paper on these tactics.


Comments

  1. Anonymous8:27 AM

    Moral of the story: don't F with a man's mother.

    This goes beyond culture and environment, this is almost engrained. Men will die for their mother's good name; of that there is no doubt. You could almost compare it to a religion, as you have. That makes perfect sense.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more