by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
It takes a lot to shock me, but I was honestly shocked by Will Smith smacking Chris Rock. I was “watching” the Oscars via Twitter and when I first heard about it, I assumed that the two men were standing next to each other on stage when it happened.
When I realized that Smith had walked up, approached Rock and smacked him full on the face…oh my God.
After losing a lot of sleep staying up all night looking at Twitter, I assumed when I woke up this morning that things would be a lot worse than they actually turned out to be.
Twitter was not full of bad What Does It All Mean hot takes that saw everything through whatever political point someone was trying to make. So, I guess we can all be thankful for minor miracles.
But, in general here’s my hot take on this situation. The joke that Chris Rock said was tone deaf, but it wasn’t bad enough to deserve to be smacked in front of tens of millions of people. The risk of escalation was too great, if noting else. Now THAT would have been a disaster.
So, in a sense, I guess we can be thankful for once that we live in an era of post-accountability. It seems we’re just going to move on as if none of this happened, just like we do whenever we learn something shocking about Trump.
It’s interesting how all the dire predictions last night of 36 hours worth of takes dominating the public conversation have not come to be. We all wake up today and it’s a big meh. What that says about modern America, I don’t know.
