Kicking a Man When he is Down

There is a rumor going around that I am the sort of person who kicks a man when he is down.

It is true.

I say that if a man needs kicking, it is best to take a good shot at him when he is most vulnerable. The best objection that I have heard to kicking a man when he is down is that it is not quite sporting. I hold that to kick a man for sport is bad. If he needs kicking, then he obviously poses some serious threat to the common good, and that a well-placed kick when he is down will probably keep him down longer, or at least will dissuade him from the behavior that required his kicking to begin with.

Kicking a man must follow the Just War Doctrine. Since we are assuming that our hypothetical case requires kicking to restore order, and that kicking is proportionate to the harm he poses, then all we have to do is to determine when he has had enough. I have rarely encountered a kick-worthy person who was rendered fit for public life simply after one kicking. Some of these folks are like the Energizer bunny.

Now, while I am using the old physical metaphor, it is obvious that I mean to apply this rule more to verbal jousts and the like (but that does not mean that I don’t hold the rule for some idiot who needs a real kick as well). If someone is such an ass that he needs a verbal kick, why spare him when he has just put his foot in it? Go for the gold and really teach him something.

I have heard it said (how’s that for cliché? Passive voice, too) that one is a redneck if “he had it coming” sounds like legal justification for punching someone. I probably am part redneck, and I was excused from a jury once in a self-defense case.

Now, there is a huge difference between kicking a man when he is down and kicking him when he is dead.

I was no fan of Ronald Reagan. I did indeed say, “I’m glad he’s gone,” but that was in 1989. However, his mere existence as an ailing old man seemed to bother some folks. I am probably more baffled by the vitriol that some writers and pundits have shown than by the misguided (yet somewhat understandable) folks who seem to revere him as a saint.

Surely there is a time and place for a critical look at his reign, and so long as it is sober, considered, and measured, it can even happen right away, but the jumping up and down with glee stuff before he is even cold is sick. I could understand it if this were some real monster we were talking about: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, FDR or Truman, perhaps even my alter-ego, Richard Milhous Nixon, but no matter how one sees Reagan’s policies, his family life, his public morality, etc., to think that he is in the same league is asinine.