If you've been paying attention to real news for some reason, you may have missed the Perez Hilton vs. Will.i.am throwdown.
In brief, they had words, and Perez claims that somebody in Mr. I.am's entourage punched him in the face. Seems pretty clear that somebody punched him in the face, but of course Will denies that part.
Aside from occasioning a number of really lame "Boom Boom Pow" jokes, this little dust-up provoked two stupid, self-serving videos from the principals. Here's Perez's video . If you can make it through all 11 minutes, you must have even less of a life than I do. And here's Will.i.am's , which is shorter, but which I still couldn't watch all of.
I have no opinion about whether this happened like either of these guys say it did--they each cast themselves as the rational, calm one while the other one was out of control.
I do want to take issue with something in Perez's video, though. He goes on and on and on about how people can say anything they want, but no one should ever hit anyone.
I agree about the whole violence is wrong part, but I'm not sure that there's as hard of a boundary between verbal violence and physical violence as Perez suggests. If you look at Perez in his video, he's hurt, angry, and humiliated. It's not the pain of his clearly very minor injuries that sticks with him--it's the humiliation.
Do you think anyone has ever felt such humiliation upon seeing their doctored photo on Perez's site, accompanied by his bitchy prose? I do not think he deserved to get punched, but I don't think you can make a career out of hurting people and then suddenly get all shocked when you get hurt.
Words are powerful. Nobody would write if they didn't believe this. I think most people, other than those who have been the victim of serious violent crimes, of course, would tell you that the hurts they still feel most keenly even after years have elapsed have come from things people have said to them.
I say this as a former bully--since I was physically small and weak, I thought of myself as a victim, when actually my nasty, sarcastic mouth inflicted a lot of emotional harm on people. I couldn't have beaten anyone up, at least not anyone in my general age bracket, but that doesn't mean I didn't hurt people.
Again, I'm not justifying anybody punching anybody. I'm just saying that people who use words to hurt people really can't get high and mighty about how moral they are in comparison to people who use fists to hurt people.
