It is a goddamned slap, nothing more nothing less
I wade through the punditry drawing meaning out of some celebrity dramatics — Will Smith slaps Chris Rock after Chris Rock makes a crack at his wife’s baldness. Feed from this broad strokes against societal ailments. A teachable moment for one group — punching down on the thing that caused the baldness. A crack at Donald Trump — Howard Stern reaches to make this idea — or Trump’s contribution to a coarsening — unleashed the violent rhetoric, now we get celebrity violence. A Reason columnist chimes in to say this spells out how words and deeds should be separated — that, no, words are not violence — and there we sold a two two on a fall from concepts drawn in the Enlightenment Liberal epoch that moved away from an offense demanding a resonse.
Maybe we can sell that this is the work of Scientology brainwashing — see, Will Smith slapped a reporter a decade ago so we have a history of this kind of thing.
In other Oscar news, according to the pile on yahoo news — some celebrity or other was wearing really short hot pants. And these are your two big celebrity scandals of a largely unwatched Academy Awards ceremony.