I DO NOT APPROVE OF FISTICUFFS, but I find it hard to fully disapprove of this.

UPDATE: Reader Trent Telenko writes:

You missed the real point.

We just saw a Hollywood director — as “Blue Zone” as you can get – play a violent, honor impugned, Jacksonian, at the cost of his movie’s distribution in the British film market. He did this when an “idiotarian” British distributor said Americans deserved the 9/11 attacks just as much as the Israelis deserve children-suicide attacks from the Palestinians while within arms reach.

It is time for you to begin a “Jacksonian Watch” because this will not be the last time this happens.

Walter Russell Mead’s book “Strange Provenance” goes on at great lengths about the “Jacksonian tradition” in American foreign policy as he describes it and three other “foreign policy schools.”

I prefer the term “cultural meme” because Americans are a mixture of all four of Mead’s schools. The ‘Jacksonian traits’ of Mead were also touched on in two recent American social histories. The first is by Gary Gerstle, “The American Crucible,” and second is by David Kennedy, “Freedom From Fear.”

Mead points out in his book that the Jacksonian traits surface most strongly when America is at war.

Trent Telenko also suggests that political correctness in the media makes actual violence along these lines more likely: “Those who make the rhetorical defense of western culture impossible, make the violent defense of it by Americans inevitable.” His comments along these lines are interesting, but too long to excerpt here. I agree, though, that the setting and participants make this brawl particularly noteworthy.