I used the line "mug them again" in an essay I wrote about the Virginian Pilot employees who were attacked and beaten by a gang of black juveniles while they were driving back from a movie. The Virginian Pilot decided not to write a story about this attack, which happened in the middle of Norfolk. I, and many other people suspect this was because the editors of the Virginian Pilot are supremely politically correct. The victims and their attackers were the "wrong" race for the Pilot so the event was flushed down the memory hole.
Evidently the editorial page editor, Donald Luzzatto, had never heard the expression used before and called me a meanie. I read widely, but at the time I could not recall where I had read the "mug him again" expression. so I was pleased to find out that it was part of a story told by former NY Mayor Ed Koch. So her' for the edification of my readers and the high school graduates at the Virginian Pilot is the story.
Last year when liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer was robbed, the New York Post editorial page used it to recall one of the late Ed Koch’s favorite anecdotes:Back when he was first running for mayor, Ed Koch used to tell of the time he told some senior citizens about a judge he knew who’d been mugged.The judge, said Koch, told a group that “this mugging will not influence any of my decisions from the bench” — whereupon a woman yelled, “Mug him again!”
Some people will not learn even if the lesson is literally pounded into their heads.
1 comment:
Years ago,in the mid 1990's,I and my son were clobbered by thugs as he tried to leave a central Norfolk school.A member of the staff said he recognized one of the thugs as a football player.He was taken aside by school officials and was mysteriously gone when the police arrived.So was the security camera footage.The Pilot got the information about the story,but decided it was racially insensitive to report it.They've been doing this for quite a while,apparently.
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