Freedom's Just Another Word For The Right to Be a Dumbass

I'm not one easily roused to righteous indignation, but one night last week I'd never felt as strong an urge to reach into my television and strangle a 16-year-old kid and his mother.

The kid in question, Walter Petryk, had been booted from his Brooklyn high school after arriving on Halloween dressed as Adolph Hitler. He had even grown an adorable little black mustache to complete his swastika-adorned outfit.

The New York Post reported that the principal removed Petryk from his second-period English class at Leon M. Goldstein High School when he refused to take off the outfit, citing his constitutional rights to free speech.

His mother — married to a Jewish man who reportedly had relatives die in the Holocaust — then delivered him the outfit the following day so he could pose, arm-raised, for photos with local media. I caught up with the story while watching Bill O'Reilly's show Thursday night.

O'Reilly, taking pains not to be perceived as bullying a kid, calmly asked Petryk why he chose to wear that particular costume.

"Why not?" Petryk, an honors student, answered.

O'Reilly then asked if he understood how his portrayal of a man responsible for World War II and the systematic extermination of six million Jews might offend some people — perhaps some people at a school named after a Jewish educator. Perhaps some of the people in Brooklyn who have tattoos on their wrists to remind them of their time in camps with family members who were gassed to death and burned in an oven by Hitler.

Petrtyk admitted that he figured some people would be offended, but they should "lighten up," because he was just making a joke. He wasn't really espousing Nazism or advocating the death of Jewish people.

His mother said she had initially tried to dissuade him from playing Hitler, but relented to his "artistic freedom," suggesting he was following in the comedic tradition of Mel Brooks' "Springtime for Hitler." It was Halloween after all, she said.

This isn't new territory. England's Prince Harry bombed with a similar sartorial joke at a party a few years ago, and Cartman, the cartoon Id on "South Park," succeeded in pushing these same buttons with his own school-worn Hitler outfit. Cartman's joke — or actually, the show's writers' joke — worked because he's a fictional character on a satiric TV show. Mel Brooks delivered his joke to a paying audience in the context of a play-within-a-play, intending to provoke and offend by portraying Hitler as a flamboyant goofball to deflate the dictator into the butt of a joke.

Prince Harry and Petryk had no such well-conceived motivation. A Halloween costume is not a comedy skit with context and an easily shared point-of-view. People see something and react. Pertyk said he did it only because he could. It was his right as an American to dress and speak as he pleases.

True. But we Americans must also endure the consequences of our freedom. And when someone — even a kid who acts dimmer than his GPA might suggest — deliberately and publicly offends people, he deserves derision. Loud and long.

On Halloween, Petryk rode the subway to school dressed as Charlie Chaplin, donning a bowler hat and top coat to conceal his real costume. He knew he would upset people and likely provoke confrontation.

There are many things our freedoms allow us to do. It is Petryk's First Amendment right to mock blind people behind their backs or lead a Ku Klux Klan rally in Harlem.

Petryk wasn't just randomly exercising his freedom of speech. He was intentionally acting in a way he knew would upset other people. And it is my First Amendment right to call him and his excuse-making, wrong-lesson-teaching mother exactly what they are: jerks.

Try that one on for Halloween.