Zimmerman Lynch Mob

--this cartoon shows the 
 typical facile liberal perception

Ahm seventeen. Almost a man.
He strode, feeling his long loose-jointed limbs 
--Almos' A Man, Richard Wright

I am looking for a human 
--Diogenes of Sinope

How could they see anything but the shadows
if they were never allowed to move their heads? 
--Allegory of the Cave, Plato
_________________

I opened my news on a muggy North Florida Sunday to read the verdict of the Zimmerman trial: "Not guilty". I have faith in the jury system, and believe jurors -- my peers -- largely get it right, when provided the relevant data.

The form in which the news came to me was via a liberal news service which ran the Yahoo news article by Liz Goodwin. The lede begins,

"Zimmerman, 29, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Martin, a 17 year old black boy ..."

"Black boy" -- evocative, no? My passing acquaintance with UPI and AP press manuals would suggest, "young man / adolescent / juvenile / or teenager" as fair descriptors, but "boy"?  BOY? Not for a 17-year-old young man, and especially not a young black man. It seems so uncouth as to be risible. It is derogatory, emasculating and humiliating.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit decided in a judgement last year that the use of the term "boy" towards a black man showed evidence of racial discrimination (Ash vs. Tyson Foods).  A retired judge commenting on the case was quoted in the New York Times as saying “It’s the same as calling him a nigger.”

Were Ms. Goodwin to describe a young black man thusly in our neck o' the woods, she would be liable to be jumped. Especially you, Liz-miss-white-person. No sir. Snoop Lion may say "boy" or "niggaz" ("fo shizzle my nizzle"), but certainly not you. Using a non-evocative, non-pejorative adjective is Journo 101, and it is sad when a national news service cannot get that right.

Our press is riddled through with bias at every slice. This should be the story of a trial and its findings, not an effort whip up some after-the-fact angst.

In addition to the offensive coverage, the comments from my fellow liberals following the story were atrocious, hideous, beginning with the suggestion that a black person now kill Z. The following is the comment I left:

"Why does the writer use the phrase, "17 year old black boy"? "Black boy" is the phraseology of the Jim Crow South; at 17, Martin was a teen. 

Oh, I get it, the liberals are just as disingenuous as the conservatives, and use anything in their arsenal, without regard to bias; in fact, intentionally with the intent of biasing. Disgusting, really. 

Some of the readers here call for the murder of Zimmerman by a black man ... most of you people here are nuts. Any hopes I had that this might be a truly liberal community are gone -- if this is liberalism in 2013 America, you can have it."

Ah, but a "boy" was killed, and we are gulled into believing that it was precisely because he was a "boy" (=young black man.) Don't give me that hokum. As Ranger says, when a 17-year-old young man earns the Medal of Honor dying in battle for his country, we do not call him a "boy". Trayvon falls short of that mark, but his age is commensurate; "young man", not "boy".

What passes for "news" and reportage today bores me. That people accept it is scary and disgusting.

Death of the Gated Community

--Haves and Havenots,
Arend van Dam

Hickory Dickory Dock,
The mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck ten,
The mouse came again
 --Hickory Dickory Dock, Nursery rhyme

Self-Defense is not murder 
--Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) 

In 1988, the crime rate in the United States rises four hundred percent.
The once great city of New York becomes the one maximum security prison
for the entire country. 
. . .

The United States Police Force, like an army,
is encamped around the island. There are no guards inside the prison,
only prisoners and the worlds they have made.
The rules are simple: once you go in, you don't come out.  
--Escape from New York (1981)
______________________

Its summertime, and that means the news cycle is hungry for more of the crazy in Florida; we do not disappoint.

This summer will see the latest recrudescence of the 26 February 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman as jury selection is underway for Zimmerman's 2nd degree murder trial. We will not discuss the excellence or degeneracy of either the shooter or the victim.

As we have written before, it a sad story oft-repeated, young black male with a brief history of flirting with the wrong side of the law, killed before be could manifest whatever it was he would mature into, usually killed by another of his own race. There is little to make this story any more noteworthy than the too-many other daily iterations of Martin's death, but the name and nationality of the shooter caught the eye of some crime reporter scouring the police blotter.

What a bombshell this might have been: Jewish man (=Zimmerman) shoots black teen (Are Jews armed? Don't they volunteer for the ACLU getting blacks their rights?) A sociological truism is that the underdog who is assisted will one day turn against his champions (=perceived betters), and people like Louis Farrakhan made sure no love was lost between the black and Jewish communities. But shooting? Surely Jewish people do not go shooting up blacks for racist reasons. This would have indeed been a coup for some gun-jumping journo, but it was not to be.

Turns out the shooter is Hispanic, and had volunteered time tutoring young black youths in his gated community of The Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford, Florida, described as "a multi-ethnic" gated community. The Zimmermans had lived there since 2009, and Mr. Zimmerman was the community watch captain. So we do not have a rogue Jewish shooter, nor do we have a version of the Crips and the Bloods.

Now, since it is not a rare occurrence for a young black man to be shot by a police officer or a peer, why the outrage surrounding the death of Trayvon Martin? Perhaps the story has become one of place, rather than players. Perhaps this story actually marks the death of the gated community, once the last refuge of affluent whites seeking protection from the ravages that play out daily in the inner cities of our country.

This story has touched a nerve: does it signal the end of the line for "White Flight"? Where do the whites go now that the last bastion of "whitehood" has been breached? The gated community is no longer a white haven, and is patrolled by Hispanic volunteers who will confront the perceived interlopers.

The sanctity of the gated community has been corrupted and penetrated from within by a degraded economy which does not discriminate when taking its victims down. Gated communities are no longer guaranteed havens or retreats from the ills that plague this world, for the residents have all been jostled about by the vagaries of an unstable world.

The Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford, Florida -- the now multi-ethnic gated community -- is no longer a place of retreat. It is just another community of striving individuals who do not care to look out of their windows when they hear a scuffle or a gunshot. The losers are the people who used to believe that gates could protect them.

26 Feb 2012: R.I.P., Gated Communities. Your death was slow but inexorable; you, the victim of a tanked economy and an ever-multi-culturing society. Whether you will be missed, and/or replaced, remains to be seen.

Enlightened Racism

I thought they'd arrest him,
but when they found a Koran in his house,
they had him executed
--V for Vendetta (2005)

We are oft to blame in this,
-- Tis too much proved -
that with devotion's visage and pious action,
we do sugar o'er the devil himself
--Hamlet, Shakespeare
_________________

Let me preface this by saying, this topic should not be plastered across the daily news. However, we cannot resist easy armchair quarter-backing and fueling our personal animosities.

We mentioned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's recent non-trial yesterday. Legal Web site Justia asked last month if it would be “The Trial of the Century?”, the "it" being the KSM trial. Check out the recent news and that designator seems to have quickly morphed into the emotional deets surrounding the Zimmerman trial in Florida.

One would think matters of State like the charges that were revived against KSM and four other suspects in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks would concern us, but those things do not allow us the high entertainment value and facile judgements that come with a sordid Southern small town shooting, kitted out with the combustible media overlay of racial profiling (Trial in Martin Case, Filled With High Emotion).

The Daily Kos recently sent me a petition to stop the sale of shooting targets depicting a faceless figure in a hoodie. The site has 1,524 entries to date under the tag, "Trayvon Martin . . . the boy who was carrying a bag of skittles and an iced tea."

Is it tasteless to exploit a tragedy? Sure. But no moreso than the bloody Hadji target we featured recently here; yet inexplicably, Daily Kos has no beef with that blood lust. If one hewed to democratic principles, then the delight in gore would be eschewed regardless of its ethnic guise. Save, for many good liberals, only some topics tickle their sympathies. It is this inconsistency of compassion which makes them hard to take seriously.

It is horrifying and heartbreaking to witness the impassioned partisanship over what should be strictly judicial issues. Before any decision is rendered, we are fighting mad on behalf of whatever dog we affiliate with, for whatever reason. Remember the furor surrounding the Anita Hill - Clarence Thomas hearings, the Duke Lacrosse (non-) rape case or the O.J. Simpson trial? People were not interested in justice being served, so much as airing their personal proclivities; these trials served as vicarious vendettas for many.

Why are so many liberals assuming the guilt of George Zimmerman? Why are conservatives tending toward his innocence? Whatever side you're on, you are a racial bigot. The judge should move to seal key evidence in the case from the public until trial.

That a company sees profit in making and a cohort of consumers will buy a suggestive target to shoot speaks of the frustration many feel. We are losing our grip on democratic form when we try people in the public domain.

As an aside, today's WaPo reports, "Bristol Palin show finally ready to run -- After being retooled again, the reality show focusing on her life as a single mother will debut in June." Well at least that, right?

It is becoming increasingly hard to believe we are a serious nation.

We Are Zimmerman

The “difference … between man and other forms of life”
is that man has invented what he calls
“morality’ and ‘reason’ to justify what he is doing. …”
--Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson

If you have the facts, argue the facts;
If you have the law, argue the law;
If you have neither, pound the table really loudly
--old lawyer's adage

The range of what we think and do
is limited by what we fail to notice.
And because we fail to notice
that we fail to notice,
there is little we can do to change;
until we notice how failing to notice
shapes our thoughts and deeds
--R.D. Laing

War is the spectacular and bloody projection
of our everyday life, is it not?
War is merely an outward expression
of our inward state,
an enlargement of our daily action
--The Causes of War, J. Krishnamurti
_________________

The U.S. serves as the neighborhood watchman of the world, proudly and without apology. We figure we are the Good Guys for trying to keep order and teach the heathens a better way. Unfortunately, since they often behave in ways antithetical to our neatly arrayed protocol and are full of tribal enmity and such, they get killed sometimes.

This neighborhood watchism of the U.S. is related to the outsized news coverage of a discrete tragic event which occurred in late February in a small town in Central Florida, a story which has quickly fired up most of the blogosphere.

We are outraged as a nation over the death of a single young black American shot by a supposedly self-appointed "neighborhood watchman." We know nothing beyond this fact, and the loud and persistent calls to bring Zimmerman to justice hinge on the following claims:

• Trayvon Martin (TM) ™ did not present a mortal threat, therefore the killing was a criminal act

• TM ™ was just a convenient target for Zimmerman's (Z) fantasy of being an American Super Hero

• Firearms are too readily used in our society

All of these are clearly articulated presumptions of a civilized society and a liberal democracy -- hard to refute on the abstract level. All life is valuable, to include that of the most heinous criminals and low-life serial killers. The U.S. is a nation of law, and no individual transcends these precepts.

If TM ™ was not a threat to Z or to anyone's life, then his shooting was not justifiable and not in accordance with our societal values. However, into the simplicity of the legality of the issue creeps the fact that we are NOT a post-racial society, and we are a violent one pretending to be otherwise.

Returning to our neighborhood watchman analogy, If TM ™ was killed illegally, then so too every Afghan, Iraqi and Pakistani whom we killed simply for being Afghan, Iraqi or Pakistani, for we just as assuredly racially-profiled them, too. It's quite simple on that level: We are hypocrites because get morally outraged over one act of supposedly inappropriate violence while supporting a national policy of inappropriate violence.

Yet we project our collective moral outrage and guilt upon Z for his willingness to apply deadly force in what we interpret as an illegal use of violence while we as a nation habitually murder the moral equivalent of TM ™ every day of the week in the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©), and do so without any self-mortification. And without the slightest irony, we figure if we stamp him (Z) out, we can gain some sort of vindication and atone for our transgressions. We love our martyrs, and if that were to happen, we would get a two-fer in the TM ™ saga.

The U.S. was on board with invading Afghanistan and Iraq and 10 years later is still killing people who posed no lethal threat to our national or personal well-being. Yet surely the Iraqis were simply trying to buy some Skittles and iced tea (biscuits and kaffir) with rags and not hoodies on their heads, and we killed them as frivolously as Z. supposedly did a helpless, cookie-baking young man.

While the Afghanis never entered the sanctum sanctorum of our protected personal lives -- the sacred gated community -- they did enter the symbolic sanctuary of our sacred financial and business lives when their supposed charges attacked the Twin Towers in 9-11-01. As a result of that violation and intrusion, our taxes and lack of outrage have allowed the U.S. to "go Zimmerman" on tens of thousands of hadjis.

We are all Zimmerman.