Call Somebody, Please?

Will somebody please permanently take George Zimmerman's guns away from him, at least?  That boy's out of control.  Got money problems, got anger management problems, wife-girlfriend-abuser problems, stalk-and-shoot problems.  Got driving-too-fast  problems. Do we need to start a George Zimmerman Betting Pool, gambling on the date when he'll kill again? In "self defense," of course.

Seems that boy can't stay out of the news.  Or out of trouble.  He's like a train just determined to have a wreck somewhere. And now everyone within a mile of him has to be on tenterhooks keeping out of his way.  "Look out!  Here comes George and his AK-47! Run Away!"  Need to have a judge somewhere declare he has to stay 100 yards away from everyone on the planet. That might help.  Until the NRA gifts him with a sniper rifle.

For sure, the NRA loves the guy, no doubt about it.  He's their poster child, the best example of the Second Amendment they've got going.  The founding fathers would be proud.  Stand-your-ground, no matter where it is!  That's the ticket.  Just move that ground line anywhere you want it to be.  Lock and load.  It was her fault.  She yelled at me and I was in fear for my life.  Ker-BLAM!  I stalked him until he turned around and came back to confront me and scared me so I shot him in self-defense.  Ker-BLAM! I don't know why everyone's so upset.  What's the problem?

Obviously, the girls love this bad boy.  True, his wife got scared after an alleged altercation involving guns and threats and she decamped.  But pretty quickly he got a new girlfriend, until he allegedly pointed a shotgun at her and she called 911.  Funny how silly these women are.  Little 'ol shotgun.  What's the fuss about?

This time, however, the cops hauled him away, he spent the night in the hoosegow accused of felony aggravated assault and two misdemeanors.  The judge took away his guns, slapped a satellite monitor on him and instructions to stay away from the girlfriend. Then his wife served divorce papers on him while he was in jail, his enabling family had to cough up the $9,000 bail since, as the Orlando Sentinel reports, he's already $2.5 million in debt (legal fees from the Trayvon Martin killing).  Then the judge kicked him loose and he's now back on the streets declaring it was all his girlfriend's fault. 

Which is why I say, can somebody get this boy some help here?  Guy's got problems and those problems are looking for trouble.  Real trouble.  And I'm afraid he's gonna keep looking until he finds it. And somebody else is gonna die. 

Same Old, Same Old

Calhoun's Cannons for July 15, 2013

This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.

                                            Oliver Wendell Holmes

George Zimmerman went looking for trouble.  Trayvon Martin was out looking for Skittles and an iced tea. Zimmerman found his trouble. Trayvon found his death. Trayvon's parents then went looking for justice.  Their community went looking for justice.  What they found instead, was The Law.

It was The Law that operated differently for black and white, rich and poor.  It was The  Law blind to human bias, bigotry and racial profiling.  And it was The Law that had been poisoned by Florida's ALEC-led "stand your ground" rules, a gun-lobbyist's wet-dream, a license to pack heat and kill with impunity because the ALEC laws bestowed authority upon any gun-packing fool and turned a civilian into an untrained, armed militiaman, a cop wannabe who knows that he can act with impunity. A law that protects unconscious race bias, unwarranted lizard-brain fear, and appalling carelessness.

In Florida, as in other states with ALEC-led pack-your-heat and stand-your-ground anywhere-you-like, if you foolishly and wrongly profile your fellow citizen as a scary black man, a punk, "one of those," provoke a confrontation and then shoot him dead, The Law allows you a get-out-of-jail free card.  Especially, if you're white.  I mean, this is Florida, after all, and there's a history there.

Which is what made this case so bizarre.  It was a drama absolutely brimming with racial fear and back-story animus, (All those f--ing punks getting away with it.), awash in the politically generated fear and paranoia that animate so much of our society nowadays. (Just who are those ALEC-led laws aimed at?  Against whom is one standing one's ground?  Martians?) Yet all parties utterly denied that such a thing could possibly be going on. 

And, like many cases involving white and black America, the narrative changed during the trial from one involving an innocent dead kid into the narrative of a dangerous black man responsible for and deserving of his own death.  The victim became the perpetrator and the perpetrator now became the victim.  And nobody wanted to deal truthfully with what really happened that night. Or why. All critical elements if you're looking for justice.

But who and why and what happened are irrelevant if you're looking at The Law.

And when the verdict came down, it was another national O.J. moment.  A familiar narrative of two nations: one white, one black, both viewing a single case through their own historical lenses.

The verdict also became the new Law-sanctioned narrative of the now transformed Zimmerman who, through his lawyer and Robert, his spokesman brother, re-tell the story of a totally innocent man who, through no fault of his own, was wrongly set upon by a dangerous young man and so he had to shoot.  It's a story that I don't buy, but I can't blame Zimmerman for sticking to it so fiercely.  Far better to go through your life thinking of yourself  as an innocent victim than face the terrible truth that it was your own foolish actions and bad judgment that set in motion events that resulted in the death of an innocent young boy. That these tragic events would never have unfolded.  Until it was started by you.

Zimmerman's path forward will not be an easy one and that, I suppose, is a kind of rough justice. Scant consolation to Trayvon's family. But for the rest of black America, the verdict was an old, familiar tune.  And for them, their way forward is also an old, familiar path: work to change The Law into something more like Justice, eliminate the un-civilized ALEC-fueled license to kill laws, continue to counsel their young sons not to be caught Driving While Black, and seriously consider outfitting their children with Kevlar vests whenever they go out for a snack and a soda at the corner store.

New rules for an all-American post racial world.      

A Fool and His Gun

Calhoun’s Cannons for April 13, 2012

The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.

                                    William Faulkner

             On that dark rainy night, The Neighborhood Watchman didn’t watch.  He didn’t have to. He had a gun, you see, and when you have a gun you don’t have to just watch.  Especially when you live in a shoot-at-will, stand your ground state.  So just watching wasn’t part of the dramatic script unreeling in his head.  He could be Shane and save the neighborhood from a suspicious black kid in a hoodie. The police dispatcher told him not to get out of the car.  To wait and watch until the real police could arrive.  But a man with a gun does not wait.  He doesn’t have to.

            On that dark rainy night, The Kid was walking back from the store to his Dad’s place, which was located in a townhouse community that felt it had a need for a formal Neighborhood Watch program.  The Kid was walking while black, after dark, in a “gated” community, in a shoot-at will state and had unthinkingly compounded his peril by wearing a hoodie.  Worse, he was armed with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea.  In America, that can be a lethal combination.  The Kid noticed the Watchman following him.  He called his girlfriend.  He was worried.  He told her he thought he was being stalked, followed, and threatened by the man with the gun. Was he frightened?  Surely, he was frightened. Then something bad happened.

            And for weeks, the authorities did nothing. Why should they?  They had a Watchman armed with a gun in a shoot-at-will state and a dead black kid in a hoodie.  Case closed.       

                        And from those events, amplified by the hungry media, there soon rose the sounds of an old American anthem played on the black and white keys of a country that has never come to terms with its dark history. And buried deep in that anthem is the call and response hymn of the terrified white slaveholder, outnumbered by his living property, always hearing the muffled footfalls in the kudzu vine the jungle music of Nat Turner and his sharpened cane knives coming to the big mansion in the night.  

            It’s found in the ubiquitous racial dog-whistle music, the theme song of an unreconstructed  south, north, east and west, the unacknowledged original sin whose stain permeates everything even though no one dares speak its name.  The fear is America’s crazy Uncle locked up in the attic whose mad song can always be heard beneath the blare of the God Bless America ooompah band. Or slyly amped up enough to be heard while still remaining ingenuously deniable by unscrupulous political demagogues feeding the dark beast to get their votes. Or ratings.  Or the whispered reasoning behind shoot-at-will, stand your ground laws:  A chicken in every pot, a gun or two or five in every home, because America is a place filled with dark shadows and who knows what is lurking in that kudzu?

            A black kid in a hoodie, for one.

            And so the song continues.  We elected a black man as our president for the first time and pretended we were living in a post-racial world.  But with Obama’s election, gun sales skyrocketed, because, well, you know.  Unspoken, but sizzling on the internet was the belief that Nat “Obama” Turner is coming to the big house to get your guns.  And your women. It was subconscious dog whistle music happily manipulated by the unholy alliance of the NRA and ALEC, and it fueled the spread of shoot-at-will laws into twenty-two states, all urgently needed because there is no problem, no sick, irrational fear in the American heart that cannot be solved or soothed with more guns.    

            And soon the ugly spirit of the Know-Nothings that has always infested the American psyche became a lively talk-radio back beat.  Rush Limbaugh called the President a “thug” (Yes, Harvard is known for graduating thugs and gangstas.), while candidate Gingrich declared that he was the “food stamp president,” wink-nudge (Ah, the eternal Welfare Queens in their Cadillacs.  That one never gets old.), and Tea Partiers waved a poster of Obama with a huge Afro and a bone through his nose, Har-har-har. 

             And now America has another O.J. Simpson moment, a 24/7 televised trial, an over the top media-fest that will let us pretend that we’re having a national dialogue about race.  But it will be another phony conversation.  It always is.  The self-inflicted wound our Founding Fathers brought down on this nation has never been healed or cleansed.  It festers still.  One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War and Jim Crow, fifty years after the civil rights marches, black parents are still giving their sons “The Talk.”  It is a speech that Emmet Till would have understood perfectly: If you’re a young white man, copping attitude will get you an eye-roll.  If you’re black, it may get you a bullet.  Be careful of what you wear, how you walk, how you stand.  Guard the expression on your face.  Don’t run, be respectful, say Yes sir, No sir, Yassir, Yassir. 

             That’s the Black American Anthem, playing still on the black keys.  It’s a song you need to understand if you want to survive if you’re black in a world of Watchman who don’t watch, a country of shoot to kill laws written by scared, ginned-up, armed-to-the-teeth citizens who perceive their world as a terrifying place filled with kudzu and the clink of the cane knives in the dark.

            And all it takes to start the music is one damned fool.

            And his gun.