I've very consciously tried to avoid opining on the sad and savage saga of Treyvon Martin for the simple reason that I don't know enough about it. I suspect that what I do know isn't going to play out well for his killer, but that's highly speculative. Besides, I'm loath to be on the side of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton about anything. I’d include Spike Lee in that denunciation, but I can’t remember the last time anybody paid attention to him. On the other hand, I have written about the kind of circumstances that led up to Martin's death repeatedly, and most of you aren't really fond of my views. I took all manner of shit from my American readers when I suggested that the Castle Law didn't give Joe Horn the right to blow away two people leaving someone else's castle, back in 2007. More recently, my Canadian peeps went nuts what I said that someone who needed an interpretor for his trial, as David Chen did, probably shouldn't be in the business of arresting folks. I got into fights for weeks over that.
Look, these Castle and "Stand Your Ground" laws in the United States, as well as the proposed revision to Canadian laws regarding citizen's arrest, are based on a number of faulty premises.
First, they presume that law-abiding citizens are as willing and able to kill or maim as criminals are. If that's true, society is fucked.
Secondly, they presume that law-abiding citizens are as practised with weaponry as criminals are. If one is smart, one never assumes that one is more dangerous that someone already demonstrably willing to commit a crime is. It'll almost never end in your favour.
These laws are written in such a way that might have the unintended consequence of encouraging criminals to kill you first. It stands to reason that if you know that the law allows you to kill an intruder that the intruder knows it, too. It doesn't take boundless leaps of the imagination to figure how that can work out.
Third, they suggest that average citizens should have police powers, without the training or experience of the police. And the police fuck up more than their share! It strikes me as odd that the same people who decry things like Waco, Ruby Ridge and the more recent G20 Battle of Toronto want everybody to have the legal authority to kill, even when a safer alternative may exist. Worse, they want lethal force as a first option enshrined in the law. And it's incredibly difficult to see anything conservative in that, at least if you're sane.
I'm all for the right of self-defence. However, with that should come a great deal of responsibility. If you're going to take it upon yourself to act like a cop, you should be held to at least as high a standard when you smoke someone. The police usually only go out with guns blazing in the movies, but some people think that those not in the constabulary can shoot first and ask questions later and do so without consequence.
As far as the Martin-Zimmerman controversy goes, it doesn't logically follow that following someone around, confronting them, and then shooting them in the chest when they decide to kick your ass - assuming that this is even what happened, itself a leap of faith - constitutes "standing your ground", particularly when you're armed and you're not good and goddamned sure the other guy is, too.
If you think I'm talking crazy talk here, know that former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who signed the bill, and the chief Republican sponsor of Stand Your Ground agree with me.
If you think I'm talking crazy talk here, know that former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who signed the bill, and the chief Republican sponsor of Stand Your Ground agree with me.
On that point, I'd be awfully surprised if Mr. Zimmerman thought that Treyvon Martin was armed and decided to follow him around anyway, especially when a 911 operator specifically instructed him not to. It makes eminent sense to assume that Zimmerman believed that Martin was unarmed, or at least that he was better armed and more willing to fire first. To suggest anything else is suggest that either George Zimmerman was stupid, suicidal, or that the neighbourhood watch program has become a kamikaze mission without anyone telling me.
Which brings me to the media coverage of the story, which is sixteen kinds of stupid. While it's beyond tragic, it's hard to see how this has become a national story but for America's obsession with race and the continuing Republican descent into eternal victimhood.
Ann Coulter hasn't always been batshit crazy, you know. I read her first book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors when it first came out and it wasn't actually retarded. Of course, smart doesn't sell these days, so Coulter made sure that everything she's subsequently written is either laughable or actually demented. Anyone who spends as much time as Coulter does defending the memory of Joseph McCarthy - whose years of investigations didn't lead to the conviction of a single communist - shouldn't be taken seriously.
But, as it happens, saying crazy shit is a great way to get on cable news, and being on cable news is a superior way of selling books to people who don't know how to read. Did you know that both Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly have had multiple bestsellers? Did you know that cable news and talk radio hosts are the only people alive who are worse writers and thinkers than bloggers, who give away their nonsense for free?
It was only a matter of time before Coulter weighed in the Martin-Zimmerman saga, if only because modesty isn't her strong suit.
“I mean it is a lynch mob. This isn’t how we try cases in this country. And you know, the last time you saw this sort of thing on a regular basis was of course again from the Democratic Party and the Democratic Party’s outgrowth, the KKK. So, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that we get this from the Democrats. They have never bought into the criminal justice system where you have, you know, grand jurors and a procedure where evidence is vetted, and police look at it and prosecutors and grand jurors.”Just for the record, the last time I was aware of a “lynch mob” going after someone named Zimmerman, Dylan had just gone electric. It’s not a phenomenon you hear a lot about in the news.
Historically, the phrase is very specific to the black experience in the Deep South of yore. It has very real connotations to people who are still alive today. Of course liberal activists shouldn’t have compared the Martin case to Emmett Till, but it should be remembered that Emmett Till would only just be approaching retirement age if he were alive today.
This isn’t unlike Sarah Palin’s appropriation of the conservative “blood libel” in the wake of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. Because having MSNBC saying nasty things about you is just like the European pogroms against the Jews that culminated in the Holocaust. Seriously, if you blindfolded me, I wouldn’t know the difference. Actually, that’s not true. Coco Chanel does smell different from incinerated human flesh, if only slightly.
Lookee, I’ve been writing in public just shy of nine years now. And if you went through everything I’ve put out on Al Gore’s fabled Interwebs, you would be very hard pressed to find an instance of me calling anyone a racist. Mostly because it’s nasty, unnecessary, rarely true, and doing so proves that you don’t have a further argument.
Moreover, it’s a tactic pioneered by the Left, who still uses it to great effect on a daily basis. It seems to me that the Right can’t decry the tactic and appropriate it at the same time, at least not while remaining credible. It’s an intellectual twist to stand for rugged individualism while positioning yourself as a persecuted class, which rich, white cunts like Palin, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Coulter herself like to pretend that they are. These people say - often in the same fucking paragraph - that you should pull up by your bootstaps and that you can't because the government and media are discriminating against you because, of all things, you want a tax cut.
You know what? I’ll renounce everything I’ve said in the preceding five or six paragraphs if you can give me just one example of Ronald Reagan publicly comparing himself to the target of a lynch mob or a Holocaust victim because of his political opinions. Nor are you likely to find him equating Democrats with the KKK, mostly because he actually was a Democrat during the period in question.
Ms. Coulter, in her comments, likes to point out that that the Ku Klux Klan originated and flourished in what were then Democratic states. What she doesn’t point out is that those states are all Republican now, or why.
Between the end of Reconstruction during the Grant administration and the 1964 presidential election, the Republican Party was considered a foreign entity in the former Confederacy. Ten years after Brown v. Board of Education accomplished exactly nothing (because school desegregation only happened under Richard Nixon, nearly two decades later), Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act, supported largely by the GOP.
But it isn’t a coincidence that Goldwater became the first Republican to win the Deep South in a century. Five of the six states that he carried were there, constituting almost a majority of the former Confederacy. LBJ swept Goldwater way in the Western and Mountain states, which were far more inclined to his libertarianism than was the South. Guessing why is hardly a stretch, particularly since the South benefitted more handsomely than anywhere else in America from New Deal liberalism.
I should also point out that Democrat Harry Truman lost a great deal of the South to the Dixiecrat segregationist (and later Republican) Strom Thurmond in 1948. Thurmond, who became a Republican as a result of its passage, also voted against the Civil Rights Act. As a Democrat, Thurmond carried out longest filibuster in the history of the Senate, 24 hours and 18 minutes, against the 1957 Civil Rights Act. As a Republican, Thurmond voted against the much-less (seemingly) constitutionally offensive Voting Rights Act of 1965.Strom Thurmond never publicly renounced his racial views, but remains a revered figure in the GOP.
The Republican advance in the South was blunted by Alabama’s segregationist (then) former Alabama governor George Wallace’s presence on the ticket as an independent in 1968. Barring a southern Democrat, like Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton – who had ambivalent racial records, if you don’t count their liking rhythm and blues – Republicans have owned that part of the country between 1972 and 2008, when Obama surprisingly carried Virginia and North Carolina, and came within eight points of winning even Georgia.
Ann Coulter might like to pretend that America’s few dozen living Klansmen, who have constituency somewhat larger than that of the New Black Panther Party (all three of them), are rabid Obama supporters, but even the most curious sense of history tells you that this probably isn’t so. History would seem to suggest that most of them have Rick Perry bumper-stickers on their Datsuns.
She also ignores the de facto segregation of the North, where Republicans dominated for most of the century in question. Nor was the Klan completely alien there. Indeed, most of today’s most notably racist Christian Identity groups are securely entrenched in the Red States. Am I the only one who noticed that the only black folks killed at Waco or Ruby Ridge were probably government agents?
Yes, the Left – and the Democratic party activists, in particular – are deeply, deeply wrong in ascribing some nefarious racial motive to everything that happens everywhere, particularly given their political history. They didn’t love blacks, as much as understood that they couldn’t form a governing coalition without them in a post- Civil Rights Act era. Life was demonstrably much easier for the Left prior to 1964, as the New Deal proved. Without the “Solid South,” none of it would have been sustained for more than a few years, if it happened at all.
But Republicans shouldn’t pretend that their hands are clean, either. The Party of Lincoln saw the accidental success of Barry Goldwater’s constitutional stand and attempted to build on it thereafter, and did so cynically.
In all honesty, I don’t think that America’s obsession with race is necessary a badthing. The United States is almost alone among great countries that have honestly tried to face the truly horrid things that it did to its own citizens, and that’s something that should be commended. It would be a better world if more of us did it.
But there comes a point where that obsession colors (pardon the pun) everything and accomplishes nothing. Past that point, it divides for the sake of division, rather than unifies. And if you believe that politicians are interested in realunity, you’re kidding yourselves. Division for the sake of division is what decides elections, whether on the Left or the Right.
In a perfect world, the shooting of Treyvon Martin would be a matter for Florida law enforcement and media to decide. It’s only in the hyper-partisan atmosphere, driven largely by cable, talk radio and almost magnificent ignorance that has made it a national racial time bomb at all.
No matter where you stand, do you think that Martin or the Zimmerman families want that?
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