Roses for Guns

The fallout from George Zimmerman shooting Trayvon Martin exposes the breadth of the divide between racist and anti-racist America. Zimmerman’s act forces people who believe in a civilized society to take a stand against it, against massive distribution of guns, and against “Stand Your Ground.” In contrast, the shooting brings racists and gun nuts out of the closet. In a typical example of the “logic” wielded by the ranting ignorati, a group much courted by Fox News, one Internet poster claimed Trayvon Martin did not have the iced tea and candy with him when he died because—drum roll—he reached home, left them there, and went out again, presumably to beat up Zimmerman or to rob someone’s house. That this conflicts with every reliable account of Martin’s death does not faze this fellow one bit.

Zimmerman claimed he carried a gun because of a pit bull that frequently got loose in the neighborhood.

Zimmerman's gun was loaded with hollow-point bullets--bullets that expand upon impact, maximizing internal damage and the chances of death. You don't need hollow-point bullets to stop a pit bull. And you don't need hollow-point bullets to stop a robber. The Atlantic

As the piece in The Atlantic goes on to note, burglars pick their particular area of “expertise” because of a wish to avoid violent confrontation. Otherwise, they’d be in the street mugging someone or at the 7/11 brandishing a gun.

Zimmerman claims Martin bashed his head against the concrete but Martin’s body was discovered face up on the grass, where, in fact, at least one witness placed the scuffle. Zimmerman’s explanation for Martin’s face-up position was that he didn’t realize the boy was dead so he flipped Martin over to straddle him.

Much speculation has surrounded the cries for help heard that night. Trayvon’s mother believes the voice is that of her son. Zimmerman’s father insists it is the voice of his son. But Martin’s mother makes a good point when she argues that if, as Zimmerman insisted, Trayvon held his hand over the man’s mouth, causing him to feel he would suffocate, how on earth did he scream?

According to the coroner’s report, no evidence exists on Trayvon Martin’s hand that he attacked Zimmerman with the viciousness claimed. But if Trayvon lost it, so what? Is it okay to stalk someone and shoot them when they try to defend themselves against someone whose motives they can’t fathom?

So much in court will depend on what was in George Zimmerman’s mind when Trayvon Martin putatively attacked him.  But what must have been in Martin’s mind when he kept seeing the hulking, mute Zimmerman following him?

Zimmerman accompanied a police detective on the route he says he took the night of the killing. His story is videotaped as they drive around. Global Grind exposes the points of contradiction between Zimmerman’s reenactment version of events and the tape of his 911 call. Zimmerman Reenacts Crime

In the reenactment, Zimmerman claims Martin jumped out from some bushes to attack him, taking him completely by surprise. But the only bushes Martin could have hidden behind at the spot Zimmerman points to look about two or three feet high and, even then, are located at such distance from the walkway, any advantage of surprise would have been lost as Martin, presumably puffing as he was reported to have been running, loped over several yards of grass.

Zimmerman additionally claims the only reason he exited his truck after being told not to follow Martin was because the 911 operator had asked him to get out and look at the street sign in order to tell her precisely where Martin had gone. No such request is recorded on that tape. Moreover, as a neighborhood watch volunteer, Zimmerman patrolled those streets and as a resident he lived on them and drove over them constantly. and the complex has only three main streets, one of which Martin was using. Yet Zimmerman didn’t know the name of it? He excuses himself by laying claim to a “bad memory.”

Zimmerman repeatedly told police that Trayvon Martin sucker-punched him, tried to suffocate him and bashed his head into the concrete to the point it felt his “head was going to explode.” He said Trayvon tried to take his gun from him before saying: “You’re going to die tonight, motherf—–.”

But [Sanford Police Detective] Serino wondered why Zimmerman’s skull wasn’t fractured, why he didn’t know the street names of a tiny neighborhood where he’d lived for three years… Serino got him to acknowledge what Trayvon’s parents and lawyers have said all along: that Zimmerman got out of his car that night not so much to check for an address to give police, but to find out where the teen went. News One

Floridians support “Stand Your Ground”, as apparently do the citizens of more than 32 states with such legislation. While the rest of the developed world shrinks from spreading guns around, America passes laws that permit guns in everything from church to school, enabling drunks to arm themselves before going out to cruise the bar scene.

Despite widespread outrage over the Florida case, gun-friendly senators in Washington want to make it easier to extend those laws to most of the country [which] would set the United States, where there are more firearms in private hands than in any other country, even farther apart from the rest of the industrialized world as far as guns are concerned. And it would mark yet another success for the National Rifle Association (NRA) in its long campaign against gun controls. Reuters

Apparently too many Americans believe African Americans have no right to defend themselves against a white stalker, and they have put their money where their mouths lie (double entendre intended). CNN and CBS seem to want to line up with them, CNN giving air time to Zimmerman’s lawyer to appeal for more donations, CBS sending flowers to Zimmerman’s parents, because, according to Zimmerman’s sister, they knew “we are going through a difficult time.” Sun Sentinel

I feel for them.

Bowing to the Dead

Google intends to charge for this Web site in the future. I am seriously considering shutting it down as a result. If I do, I will continue to post my thoughts on my own Web site, on the Notebook page, at http://candidapugh.com.
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In 1965 I worked for the American Cancer Society in San Francisco. The ACS engaged in a number of charitable activities, from providing free transportation for cancer patients to their chemotherapy sessions, to providing bandages for mastectomy patients on the mend.

What they didn’t provide much of was serious research. I learned this by keeping my eyes and ears open. At that time, the ACS in San Francisco oversaw a trust fund of $1,000,000, then (unlike now) a substantial sum. The terms of the trust were that the fund was to be spent on research and that all the money was to be consumed within a certain period of time. At the time I worked there, ACS had just gone to court to win an extension on the trust provisions. No problem. The widow who had left that money to the ACS was no longer around to contest anything.

What interested me even more than their having invalidated the original provision was the question of where the money was going. In reality, the fund was increasing, not diminishing, thanks to savvy investments having nothing to do with cancer research.

Through that trust fund ACS funded only junior researchers, post-docs, whose hope of making any significant break-through in curing cancer ranged from slim to none.

My guess was that the members of the board of SF’s ACS washed each other’s hands, steering donations and bequests into each other’s businesses. I contacted a reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle and he asked me to do some late night sleuthing. I brought him a stack of documents and he went up to Sacramento to talk to the individual in charge of monitoring charitable organizations throughout California. He returned with bad news.

The bureaucrat had explained that he was the only employee of the State engaged in looking into the work and finances of all the organizations in California. He specified the number but I don’t remember it, only that it was far beyond what any one individual could cover adequately. He also said he “knew something” about the American Cancer Society but would only tell the reporter “off the record.” Since the reporter planned to publish whatever he learned, he refused the confidence.

Working conditions at the Cancer Society for those of us not in the higher echelons were somewhat crappy. Although far from toiling in the coal mines or rice paddies, we were nevertheless overworked and underpaid, secretaries routinely sent on personal errands, like all good secretaries of the era. We served coffee and food to pontificating executives whose lists of goals and objectives never related to anything in reality.

I reasoned that we needed a union, so I brought one in.

The immediate effect was that a few people who also wanted the union were fired. The person who headed up the local ACS branch office, Allen Kolb, called a meeting after we voted in the union. Mr. Kolb had never expressed the slightest interest in the well being of the staff, but he rose on his shaky legs (he was of an advanced age but I suspected him of exaggerating his infirmity on this occasion), and gave a long poignant speech that actually included the words, “My door is always open.”

Being young and hotheaded and not particularly bright about how easily people are moved to compassion, I stood and asked Mr. Kolb some penetrating questions. I thought my questions exposed his plot to manipulate us. In fact, all that it exposed was that people are eager to believe the best and put off by young women who press old quaking men to tell the truth.

In the John Roberts decision over Obamacare, we see the same eagerness to plunge heads into the sand and believe the best. Columnists ooze joy over the way Roberts has “reformed” the Court. When the Chief Justice lifted his leg to urinate on the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, if you’d been listening for criticism, you could have heard a pin drop. One writer went so far as to declare the Roberts Court free of the very politicization that has marred almost every decision to come out of it. Forgotten, seemingly, were the decisions to hand the presidency to George W. Bush and Citizens United.

The other justices, predictably, expressed outrage, citing the founding fathers (also predictably).

Here are the two versions of what the founding fathers thought:

[Right-wing wacko/Right-wing Justice version]

When one reads the writings of the Founding Fathers, there is little doubt that the commerce clause (as applied between the states of the Union), was to be used for little more than insuring what we would call today, a "free trade zone". That limited role is quite rightfully where the federal government's authority in interstate commerce should end. Any reach for authority beyond that envisioned by the men who wrote the Constitution should be considered unconstitutional.  http://www.originalintent.org/edu/federaljur.php

Jeez. Free trade. Who would’ve thought our reactionary buddies in government would’ve been so focused on business? But here’s another version:

George Washington in a letter to James Madison: “The [commerce] proposition in my opinion is so self evident that I confess I am at a loss to discover wherein lies the weight of the objection to the measure. We are either a united people, or we are not. If the former, let us, in all matters of a general concern act as a nation, which have national objects to promote, and a national character to support. If we are not, let us no longer act a farce by pretending it to be.”
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/02/24/madison-father-of-the-commerce-clause/

I guess Washington meant we were united in seeing trucks rolling across state borders to deliver more cigarettes and beer to the local 7-11’s.

We who fought for civil rights in the 1960s heard the coded messages sent through the invocation of “states’ rights.” Argue all you want to that states’ rights, just because it was the cry of the old Confederacy and the underpinning of Jim Crow, does not have to mean racism. Think of leaving the weakest members of society to the mercy of various states. Oh yeah. We’ve already done that.

Well, here another commentator gets it right. John Finkelman, President William McKinley Professor of Law and Public Policy and Senior Fellow in the Government Law Center at Albany Law School, writing on “Thomas Jefferson, Original Intent, and the Shaping Of American Law”:

Much of the analysis in these cases limiting the Commerce Clause and expanding the scope of the Tenth Amendment resembles the losing arguments set out by Jefferson in opposition to the Bank of the United States. An understanding of the origins of the Rehnquist Court’s Commerce Clause and Tenth Amendment jurisprudence illustrates that the Court’s recent positions have an old lineage—dating from Jefferson’s years as Secretary of State—but that the Court’s positions reflect a theory of the Constitution rejected by almost all of the framers of the Constitution and leaders of the nation at the found- ing. Ironically, many of the justices in the majority in these cases advocated implementing an “originalist” jurisprudence or a “jurisprudence of original intent.” But an examination of the debates at the time of the founding illustrates that they are not following the intentions of the vast majority of the Founders, but instead are following the losing and rejected theories of Jefferson,93 which metamorphosed into the long-discredited theories of John C. Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and, in the modern period, Strom Thurmond, Harry Byrd, George Wallace, and Lester Maddox. http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv1/groups/public/@nyu_law_website__journals__annual_survey_of_american_law/documents/documents/ecm_pro_064602.pdf

While, according to Finkelman, the founding fathers, all except for Thomas Jefferson, wanted a strong centralized government that could override states’ rights, the wacky Right argues that never happened. Sweeping all the rhetoric countering their twist on history to one side, they ignore the entire reason the Articles of Confederation were swapped for the current Constitution, namely, that the Articles permitted the states to retain sovereignty.

But suppose the founding fathers had wished to thwart regulation of the states and their business by the federal government? So what? Is it not lunatic to rigidly apply a document conceived well over two hundred years ago to contemporary society? Thomas Jefferson himself thought so. He argued that a new constitution should be written every 19 years. Furthermore, as he wrote to James Madison:

“This principle that the earth belongs to the living, and not to the dead, is of very extensive application and consequences, in every country, and most especially in France.” http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch2s23.html

In other words, all this palaver about bowing to the original intent of long-dead white people flies in the face of reality. Those men did not live in a world that has narrowed to the range of bandwidth. They never saw a computer and never witnessed the explosion of nuclear weapons, the failing of nuclear power plants polluting the planet. The notion that they could prepare us with a single document to cope with this fragmented and fragmenting world is preposterous on its face. Who cares what their intent was? What’s the right thing to do now?

Friends Don't Let Friends Eat Cake

In the days I liked to sew, I’d go to a wonderful fabric store in Oakland and wander up and down the aisles. That store had thousands of bolts, every kind of fabric I could imagine and some I couldn’t. After spending the better part of an hour gawking, I’d get back in my car, drive to my neighborhood five and dime, and within minutes pick out yardage for a pattern from two short rows of fabric bolts.

Americans take pride in diversity of choice, seeing it as a natural outgrowth of the virtues of capitalism. But too much choice is numbing. Desire can bump up against competing desire, and when the choice must be limited to one only, competing desires can become self-canceling.

I thought about that wonderful Oakland fabric store while the Occupy Movement was making headlines with its headless octopussian shape, its Walt Whitman multitude of demands. I thought about another experience as well, a long-defunct 60’s social workers union in San Francisco with the motto “Do Your Own Thing.” As a curiosity, it was kind of cute. As a union, it was an oxymoron.

(“If you want to strike, go ahead and strike.” But folks—that isn’t called a strike. It’s called quitting your job.) The membership wanted nothing more than to be their version of free, not free of oppression from above but free of commitments to their peers.

By the time Ronald Reagan brought his Alzheimer’s into the presidency, the Left of the 1960s had disappeared. Replaced by liberals and progressives, most of whom showed increasing reluctance to self-identify, so-called “leftists” shuffled to the right, landing somewhere just north of the center, while so-called “conservatives” (as if shoved) moved more and more severely to the right.

As for the center, what is that? What does it mean to be nowhere, to have only “neutral” opinions? The pretense of the existence of a center hinges on the fantasy of objectivity. Americans like to believe that between the “radicals” and the “conservatives” the press serves up, there exists a kingdom of Truth where all things are equal and nothing benefits from favoritism. It’s the idea behind the jury system, isn’t it? That jurors shed their bigotry, their prejudices, their assumptions, all that shapes their thinking in a concerted effort to strip the facts of all coloration.

I used to begin the reading and composition classes I taught as a graduate student at Berkeley with a small exercise. Standing at one corner of a desk, I’d ask the students to tell me what they believed I could see. Then I’d move to the opposite corner and ask if the view had altered. The point is that wherever you stand, you will not be able to see some things. There is no objective position to occupy.

Beyond that, fans of illusionary objectivity claim that it excludes emotionalism. With a bit of reflection, anyone can dig out the flaw in that thinking. Objectivity, if it were at all achievable, would encompass all truths. Emotions are part of reality, part of the truth. Consider, for example, apportioning a coconut cake between two children. One child hates coconut, the other is wild for it. Do you cut the slice in half anyway because that is the objectively fair thing to do?

Back to the Occupy Movement, a patchwork quilt of desires: End global warming and Frankencrops. End poverty and racism. Free higher education. Universal healthcare. Stop reliance on fossil fuels. Eliminate national boundaries. Forgive all indebtedness.

Why not let them eat cake?

So, what’s wrong with the Left? In the list of Occupy demands you have most of the answer. A lack of focus. A lack of an achievable agenda. A lack of connection to the community.

Either organize for revolution or stop pretending you want things that would only be possible under a different government. Either put together a viable third party, which means winning the middle and the working classes to your platform, or fold up your tents and go home.

By rejecting centralized leadership, the Occupy Movement failed to establish an identity, something that might have been compelling to the 99% they talked about. The Right has an identity. Focused (and sadly achievable) demands. A familiarity with all those subtle language buttons that, when pushed, make Americans all too willing to act, or at the very least to vote for candidates that despise them.

The buttons the Right pushes are freedom of choice (except for women), baby-killing, terrorists, taxes, socialized medicine, liberty, crime, immigration, etc.

What buzz words does the Left use to garner a receptive audience? Okay. I said there was no Left. The absence of a language proves it.

When Reagan began attacking liberals and equating that word to traitors, liberals responded as Barack Obama tends to, pulling in their claws and hiding behind the sofa. The Right came storming. The Left dissolved, leaving behind a series of failed compromises. Liberals have been reduced to whimpering while the Right bellows.

What is a program for change? First step: Get real. Get serious. Prioritize needs. Articulate demands that look achievable and start building neighborhood organizations to go for them. Address some of the most pressing problems facing this country instead of every problem on the planet. Without priorities, nothing gets done.

The second part is to follow the Right’s lead and put some effort into public relations. One reason Americans are confused about their own need for single payer healthcare is that the Obama Administration failed to articulate the benefits, including the economic advantages. Why? Because they didn’t try.

If there were a true Left in America, they would shove the President aside and educate people. They would distribute flyers, hold community meetings on local issues, appoint spokespeople. Outrageously, at many, if not most, Occupy demonstrations, no one was authorized to speak for those demonstrating—opportunities to make points with the press were lost while do your own things held sway and nobody was oppressed by making their demands secondary to those of a unified Movement.

Having seen the great numbers of people willing to camp out in miserable weather to make a political statement, I at first rejoiced but I ended in despair. The bulk of that energy has been dissipated and the press and the public have turned away from a Movement that seems to have little to offer beyond a pie-in-the-sky agenda and no means or inclination to organize for any part of it.