...And Another Thing

I suppose I should just get over this whole George Zimmerman thing. The truth is that there is an unimaginable litany of grotesque injustices perpetrated throughout the world every day of our lives. Our own government routinely crushes and incinerates women and children as a function of our holy crusade against Islamic radicalism, a both popular and self-perpetuating foreign policy. All over America, men, women and children of all races are shot and killed each day as an apparently irrelevant by-product of our sacred right of weapons possession. Let me not digress into the state of much of the remainder of the planet, where in abominable places like North Korea people eat grass and corpses to survive and in every corner of the globe evil men exploit and abuse the weak and the defenseless. Sometimes I just feel like giving up, which it appears a substantial number of my fellow citizens have already done.

 

I should get over it, but I can’t; not just yet. I have already suggested that my having sons around the same age as Trayvon Martin has emotionally affected me in unexpected ways. While my children are not black, they have friends who could be Trayvon Martin; kids who have on occasion raided my refrigerator and left cigarette butts on my patio and parked on the grass even though I have told them not to. As co-conspirators with my own children, they may even have smoked some dope, like about virtually everybody has at some point in their lives. Like my own children, they may even have taken exception to being corralled by authority and may sometimes have taken a short-cut through the backyard of someone they didn’t know. I am still having a great deal of trouble understanding how any of this warrants execution at the hands of a facile, over-aged hall monitor with a bad temper.

 

Speaking of bad tempers, I am making every effort to control mine. Anger is pointless, since there is not a thing I can do to correct any of this particular injustice, and rage just further assaults my already perilously decrepit cardio-vascular system. Anger is the path to the dark side and, perhaps more importantly, as opined by Sherlock Holmes, passion is the enemy of precision. Righteous indignation is a poor substitute for a reasoned and enduring commitment to justice, so I am going to suppress my fantasies of violent retribution and the sickly gleeful whimsy of seeing the smug, contemptuous proponents of feudal law being visited with the violent death of their own children as a proper form of education. Living only 54 miles away from the beautiful City of Sanford, Florida, I have been tempted to drive over and holler “you suck!” at every 40-something white woman I encounter, hoping my protest would find the ears of a member of the jury. Instead I am going to try my best to develop some perspective, accept the possibility that I could be wrong in my assumptions and surrender myself to the benign indifference of the Universe.

 

For the record, in my view of that Universe, we humans are only apes with big brains who by force of evolutionary dictate have adequately mastered control of our environment to allow us to procreate in unreasonable numbers and transmit the power of knowledge to succeeding generations. We are not the beloved of God, nor the pinnacle of creation, nor is there any substance to all of the other arrogant self-delusions we so fondly embrace. We are at every moment subject to slipping back into a state of primitivism where the exigencies of survival supersede commitment to any secular or religious principle. We must be constantly vigilant, not against the “fucking punks” that seek to burglarize our mid-priced townhomes, but against our own shallow commitment to decency and respect for the value of human life.

 

Quite frankly, I have been nauseated at the celebratory cacophony of voices extolling the vindication of the right to “stand one’s ground”.  This antediluvian concept, lifted straight from a “B” western, implies that civilization should support people who chose to initiate or prolong disputes to the point of lethal force when they simply could have walked away, as if one man’s pride is more valuable than another man’s life. This is what is so horribly wrong with Trayvon Martin’s death and why I have such difficulty in letting it go. I do not have to know the facts of the ultimate encounter to know that George Zimmerman did not have to put himself into the position of firing a round at point-blank range into the chest of a 17 year-old child. I do not have to know the state of mind of George Zimmerman to know that he had dozens of other choices he could have made that would have endangered no one. I do not have to analyze Florida’s manslaughter statutes to know that deliberately seeking a conflict and then using that conflict as justification for killing deserves to be punished. I do not have to judge the character of a dead child to know that his death is a tragedy. Over and over again in my mind, I keep seeing the image of Trayvon Martin’s lifeless body lying face up in the grass, legs crossed, blank eyes staring into oblivion, uselessly, senselessly and, apparently, legally shot dead, and my heart hurts.

That's Why It's a Sin to Kill a Mockingbird

Well, needless to say, I found the verdict in the case of the State of Florida vs George Zimmerman to be repulsive, although by no means surprising. I’m still trying to figure out how it can reasonably occur that a 17 year old kid coming home from the store is profiled, stalked and shot dead by a self-revealed racist with a history of physical violence and nobody is held to account for it. I am saddened and disappointed and, of course, angered and my anger and sense of frustration are exacerbated by the large numbers of my fellow citizens who take the position that justice has been done and we can all sleep well at night again.

It is not my intention to analyze the legal merits of the prosecution or defense of the case and it is not my intention to impugn the character or the intelligence of the jury. It is not my intention to question the efficacy of our legal system or of any of the specific decisions or actions of that system made or taken during the course of the trial. I was not present during the trial and cannot evaluate the quality of the presentation of the evidence or the manner in which it may have been refuted, and I did not participate in the jury deliberations and cannot assess the intent or substance of those deliberations. I do not know if it was proven that Mr. Zimmerman was guilty beyond all reasonable doubt of the charges brought against him, but I do know Mr. Zimmerman is guilty of being an avatar of the sick paranoia and cult of hatred and violence that so many people promote as a virtue in 21^st Century America.

America has always been a racist nation. We were born through the genocide of countless millions of aboriginal peoples and built upon the violently extracted sweat of African slaves. These actions required us to value the lives and rights of certain classes of people less than our own. The extent to which these facts of our history are diminished or denied has continually astounded me, and the righteous justification that allows us to absolve ourselves of moral culpability for such things contributes to the creation of people like George Zimmerman who feel that their assumptions about certain types of people are evidence of clear and present danger that warrant pre-emptive action. Racism is by no means dead in modern America, and the very argument that Mr. Zimmerman’s fears were reasonable because “young black guys commit all the crimes” is sterling evidence of that.

What really drives my dismay about this verdict is more deeply personal, though. I have two sons, one who will be 21 in a few months and another who will be eighteen in a couple of weeks. I love them and fear for their welfare a good deal more than my words or deeds generally indicate. They have not always followed the narrow path and I can easily see either of them wandering around somewhere unfamiliar at an unusual time and being confronted by a resident suspicious of their presence. I can also see the brashness of youth resulting in an uncooperative attitude which is then viewed as confirmation of suspicion and an escalating exchange where both parties vent their frustrations; frustrations over perceived danger on one hand, and the frustration of not being able to pass unmolested down a public street on the other. Such encounters usually result only in harsh words, or, at worse, the police being summoned to intervene, but if a person like George Zimmerman is introduced into the mix, I might be grieving the death of a child who was guilty only of standing up for himself and not being experienced enough to know how dangerous that can sometimes be.

On the night of February 26, 2012 George Zimmerman observed a person legally walking in his neighborhood that he thought was suspicious. He thought he was suspicious because he was the same race and age of persons who were thought to have committed property crimes in the neighborhood. George Zimmerman armed himself with a handgun and followed the “suspect” in his car. At some point he got out of his car and confronted the individual. Some sort of exchange ensued and an unarmed Travon Martin was shot dead. Whether George Zimmerman planned to shoot anyone is impossible to say; it is clear he prepared himself to so. The jury says there was no crime, but the jury can only judge the guilt of an individual, not a society, and crime and sin are not always the same thing. 

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Equilibrium

For no apparent reason I was sitting around this afternoon thinking about natural rights. I guess mostly because my job is boring. I wonder if perhaps the right to daydream is also unalienable, although the tax-payers paying my salary would likely not think so. Anyway, I have concluded that what so many try to define as natural rights are simply human predilections. We claim the right to free speech because it requires a severe beating to shut the average person up. We claim the right to bear arms because we are in parts hostile and fearful and fascinated with machines. We claim the right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure because we don’t like anybody messing with our shit. We claim the right of association because drinking alone is not as much fun. Our rights are, for the most part, just the freedom to be what we are.

From what moral authority these rights devolve, no one can truly say. Many would claim they are “God given”, but the Bible is oddly silent on whether or not a corporation is a person. I personally see scant evidence of any god’s existence and therefore cannot accept intellectually the presupposed moral structure that bestows these rights upon man. Mr. Jefferson, et. al. made reference to “nature’s god” in their eloquent treatise on why King George was a douche-bag, but this could have been a reference to Baal or Pan, or simply just a metaphor. Nonetheless, there is a tenacious impulse in the people of our nation to presuppose and defend with a mortal certainty the existence, universal applicability and moral sanctity of these rights.

Perhaps I overstate the case. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can certainly be abridged, often with the enthusiastic support of the populace. In some places you don’t even have to be technically guilty of a crime to be deprived of your life, but perhaps some pigs are after all more equal than others. I suspect that part of Mr. Jefferson’s intent was to suggest that rights were possessed not only by those who had the power to assert them, but that proposition then begs the question of what authority will preserve the rights of those who are not capable of doing so independently. Of course, the answer is government, but ironically we are now in an age where a significant number of our countrymen, perhaps even a majority, see government as the greatest threat to their liberties and they seek to fracture the responsibility for protection of individual rights into ever smaller units, right down to the solitary random dude with a gun. This pervasive suspicion of the police power of the state is, however, strangely lacking when it comes to the government’s imposition of certain behavioral constraints related to the moral preferences of certain groups of citizens. In America independence and conformity, like irony and hypocrisy, are mostly interchangeable.

I have cultivated an interesting perspective on the issue of unalienable rights, having spent more than a quarter of a century as a government bureaucrat involved in areas of regulation of building and development. I have listened to countless citizens bemoan the oppressive weight of government regulation and the fundamentally inequitable limitation on their right to engage in commerce. As a general proposition, the basic argument is that a person should be able to put whatever product on the market that they desire, and the informed consumer will make a rational choice concerning its purchase. Sounds like a winner in theory, but of course a couple of people usually have to be severely injured or killed before the informed consumer becomes informed. What do we do when one person’s right to pursue happiness contradicts another’s right to life? Bangladesh is, after all, the model for the unfettered free market.

Of course, regulation does often go too far and unreasonably impair the rights of individuals and is too frequently applied without due recourse to common sense, but perfection is not a prominent human trait, and neither is logical consistency. I continue intermittently to find irony in the significant subset of the population who will strongly assert their inviolable individual rights and in the same prolonged breath tell me their neighbors are illegally harboring a rooster which makes a lot of godawful noise. This makes we wonder as to whether harboring a rooster should not be included in the universal declaration of the natural rights of man. Sadly, absolutism is a luxury of the idle and mentally infirm and the rest of civilization must simply muddle along making daily the thousand compromises necessary to hold back the darkness of chaos and prevent interruption of cable service.

Pirates of the Parliament

I suppose things must be getting really fouled up when the timid toreador Harry Reed decides to actually take action on something. He is again threatening is to amend the Senate rules to limit the use of the filibuster. Since the rules can be, under the appropriate circumstances, amended by a simple majority of Senators, such an action is within the realm of the possible, especially given the almost ubiquitous use of the filibuster by the Republican minority to forestall consideration of anything Glenn Beck doesn’t approve of. It remains to be seen whether Senator Reed has the courage to do anything but piss himself when Mitch “The Turtle” McConnell glares at him, but I very much support the elimination of what is to my mind the political equivalent of a muzzle-loading flintlock.

Part of the deep-rooted political schizophrenia of our great nation stems from the dilemma that faced our forefathers as they contemplated ditching King George for Plan B. While they clearly understood the potential for abuse of authority inherent in hereditary, autocratic regimes, they were also a bit lukewarm on the aptitude of the common man for self-governance. Parlor tricks like the Electoral College and the Senate itself were devised to potentially frustrate the will of the majority should it deviate too severely from social stability and the solvency of the banks. In defense of the sainted founders of our nation, the French Revolution just a few years later demonstrated that their fears were not completely unfounded. The bottom line was, you could limit the franchise to white guys with property, but you could never be sure that a bunch of idiots wouldn’t accidentally be born white and luck into property through inheritance or the lottery.

So our democracy was conceived in metaphysical dysphoria and was designed as a procedural obstacle course to prevent anything precipitous from occurring. In this respect, our forefathers would be proud of what we have become. Unfortunately, the world has changed since the 1780’s and the role of the federal government has evolved to the point where paralysis can actually do practical harm. The filibuster itself has been around in the Senate in various incarnations since the mid 1800’s, but really took its modern form in the 1930’s. Without troubling myself to do any actual research, I believe the process requires a vote of 60 Senators to bring an end to debate on any proposed action and move it forward to a vote. It used to be a requirement that someone actually be debating for a vote to be filibustered, hence the melodramatic “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, but now Senators can sit in their offices and get pedicures while refusing to end debate on an issue and effectively defeating it, denying a potential majority of Senators the opportunity to consider approval of an action.

As matter of full disclosure, I am what Mr. Reagan would describe as “so far Left, I have left America”, and I am sure that there are those who would suggest my newfound distain for the filibuster is just partisan polemics, but I have convinced myself that it is really a pretty silly idea. As far as Citizen Obama’s agenda is concerned, filibuster reform in the Senate would likely result only in improved success of judicial appointments since the MENSA gang over in the House will never approve anything that a black man supports. To me, the issue is more of a call to recognize that as a nation we only perfunctorily embrace true majority rule and, as each political group takes its turn sucking hind tit in the wilderness, we are becoming more and more absorbed with simply defeating the evil machinations of our opponents and less and less committed to any real principle. In that vein, I was dismayed to see Texas State Senator Wendy Davis elevated to hero status for filibustering an anti-abortion measure, not because I support such theocratic, totalitarian falderal, but because it just demonstrated that Democrats are as hypocritical and void of principal as the abominable Republicans.

   

Anyway, there are no innocent parties in this agglomerated mess we have made of our political process, but the proponents of obstructive minority rule are nothing more than treasonous royalists who seek to place King George back upon the throne. I see the mental state of participants in our present political system as being like that of jilted lovers who selfishly murder their former paramours simply to prevent them from being with anyone else. If you only believe in democracy when you are in the majority, then you belong in the Soviet Union. The filibuster is a bad idea that makes a whole lot of other bad ideas worse and Senators of every political stripe need to grow up and act like adults instead of spoiled children who didn’t get what they wanted for Christmas.

Zombie Research News

Seems like zombies are just about everywhere these days. With the release of Brad Pitt’s summer blockbuster “World War Z” just around the corner, reanimated, cannibalistic corpses are once again in the news. Perhaps not coincidentally, a newly published study, “Zombies; Serious Threat or Delusional Bullshit”, undertaken by Dr. Wang Chung Chu of the State University of California at Rancho Cucamonga and Dr. Vern Angstvorstern of the Technical Institute of Basel, explores the scientific basis for carnivorous corpses and conjectures how such a plague might begin and eventually wipe out mankind. The nine and one-half page report, published in the June edition of The Journal of Armenian Homeopathic Practice, examines the biological basis for zombies and the epidemiology of a possible zombie outbreak.

Dr. Chu, who holds a PhD. in industrial psychology from Case Western Reserve University, first became interested in the potential for real life zombies when he was bitten by an apparently homeless man on Rue de Chartres in New Orleans while attending the Super Bowl in 2002, which was won by the Patriots on a late Adam Vinatieri field goal. Says Dr. Chu, “this guy was super grody and the bite hurt like hell. He didn’t break the skin because his few remaining teeth were pretty loose, but I had to ask myself what would have happened if this guy had been dead and ripped a big chunk out of my hand. I would have been in some serious trouble.” After this experience, Dr. Chu began to read all the scientific literature he could find on the living dead. “I couldn’t find any scientific literature on the living dead,” says Dr. Chu, “so I thought I should probably write some.”

With the aid of a grant from The National Science Foundation and UNESCO, Dr. Chu assembled his research team. Realizing he needed someone with a credible background in microbiology and cellular mechanics, he contacted Dr. Vern Angstvorstern, a chemist with extensive experience in the reflective optics of industrial coatings. “Dr. Angstvorstern was just the man we needed,” recalls Dr. Chu; “he was neurotically meticulous with an obsessive eye for detail and he owned a boat on Lake Lucerne.” Dr. Angstvorstern recalls their first conversation on the proposed study, “I had just completed a research project in which we had attempted to find a coating for the hulls of large vessels such as oil tankers which would prevent barnacles from attaching themselves. The research was largely unsuccessful and I really needed some money. The grant funding sounded interesting, so I joined the team.”

Chu and Angstvorstern began by assessing the supposedly fictional representations of zombies in popular culture. “We must have watched 200 zombie movies,” says Chu; “most of them were pretty shitty. The plots made no sense, the editing was incoherent and the cinematography was awful. Whoever thought this crap was marketable entertainment escapes me.” Angstvorstern echoed Chu’s sentiments, “I’ve seen Bangladeshi porn with better production values than most of this manure,” Nonetheless, after hundreds of hours of viewing, the team was able to establish the basic rules of reanimation of the dead and the forces that drive them to seek human flesh. “Your guess is as good as mine,” says Chu; “it’s either a virus or radiation or a curse or a chemical the military made or a medical experiment gone sadly off track.” As to the craving for human flesh, Angstvorstern puts it more succinctly; “well, some zombies seem to only want brains, while others will eat intestines and some even eat bugs and raccoons.”

As to whether there is any real chance that a zombie apocalypse will befall the world in the future, Chu and Angstvorstern are decidedly noncommittal. “There’s no way any of this shit could ever happen,” says Chu; “dead people can’t get up and walk around. That’s complete foolishness.” Adds Angstvorstern, “If you have ever tried to keep barnacles off a boat, you know what a challenge it can be, but human progress will defeat even the barnacle one day.” Despite remaining unanswered questions, the work of Chu and Angstvorstern has expanded the frontiers of scientific knowledge and provided a solid basis for audiences all over the world to judge the scientific accuracy of zombie films like World War Z. Angstvorstern sums it up, “the Dawn of the Dead remake was pretty good, but I didn’t get paid enough to watch most of that wretched mess.”

Mr. Cthulhu, Your Table is Ready

Animal Planet just aired a program about the “Man-Eating Super Squid”. This was part of its “Monster Week” line-up of supposedly frightening creatures. For my part, the “monsters” in Monster Week are like the “news” in Fox News, but I digress. My initial expectation was that I would see a squid, possibly wearing a red cape, shooting lasers out of its perfectly round, soulless eyes while slaughtering boatloads of hapless Haitian refugees or snatching healthy, buxom possibly under-aged young girls from the surf, but instead there was a collection of sailor’s tales (which are especially known for their uncanny accuracy) and video of some smallish but excitable squid doing what smallish but excitable squid do.

For the record, there are presently around 300 species of squid lurking in the world’s oceans apparently patiently waiting for the opportunity to dine upon succulent human flesh. They range from the very tiny (around one-quarter of an inch) to giant, colossal and stupendous (about 45 feet long). They have been around for 60 million years, give or take, and inhabit virtually every corner of the globe. The best known of all squid is perhaps Squidward, who lives next door to Sponge Bob, but he sadly is missing a couple of tentacles and is not a good candidate for being a man eater. When they are not gleefully eating people, squids enjoy a diet of fish, crabs and each other. They are also eaten by quite a few residents of the ocean and slaughtered sperm whales are well known for having bellies full of the indigestible beaks of large squid, which must leave them feeling bloated and irritable, perhaps explaining why they often try to smash the boats of the whalers who are attempting to slaughter them.

Here would perhaps be a good point at which to address the on-going controversy as to the plural of the word “squid”. Merriam-Webster’s on-line dictionary says that it can be either “squid” or “squids”. Why we are given a choice of a very clear usage and an ambiguous and potentially confusing one, I do not know. If, for example, someone said “the squid ate my mother”, we would have no idea whether there was one culprit or several. This could lead to some issues at the eulogy when the preachers says Mrs. So-and-so was eaten by “the squid”. Some mourners might note that Mrs. So-and-so was a large woman and then inappropriately extrapolate the required size of the offending squid (singular), when in reality it was dozens of smaller squid that skeletonized her in four feet of water off Cocoa Beach. Words do matter.

In the program, Animal Planet shows us a couple of guys who went diving in the Sea of Cortez where large groups of the Humboldt Squid are known to hang out. These guys got pestered and ultimately assaulted by a number of the squid. The Humboldt Squid can grow as large as six feet in length and weight up to 100 pounds. Apparently they are very curious and don’t like to be bothered when eating. The divers in the video say the squid punched them, bit them and pulled them down into the murky depths with hostile intent, perhaps to eat them, maybe sexually assault them, or possibly just to kill them because they were boring. Who can say? When the divers were released by the squid(s), the playful cephalopods flashed various colors, perhaps to say “quit being such a cry-baby, we were just fucking with you”. In any event, I was disappointed to see that there were no partially eaten neoprene-clad corpses pulled dramatically from the ocean with blank, empty eye sockets staring accusingly at the cameras.

So anyway, what struck me most about the whole program was the implication of evil intent on the part of our clever mollusk cousins and the seemingly genuine hurt feelings of these guys who got harassed. A squid is just a freakily mutated snail with great eye-sight and enough intelligence to be concerned about what the fuck a human is doing swimming around in its ocean. In my opinion, hippies and other unrealistic people should not go in the ocean, because the idea that they may gently commune with the peaceful denizens of this primitive world is a hash induced fantasy. I am really sorry these guys got beat up by the squids, but they asked for it. Animals do not like you or dislike you; they only want to know if they can safely eat you, are you going to try to eat them and what your fat ass is doing taking up space in the territory necessary to their survival. We create our gods and our fears in our own image, but squids and the rest of the world’s carnivores don’t have the emotional capacity or the idle time to wish us harm. As usual, the only real monsters are the Homo sapiens who harvest the oceans to the point of exhaustion, dump garbage and sewerage into the squid’s habitat and eat calamari while watching Animal Planet and shuddering at the thought of being grasped by a powerful, sinewy tentacle and dragged off to face the same cold indifference that we claim as our birth right.