Make My Day
Where’s Condi Rice when you need her? As usual, pretty much everywhere; if you’re the NRA or the increasingly infamous ALEC and being exposed as the two organizations whose “charitable” activities led to the death of Trayvon Martin, you’d better be launching into a Busby Berkeley production of “No One Could Have Predicted,” maybe even with Condi herself accompanying on piano. Because opponents of Florida’s execrable “Stand Your Ground” law predicted years ago that random, racially motivated killings would be the result of its passage, and so they are. Cue the orchestra.
Don’t expect a lot of mea culpas from the NRA or ALEC, though; both are still pursuing similar laws in several states in the wake of the tragedy and in spite of its increasing notoriety. They just can’t help themselves; they’ve developed a narrative and it’s working, so bodies on the pavement must be quickly whisked away while the peripheral goals of racial polarization and perceived societal breakdown work their magic in the more important economic sphere. For them, it isn’t the principle of the thing, it’s the money.
Neither the NRA or ALEC probably set out solely to make it easier for white vigilantes to wantonly kill the dusky-hued; all they wanted to do was sell more weapons, undermine confidence in the socialist, union police, and make a play for votes in the notoriously violent old confederacy. Both will piously decry violence while leaving unacknowledged that it is just a cost (borne by others, natch) of doing business. Now that corporations are people, we’re quickly learning that they aren’t anyone you’d want to invite over for a potluck, and that they are also prone to incestuous couplings that produce pretty hideous offspring.
Ever since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” but accelerating massively since the phony “War on Terror,” Republican politics have moved in lock step toward a more belligerent, violent, and punishing society, and as luck would have it, there’s a plethora of corporate interests that look at this otherwise alarming development and see nothing but greenbacks. Whether or not Make My Day America is a good thing for, well, Americans, it’s undeniably profitable enough to fund think tanks, mount political campaigns, and further enrich wealthy oligarchs that none of them mind stepping over a corpse or two on the way to the bank.
In short, America is being torn asunder more or less accidentally as part of a comprehensive marketing campaign to sell things of dubious or negative value: guns, oil, military hardware, prisons, wars, surveillance, gold coins, you name it. More insidiously, the same interests also see money in discrediting things of undeniable and proven value: good public schools, responsible law enforcement, free speech, privacy, racial tolerance, and protecting the environment. Freedom, as they see it, is a lot of things, but it decidedly isn’t free; it might even cost you your first born son.
Trayvon Martin was merely collateral damage in a larger war, one that ALEC and the NRA are, at least at the moment, winning.
Now that corporations are people it’s too bad they can’t be eliminated as easily. In reality, at this point, corporations are superman type people who, nevertheless, require the protection of the likes of the NRA and ALEC – not to mention the whole governmental apparatus. This whole episode is sickening but, unfortunately, a sign of the times.
And better (worse) yet, now Geraldo says Martin was asking for it the way he was dressed. Blame the hoodie!
Please confer permissions to cite, excerpt, even dittofeed your wordwell work here, everywhere.
I’d like “to put it out there on the internets” as an older friend advises me for making societal reforms through ‘the talk of the town.’
Besides, I get that suffusing warm goodness feeling of being in the presence of perfected pen when I read it, and others reading it might feel the same and better.
Well, CHNN isn’t the AP; we give it away for free, as it were.
Sanctioning children, or, gee, childlike gun toters – untrained in weapons or law enforcement, maybe not even with “guardian angel” cred – to patrol neighborhoods.
Perverse, ersatz vigilantism.
What a blessing.
Thanks, ALEC, and the NRA, for making America special.
Well.
As long as it’s just the brown people doing in one another, what’s the bother? /s
Someone pointed out at a meeting I attended yesterday that this is all part of the fall out from the Drug War that’s criminalized practically everything under the sun, especially those many assorted “… While Black and/or Brown” crimes.
Shit’s fucked up and bullshit.
Ah, but not for its promoters. For them, these laws are working just as designed.
Krugman has a good article on ALEC vis a vis the “Stand Your Ground” laws.
OT – but interesting – Reading Frank Rich’s newest column in NY Mag and I had a little eureka moment about Rick Santorum. It occurs to me that his visceral anti-sex (esp for women) issues have to do with his wife, Karen’s past before he met her. As you may or may not know, Karen lived IN SIN with an older man for years before she met and married Rick. I think he’s still upset about that. I remember having a boyfriend 16 years ago who asked me how many lovers I had had before him, and I flat out told him it was none of his business. He wouldn’t accept that as an answer, so I finally just made up a number (which I knew, no matter what, it would be too high for his liking).
I think Rick Santorum is projecting his jealousy and insecurities about his wife’s sexual past on to the rest of us.
Well, if I were Ricky, I’d be deeply suspicious of anyone dumb enough to let me fuck them, but I’d be more grateful.
Dick Cheney has a new heart
Of this we’re very glad
Because it’s the very first heart
Fucking Cheney’s ever had.
I wonder who they killed to get him his new organ….
Us.