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mallorys_camera
Justifiable force is one of the cloudiest areas of the law, so I'm not at all surprised the Trayvon Martin case played out the way it did. If you're being beaten up, you will act to defend yourself by whatever means you have at hand. If those means include a concealed weapon that you have a permit for, you will use it in self-defense.
Make no mistake – Trayvon Martin had every right to cut across the gated community despite Zimmerman's objections to his presence. Zimmerman is one of those creepy police wannabes. Obviously, he had an agenda on that particular day.
Florida has something called the "Stand Your Ground" law by which the use of deadly force is not required to be the very last response to an attack. I would say this is a highly questionable policy in general and rather dangerous when codified as law, but in Florida, it is the law.
There were plenty of inconsistencies in Zimmerman's story. It seems obvious to me that he was stalking Martin despite his statements to the contrary. What's critical, though, are the facts of the actual physical struggle between the man and the boy. Forensic evidence strongly suggests the boy was the aggressor.
The profiling, of course, is something that occurred on both sides. Martin tells his girlfriend he's being watched by a "creepy ass cracker." Zimmerman is heard to mutter, "Fucking punks," on the phone to the emergency police dispatcher. What's interesting to me here – at least on the basis of these two epithets – is that Zimmerman's hyper vigilance seemed predicated on Martin's age while Martin's is a racial slur.
Of course, I'm the mother of a kid who frequently got stoned on marijuana all throughout high school and wandered around in places his sorry ass had no good reason for being. This being the case, my emotional sympathies here are squarely in the Trayvon Martin camp. But I think the verdict was the correct one given the facts of the case and the peculiarities of Florida law. I don't see how any jury could have found differently, and I wish there had been more diversity on the actual jury to lend the verdict some authority.
Zimmerman does not get off scot-free. He's essentially a pariah now, and a trophy. I'd say his chances for making 2015 New Year's Resolutions are not very high; the temptation to being known in the black community as the man who got justice for Trayvon Martin is just too high.
I was driving with Phyllis a few months back through a community on the tony North Shore. We got lost.
"Why don't you just pull into one of those driveways and turn around?" I suggested.
"Oh no, honey," Phyllis said. "They be looking out those big picture windows and as soon as they see who's driving the car, we'll have a police escort."
Oh. Right. Duh.
The big gap, that. No matter how tight our friendship, I'm just never gonna fully get her reality.
In other news, Lucius highly recommended Neil Jordan's Byzantium so I trekked out to Hipster Ground Zero a/k/a Williamsburg yesterday, which was the only place in greater metropolitan NYC where it was playing, to see it. It did not disappoint.
I love Neil Jordan passionately; even his bad movies like his earlier foray in bloodsucking like Interview With the Vampire starring an incredibly overwrought and miscast Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt who even way back then many years pre-Angelina was obviously jonesing for a dominatrix to pee on him. I love that Jordan makes movies about magic, even when they're not overtly about magic. The Tiresias gender-shifting overtones of The Crying Game and the pudgy Orpheus stalking a whorish Eurydice through the Hades that was swinging London in Mona Lisa are no less mythological for being subtle. My very favorite Jordan movie is The Butcher Boy, which is just so fucking weird that it defies my attempts to analyze it.
Byzantium is a much better vampire movie than Interview. In fact, as far as vampyric universes go, I would put it right up there with Buffy. For one thing, it has an entirely different creation myth: Vampires don't create each other; they can only be created in a tiny cave on a remote piece of rock floating in a grey sea. This is a sanctuary to the Old Gods whose creatures vampires are. For another, it gives a nod to the economic realities of the vampire life. They need money – who doesn't? The vampire duet in this movie is a mother/daughter team. The mother works as a BDSM hooker; the daughter goes to high school, and agonizes a lot over the fact that at 200 years old, she's the oldest sophomore in her class.
Yes, yes, the special effects – waterfalls turning to blood – are certainly amateurish. I could do better special effects with my own little antiquated Photoshop program. And the film is singularly humorless in places where it could have benefitted from a little humor. Since I know Jordan has a rather sly sense of humor as evidenced multiple times in earlier films, I can only imagine that humor was surgically removed from this piece in order to make it conform more closely to the Hammer horror code.
Afterwards I wandered around Williamsburg for a bit spying on hipsters, and then proceeded to endure the trip back to Lawn Guyland that was much, much longer than it had to be due to various rerouting of subway lines on ground buses because of Hurricane Sandy track work and an N22 bus that was an hour late. I didn't really mind. I do this trip so seldom that everything I see is all part of the parade, part of the experience. If there was any place I particularly had to be, though, I would have been pissed.
At the bus stop I fell into conversation with a Woody Allen-type guy who saw I was scribbling notes about Poughkeepsie.
"Why are you writing about Poughkeepsie?" he wanted to know.
"Well, I'm trying to figure out what went wrong," I said. "When it stopped being this enchanting little village on the banks of the Hudson and turned into a horror show."
"Well, it lost its manufacturing base," he said.
"Yes, but that would have happened in the 1940s," I said. "The urban blight I'm talking about looks more recent. I expect it happened because Poughkeepsie is just a hop, skip and a jump off Highway 87, the great crack cocaine superhighway. That's what happens when the service economy – in this case prisons – replaces the manufacturing base."
We chatted for animatedly for 45 minutes or so. I don't know why I was so surprised when he slipped me his card as he was getting off the bus. He's a dentist. Lives in New Palz, right across the river from Poughkeepsie. Doesn't like to drive. Comes to Lawn Guyland every other weekend or so to play golf.
I might call him after I move. I might not.
Also RTT called and we chatted animatedly for close to half an hour. I guess my care package policy is paying off. He hadn't heard Max's news, was duly impressed.
"So guess what area of the law he's interested in?"
"I don't know –"
"Environmental law!"
"That's what I'm interested in!"
"I know!"
"We could go into practice together –"
And then your old Mama could die happy, I thought.
