We Are All George Zimmerman
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Andy Warhol predicted that in the future everyone
would be world-famous for 15 minutes. What he
neglected to mention was that they were just as
likely to be infamous.
Zimmerman had decorated his flyers and website
with the famous quotation attributed to Edmund
Burke, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of
evil, is that good men do nothing." His activities
reveal a man who took those words to heart, who put
his time, money and safety on the line to become one
of those good men who do something. But the problem
was that Zimmerman had been reading Burke, when he
should have been reading Kafka.
"Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one
morning, without having done anything wrong, he was
arrested." That is the famous opening sentence to
Kafka's novel, "The Trial", words that have far more
to do with the way we live now.
George Zimmerman is not on trial because he shot a
black teenager during a scuffle. It's not the facts
of the case that brought him here. It's his name.
Had his last name been Pereira, none of this would
have gone anywhere. And it's not the name alone,
it's that in this time and place lynching him will
help make the political fortunes of everyone from
the man in the White House to his cheerful smiling
prosecutor who is already counting her campaign cash
and book deals.
Zimmerman with his book of quotations from the great
thinkers of history, a man who clearly believes in
the old fashioned virtues, is particularly
ill-equipped to understand what is being done to him
and why. The quotation that he plastered on flyers
while investigating the beating of a homeless black
man and on his own website, is more apt than he
realizes.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is
indeed that good men do nothing, but as a corollary
to it, those are exactly the sort of men that evil
will go after. It does no good to read Burke
quotations to a Kardashian society which makes its
determinations not on truth or justice, but on its
omnipresent need for entertainment. Trying to reason
with it only makes it angrier. Talking about virtues
and decency to people who have none either confuses
them or infuriates those few who understand the
concept in some distant way.
We aspire to behave the way that George Zimmerman
did, to contribute to our communities, to defy the
conventional wisdom and speak out when we see
wrongdoing. We believe that all that is needed for
the triumph of evil is for good people to do
nothing. And we are only a misstep away from being
George Zimmerman, from doing the wrong thing, from
intervening in the wrong fight, drawing the wrong
cartoon or saying the wrong thing at the wrong time,
a heartbeat away from appearing at the bar of the
kangaroo court of stage managed public opinion.
In our own way we are all George Zimmerman. We think
that society should be moral and rational, and that
people should do the right thing. But that's not
what it is. It's an insane braying donkey's laugh as
the thieves, large and small, rob the people blind
and then muscle them into a lynch mob to go after
some handy victim. It's George today, it will be
someone else tomorrow. Maybe someone who even
deserves it. But it won't be the people destroying
the country, because they're the ones leading the
mob.
George Zimmerman has been chosen to serve as a
gladiator in the circus that distracts a bankrupt
nation from the criminal folly of its leaders, large
and small. He has been assigned white team colors,
had an NRA badge pinned to his lapel, and is being
shoved out into the stadium while the lunatic mob
howls for blood. The Emperor of Hope and Change has
already made the thumbs down gesture, the courtiers
are rushing out to fix the match.
Like Kafka's protagonist, Zimmerman has been
protesting all along that this is some sort of
mistake. And he's right. It is a mistake. Had the
engineers behind the lynch mob gotten a good look at
his photo, they might have pulled back and looked
for a better victim. Someone who more properly fit
their bicoastal idea of a "cracker" to string up on
the crooked scales of Lady Justice. But once a mob
has gotten started, it's hard to shut it down. And
there's no real need to stop.
In the past, a media organ that reported a
blatant lie might have at least paused on getting
caught, but we live in a post-fact society now. The
only thing that happens is that the media shrugs and
doubles down on the narrative. George Zimmerman
isn't white? Just call him a white-hispanic. Insist
that Latinos are really white even though your
entire practice has been to loudly scream the
opposite. Accuse anyone who points out that
Zimmerman doesn't look much like Larry the Cable Guy
of being a racist. Problem solved.
Zimmerman thinks it's a mistake because he's not
guilty. But as Kafka might have told him, guilt or
innocence has little to do with it. Zimmerman wasn't
indicted on charges of shooting a man, but of being
a racist, of being the living embodiment of American
inequality, NRA lawmaking and a dozen other sins.
These are not charges that he can ever shake,
because they are not legal crimes, they are
political crimes.
The true charges against Zimmerman are 'class
charges', they indict him as the representative of a
class, white racists, gun owners and the entire
heteronormative patriarchal class of men who quote
Edmund Burke, carry guns and feel entitled to trail
troubled black teenagers in their community.
Lynching Zimmerman is not about putting one man
away, it is about putting everyone away. It is about
the absolute triumph of the system and its ideology
and about putting the individualist in his place, in
a small cell and an orange jumpsuit.
The original title of "The Trial" was "The Process"
and we are always in the middle of a process. The
process begins before we are born and ends only when
our bodies and estates are disposed of to the
complete satisfaction of the system. The point of
Kafka's book was not whether the defendant was
innocent or guilty. The point of the process was the
process. The purpose of the trial was the trial.
We are all on trial under the system. That is the
nightmare that Kafka anticipated. It is a reality
that was already taking hold in the Soviet Union
even while he was writing. The purpose of the trial
is the absolute power of the system and its ability
to snatch up anyone, examine them and then dispose
of them. The theater of the trial informs everyone
who lives under the system that they are at its
mercy.
The very randomness of choosing Zimmerman, the
contempt for the basic facts of the case, has become
part of the message. The message is the same. The
facts don't matter. The decision making process
doesn't matter. Leave your evidence and your Burke
quotations at home and watch how the wheels spin,
the gears grind and the blood flows. The message is
that the system is absolute and there is no escape.
This is evil. It is the very essence of evil. It is
an evil that Zimmerman could not have seen coming or
understood when he was out patrolling his community.
It's an evil that is all around us. We can catch
glimpses of it on the evening news, in the sneers of
anchormen, the practiced smiles of politicians, it's
there in Angela Corey's helpless grin, it's there in
the mountains of paperwork, the lines of tiny print,
the lines of people waiting at bulletproof windows,
the morality mobs forming up digitally for the next
victim to string up, the next popular opinion to
enforce, the next skull to crush.
The beast that is doing its best to swallow up
Zimmerman knows no facts or truths, it has no
virtues, only goals. It cares nothing for what he
did or did not do. Its only goal is to swallow him
whole. It has eyes made of cameras, teeth made of
guns, network cables for guts, a mind made of
slogans and a nervous system that always needs
stimulation. The beast may fail in its task, but it
will let out a brief howl and move on to the next
victim.
For all that the beast seems terrible to Zimmerman
now, it is no larger than Obama's water dog, it is
one of a thousand such animals wandering through
studios, courtrooms, legislative offices, chambers
and all the corridors of power. If it should fail,
it will break up into a thousand pieces, the
reporters will go back home, the racial hucksters
will head to the next trouble spot, the protesters
will go back to hanging out on street corners, the
cops will ride past them, the prosecutor will treat
it as a learning experience, the lawyers will add it
to their calling card, and the politicians will
sniff the air waiting to see which way the wind
blows.
In movies trials end in some larger conclusion, some
lesson learned, some principle defended. That will
not happen here. The people who run our system no
longer believe in those things. They don't read
Burke, they don't even hang Andy Warhol on their
walls, he has become too structured for them. There
are no more lessons except the lesson of power, the
grand game of guilt and terror, the spectators
crowding the bars to see the tigers roar, the blood
flow and the knowledge that they could be down
there.
White guilt. Entitlement. Patriarchy.
Heteronormative. Critical race theory. All that
empty gabble of words is a way of defining power and
power rests with those who make their words into
law. Those who use them to destroy meaning and feed
those who believe that words have meaning to the
lions.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for
enough people who say things like that and mean it
to be fed to lions. Not even on purpose, but because
they stuck their head up at the wrong time, they
caught the eye of the insect eyed Big Brother
collective of critical racial theory thinkers and
gender role debunkers, of sensitivity counselors and
nightly news provocateurs, of politicians running on
race and running away from race, of the rich playing
class warfare against themselves and the poor who
know that money comes from the government, and the
uniformed and pantsuit clad minions who oversees the
circus that keeps the system going a little longer.
We are all Zimmerman. One of us might be next. One
of us will be next. The system is always hungry and
the beasts must be fed.