In 1945 my uncle was with Patton, in the Battle of the Bulge, and was awarded the Bronze Star for gallantry. He was all of nineteen. Rachel Jeantel is nineteen and she is frequently referred to by the media commentators such as Piers Morgan, that egg–sucking sycophant, as a “child.” She is not a child. Undereducated, surly, she spends her time telling Piers about what a “nigga” is as opposed to a “nigger” in her mind and in her community. It is the kind of education I need not pay attention to, for it reeks of grossness and base human relationships. As Larry Elder, a black commentator, said in a heated confrontation with Piers Morgan, she represents nothing good from her black community; that she needed to get an education. Continually referring to her as a child, Morgan fawns over her, extols her for telling the “truth,” but she is a grotesquerie which I don’t happen to like. Not only is her demeanor unpleasant to see, she in no way needs to be enthralled. I do not deny what my mind and education inform me, this is one hell of a narrow and very limited “woman.” To make any more of her is to be blinded by what is before you. I associate to an old quotation: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
Forty-two or so years ago I drove a cab in New York City. My infant daughter, Brett, was a few months old. I was held up by a black youth who asked me to drive to a street that was in shadows. I was so naive. At that point he pulled a gun on me and put it behind my head and asked for cash. In those days cabbies shoved bills into a small vault on the floor of the cab, keeping smaller bills for change, etc. It was a surreal experience as I offered to help him break into the vault. Disappointed by his not getting anything and by my pleading for my life, he went on to say, in effect, that white people fall apart and cry under duress–bravely said. Luckily for me, when he pushed the rear-view mirror to the side and fled from the back seat, I remember I was stunned, for there was moment there, for him, and me, that I thought he was considering to blow my head away, Kennedy style.
When my wife heard my story, she said that she was grateful that he had not shot me, for her own father’s father was killed in a similar scenario when he drove a cab in the thirties. For months after whenever I saw a detective show and some one pulled a gun, I got the willies. I still tremble at how close I came to being murdered. And I associate to my wife, Rochelle, in 1980 having a black man invade our apartment with a baseball bat who beat her over the head with it. Somehow and in some fashion she fought back and wrestled the bat from him. Rochelle had the courage to strike back, receiving blows which broke both wrists and gave her a concusssion. I missed this bastard by about fifteen minutes as I was on my way home. If I had gotten there, I would be dead or he would be dead. My daughter was traumatized and my son became school phobic for months which really means that he could not abide being separated from his mother. Rochelle was hospitalized.
The point here is that I have taught black students in segregated areas with mixed results and I have been appalled by black behaviors directed at me and my kin. I choose not to deny what I feel, and how I manage my feelings quite frankly is my business. However, was the holdup in which I was involved a racist act or not? Did my being white strengthen my assailant’s behavior? I know so, it was venomous. I don’t deny my feelings and they are not pleasant ones at that. When I see Piers and others go blind before Rachel Jeantel, I think of that old bromide that a liberal is someone who hasn’t been mugged. Slavery was this country’s original sin and both the victim and the victimizer continue to suffer for it.
Al Sharpton has once again come out of his rathole. Do you remember Tawana Brawly? You should, and how he was convicted for his lies about that case, or the Crown Heights affair in which he fomented racial hatred and one Jewish man slain by a riotous mob. Yet the media gives this man a show. Have you listened to this opportunist who has trouble agreeing subject and verb in his sentences? This cretin is given a show! And then there is Jesse Jackson, whose son is in jail, ladened sadly with psychological problems, doing his old and tiresome routine, the man who referred to New York as “Hymie town.” No one takes these creeps on for it is denial of a major kind. I went to Wikipedia and looked up Sharpton”s “record.” Try it, it is appalling.
And now to the heart of the recent media blizzard about Trayvon Martin. When I became first aware of the case I intuited George Zimmerman as someone other than how he was being portrayed. I sensed a softness in him which belied the sewage thrown at him. I found it hard to consider him as a profiler [parenthically, from day one we profile the people about us–hello!] and murderer. It was a feeling, the same you have about people around you until you learn otherwise! Before long Bill Maher, alas, and other celebrities and commentators built up a case that Zimmerman was guilty. I fought that off.. I felt it was a smog of smears. When a demented jury freed OJ years ago, I recall pictures of black college students cheering in their dorms. Is there any sane person who does not believe he murdered both Nicole and Ron Goldman? Despicable, but who said going to college does anything to you if you are driven by racial animus? I regret that thousands of white people [were we fearful of hurting the feelings of our black brethren?] did not march and protest that horrid jury decision, which was a racial one!
What is the most overpowering shock to my system is that George Zimmerman, as the media constantly drums into us, will have to fear for his life for decades; that the Black Panthers recently put out a $10,000 award for the killing of him (Yes!); that he is a man without a country. Legally set free, look at the country we live in. We now pursue an acquited man. Imagine that he has to live in the shadows, live with disguises, cannot get up and go to work like any one of us. (OJ was allowed to walk around for years without such a cloud over his head.) It is a fetid abomination that this so-called democracy gives him. If I were he, I’d leave this country for if you scratch our so-called civilization you would find pestilence, hypocrites that we are. Few mention the consequences for Zimmerman other than the litany of what will happen to him. We are fucking blind. So if a man is declared free and society feels he is not, he is once again punished by exile within his own country. The species-as well as our culture-is deplorable.
By the by, Rachel Jeantel would not understand this blog.
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