56-Up: Checking In With ‘Old Friends’

Roger Ebert once referred to Michael Apted‘s Up series as the ‘noblest project in cinema history.’ In writing his review of 56-Up–the latest installment in the story of the Fab Fourteen–Ebert disowned those words as ‘hyperbole’ but its easy to see why he might have thought so. It is as straightforward–and as complicated–a film project as could be: take fourteen children, interview them at the age of seven about their vision of life and what it holds for them, and then, every seven years, meet them again to ‘check in.’ The original premise might have been to explore whether the British class system affected a child’s world-view and whether it locked their lives into unalterable trajectories, but over the years the Up series has grown into something else: an episodic cinematic document of a tiny cross-section of humanity.

Fourteen ‘ordinary’ people; fourteen ‘ordinary’ lives. Hardly the stuff of riveting storytelling, or so you’d think. Thirteen of them are white, one is black, four women, all are English. This is not even a very representative sample of the world’s humanity. And yet. somehow, over the years, they’ve managed to captivate millions all over the world who tune in, faithfully, every seven years.

Every viewer of the series has his or her own personal reasons for remaining riveted to it, for eagerly awaiting the next installment. In my case, it has been because, like many others, I’ve become personally interested in the fortunes of its participants, not out of pure voyeuristic curiosity, but because I’ve been growing too, and often find immediate, sharp, and personal resonances with their lives. There is the sometimes incoherent, sometimes acute vision of the seven-year old, the callow, rash pronouncements of the teenager and young adult, the maturing, sometimes rueful perspectives of the thirty and forty-somethings, and now, the slow, low, sometimes content glow of the mid-fifties. (They’re ahead of me; I’m not fifty yet, though the gap between my age and theirs has shrunk!)

It would be a mistake to say every life examined on this show demonstrates some universal truth or anything like that. Rather, each one showcases, in part, some of life’s fortunes and misfortunes; some get more than fair share of the hard knocks. But it is in the adding up, in the rendering of a composite image that one is able to see a glimmer of the complexity and variety of human existence: present and missing parents, loves–lost and found, illness and good health, passion and anger, ruefulness and exultation.

Of  the various cinematic techniques invented by directors over the years, I find the epilogue particularly poignant: the passage of time and persons, the looking back, the reckonings and accountings of a life.  Often it is because those episodes are tinged with regret for missed opportunities, sometimes because through them, we are brought face to face with the most basic facts of our existence: life is just one moment after another, the past already gone, the future yet to be realized. The Up series has often felt like a collection of epilogues even as we know–or at least believe and hope–another installment is forthcoming.

And in case you were wondering, yes, I’m looking forward to 63-Up.

School as Preparatory Space for the Workplace

During the course of an essay on Keith Moon and the pleasures of drumming (‘The Fun Stuff‘, The New Yorker, 29 November 2010) James Wood writes:

Georges Bataille has some haunting words about how the workplace is the scene of our domestication and repression: it is where we are forced to put away our Dionysianism. The crazy sex from the night before is as if forgotten; the drunken marital argument of the weekend is erased; the antic children have disappeared; all the passionate music of life is turned off, and a false bourgeois order clothes you with the sack and quick penury awaiting you if you don’t obey. But Bataille might also have emphasized school, for school is work too–work before the adult workplace–and school tutors the adolescent in repression and the rectitude of the bourgeois order, at the very moment in life when, temperamentally and biologically, one is most Dionysiac and most enraged by the hypocritical ordinances of the parental league. [link added]

Bataille, Dionysus; these are some pretty heavy-duty invocations, marshaled to make a point almost every schoolboy knows and senses almost instinctively, deep in the core of his already-repressed self. School is a training and staging ground, a rehearsal space, a green room, for the regimented and regulated world on the ‘outside.’ But it does even more service than that, of course. It also frees up the child’s parents to put in their inadequately compensated eight hours or more in the workplace. School is not just preparatory for the workplace; it supports and enables it.

Some schools–like parochial religious ones, appropriately enough–perform this task of preparation better than others: generic school buses, pompous titles for teachers and administrators, prayer assemblies, and most interestingly, uniforms. Why do you think so many perfectly intelligent human beings put up with the idiocy of rigidly prescribed dress codes, which homogenize and straitjacket and which, as the examples of jackets and neckties in hot summers remind us, are so often inappropriate and uncomfortable? If they haven’t worn uniforms themselves, they’ve seen children wearing them; it reminds them of order, a good thing, as we are often old. The bit about assemblies and uniforms remind us that schools are also venues for flirtations with the military: who better to instruct and inspire us on the virtues of order and discipline and immediate, instinctive, unthinking obedience?

Note: It has been said the primary value of a putative employee’s college degree–for employers–is the knowledge it provides them of his or her ability to persist with a structured program for four years, maintain a schedule, read and write with some adequacy, and follow instructions.  This reductive view of a college education seems to be the one uppermost in the minds of those who plan university reform these days. Critical thinking would be a disruptive, subversive skill; better to merely emphasize the routine and the structural, all the better to prepare today’s graduate for the arrangements that await him in the workplace, the enduring site of his or her control, a space where–in the American context at least–the Constitution is put on hold.

A Long, Hot, Sickened Journey

The worst of the heat might have receded from New York City but that’s not going to deter me from churning out another hot weather-related blog post. On this occasion, about a time when a combination of heat and a mysterious ailment combined to induce in me a misery that has, thankfully, not been rivaled since.

In 1979, I went on a schoolboys trip to a national park, one organized by my school. The trip was everything it was promised to be: though we missed out on spotting a tiger, we saw plenty of wildlife, swam in rivers, went on long hikes, and rounded off each day with a festive campfire. It was a boy’s dream; I loved every minute of it and was saddened by the dawning of its final days. Those entailed a long bus ride back home to New Delhi.

It was April, and the summer had settled in on North India. Daytime temperatures were already reaching into the high nineties (Fahrenheit) and past the hundred mark. The journey back, in a non-airconditioned bus, promised to be a  trying experience. It soon acquired a terrifying new dimension.

For by its commencement, I had become sick. Perhaps a stomach bug of some sort, but though there was pain and churning aplenty in my belly, there were no frequent trips to the bathroom. Instead, I felt weak and nauseous, with a head that spun furiously. I told my companions; little interest or sympathy was forthcoming. I informed the master in charge; he seemed nonplussed. Tired, worn out, and to be honest, a little scared, I withdrew–unmedicated–to a seat by a window, and waited.

Our bus drove on, on roads that were sometimes narrow, sometimes bumpy, sometimes dusty, past field and village and town. As the day progressed, so did the heat and my discomfort.  I kept the window open, hoping for a breeze or two, and sank into a sweat-lined heap at its base. I was sick, sick, sick; a bundle of desperate sensations, hoping for relief in any shape or form.

Toward the middle of the afternoon, we approached a scheduled halt. We would rest and partake of lunch in a park. My illness was now at a crest; I felt close to death, hideously miserable and discombobulated. I staggered out and took a few steps toward a shady spot beneath a tree.

And then, the miracle. I vomited spectacularly, bringing up a torrent of unprocessed material from my last meals. My company scattered, perhaps in fear, perhaps in awe. I swayed; my ability to stay on my feet still seemed in question. But a few seconds later, I felt better. The expulsion had, mysteriously and thankfully, possessed a cleansing quality.

A few minutes later, someone pressed a glass filled with crushed ice and a Coke into my hand. I drank it greedily–the sweetest nectar ever. I still had no appetite, but a cold, sweet drink was welcome.

Home was still several hours away, but for the rest of the drive home, though I still felt weak and exhausted, I was never as sick as I had been earlier in the day. I reached my destination at night, back into the arms of my concerned mother and a bemused father.

I still do not know what had afflicted me that day. And I still continue to hope that I will never, ever, approach the desperate depths of discomfort attained that day via a toxic combination of head-spinning nausea and heat.

Memories of Hot Summers Elsewhere

Talking about the weather is supposedly a concession, an admission that a conversation has run aground, spun off into irrelevancies; nothing, it seems, quite shows the lack of an agenda for an exchange of words like a discussion about the heat, the cold, the rain. Well, I admit defeat; I admit I’m tongue-tied and incoherent. This has been a hot summer in New York City, and its driven me to blogging about the heat. More to the point, what has finally sent me over the tipping edge was a rumor floated earlier this week that temperatures in the city would approach 104F. Because I spent the first twenty years of my life in climes calibrated by the Celsius scale, I occasionally still convert temperatures into that set of numbers, to ascertain whether my childhood reckonings of temperature extremes have been tickled or not. And 104F is the Fahrenheit equivalent of a grim marker in Celsius: 40C, the temperature at which, as a boy, I knew the real summer began.

I grew up in a very hot city: New Delhi. (A quick glance at a chart of world temperatures will show that it is, quite easily, the worlds hottest large city.) 40C came early in the year, as early as April, and you could experience 40C days into August. In between, the monsoon intervened, and its drenching showers brought some relief, but very often it would result in days marked by low-lying cloud, suffocating, stifling humidity and temperatures in the high nineties (in the mid to high thirties if we are talking Celsius). For the rest of the time, Delhi baked, day after day, in searing heat that enervated and exhausted, sending adult and child, when possible, into cool refuges, all the while hydrating themselves with any fluids at hand. (A simple injunction I received as a child was: ‘Drink a glass of water when you leave the house; drink another glass when you arrive at your destination.’) Airconditioners were rare; evaporative coolers common.

The serious heat began at finals time, and branded the vacations. School ended, and we retreated indoors. We were glad to not have to ride crowded, non-airconditioned school buses anymore, with their sweat-stained seats, but unless trips out of the city–to, hopefully, a salubrious ‘hill station‘–were planned, we faced the prospect of lengthy confinement at home, hemmed in by a cauldron of hot winds and glaring sunshine. Temperatures climbed into the nineties by 7AM or a little after, and after a few brief forays outside, the more prudent among us quickly retreated. The reckless often ventured out, even in the middle of the afternoon. Playtime at local parks in the evenings began late, after some nominal cooling.

Delhi summer nights and days were often made more miserable by the loss of electricity. To this day, I don’t think I have heard anything quite as terrifying as a ceiling fan grinding to a halt, its supply of electric charge cut off by an errant power grid. And nothing, and I mean nothing, will ever sound quite as sweet as the sound that came to me, as I would wait patiently outdoors in the warm summer night–dazed and confused after being woken up by a power failure–of dozens of cooler fans starting up in my street. That was bliss; every other human pleasure seemed insignificant in comparison.

Except perhaps, the taste of cold water after a stint in the sun.

The ‘Victims’ of ‘Realistic Literature’

In 1965, Gordon Lloyd Harper interviewed Saul Bellow for the Paris Review (9.36, 1966, 48-73). During the interview the following exchange took place:

INTERVIEWER

It’s been said that contemporary fiction sees man as a victim. You gave this title to one of your early novels [The Victim], yet there seems to be very strong opposition in your fiction to seeing man as simply determined or futile. Do you see any truth to this claim about contemporary fiction?

BELLOW

Oh, I think that realistic literature from the first has been a victim literature. Pit any ordinary individual—and realistic literature concerns itself with ordinary individuals—against the external world, and the external world will conquer him, of course. Everything that people believed in the nineteenth century about determinism, about man’s place in nature, about the power of productive forces in society, made it inevitable that the hero of the realistic novel should not be a hero but a sufferer who is eventually overcome.

Bellow might be accused of a little overstatement but perhaps not too much. After all, didn’t George Orwell say, in one of his characteristically cheerful moments, that ‘every life when viewed from the inside is but a series of defeats?’ (Orwell’s quote, captures quite well, I think, the ‘common unhappiness’ of man, which  psychotherapy, with its alternative narratives, attempts to ameliorate.) ‘Realistic literature’ often might be that same view conveyed from the ‘outside’: a tale of implacable, indifferent, forces arrayed against human endeavor, with ambitions and aspirations running aground on one shoal after another.

But these series of wrecks do not have to be caused by man being ‘determined’ or ‘determinism’ or anything like that; after all, why would it not be possible for some humans–even ‘ordinary individuals’–to have a bright future ‘determined’ for them? That does not seem statistically improbable. Rather, it is that at any given moment, no human can be conceivably aware of all that may render his or her plans moot. That ‘all’ includes not just the forces of nature but more often than not, other humans’ objectives and efforts.

And that is what may make the language of ‘victim’ appropriate. To use that term for a human afflicted by nature alone seems inappropriate; nature seems far too blithely unconcerned about man’s doings for such a personalized description to resonate. Man can only be a victim of others like him; victimhood is a state attained at the hands of humans. It is the ‘productive forces in society’, the economic and material circumstances and engines that alter and shape the world around man, that turn ‘ordinary individuals’ into ‘victims.’  It is they, driven by contrary human ambition and desire, that lend the fate of man a particularly grim hue. These opponents of ours, those supposed to be our fellow travelers, turn out to be, on closer inspection, precisely those that induce God’s supposed laughter at our putative plans.

Note: The interview with Bellow is reprinted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Third Series, ed. Alfred Kazin. (London: Viking Press, 1967). 175-196.

Kundera on the Novel’s Powers of ‘Incorporation’

In ‘Notes inspired by The Sleepwalkers‘ (by Hermann Broch), Milan Kundera writes:

Broch…pursues ‘what the novel alone can discover.’ But he knows that the conventional form (grounded exclusively in a character’s adventure, and content with a mere narration of that adventure) limits the novel, reduces its cognitive capacities. He also knows that the novel has an extraordinary power of incorporation: whereas neither poetry or philosophy can incorporate the novel, the novel can incorporate both poetry and philosophy without losing thereby anything of its identity, which is characterized (we need only recall Rabelais and Cervantes) precisely by its tendency to embrace other genres, to absorb philosophical and scientific knowledge.

The modern novel is often said to begin with Miguel Cervantes‘ Don Quixote, but as Kundera’s sweeping claim and the history of the novel suggests, precise markers of provenance do not do justice to such a polymorphous entity. For Kundera is right about the novel’s well-known and enduring ‘powers of incorporation’: the philosophical novel is a commonplace as are novels in verse.

But I am not sure he is correct about the incorporation going in just one direction.

The novel that seeks to provide a coherent statement of a philosophical doctrine–either through its main narrative, the actions or pronouncements of its characters or even by its form–has incorporated philosophy into itself, but it is just as plausible to suggest the philosophy in question has compelled the choice of the novel as the form for its statement. That is, the philosophical doctrine has ‘incorporated’ the novel into the various forms necessary for its statement. The novelist could have after all, written a philosophical tract, but chose the novel instead; it is the chosen vehicle for the delivery of the doctrine.  And perhaps that is because the nature of the statements, arguments and conclusions at hand, indicate to the novelist that this is the correct choice to make. It is no coincidence that certain philosophical doctrines–such as existentialism, for instance–have such extensive flirtations with the novel; their central principles are often best expressed and illustrated by its form and structure. (The novelist appears as a philosopher, one obliged to turn to the novel’s form.)

Similarly for a poem in novel form. The poet’s statement is such that it demands the novel as its form; in doing so, poetry incorporates the novel into the various forms of its expression.

What these remarks suggest, I think, are two things. One, that both poetry and philosophy are perhaps not as well defined–in either form and content–as might be imagined by some. Second, an insistence on the unidirectional nature of the inclusive capacities of the novel runs the risk of rendering it an entirely indeterminate entity. (The experimental efforts of avant-garde and postmodern novelists might have already done that, of course; more to the point, that might not be such a bad thing for the novelists that lie in our future.)

Postscript: In a comment on Facebook, my friend Maureen Eckert offered the following perspicuous comment:

This “incorporation direction” issue applies in a very interesting way to Plato’s texts, too. At this point, these texts are typically assumed to be Philosophical – literary works: their philosophical content has incorporated the literary form and content. And yet (in historical context of 4th century BCE Athens) the dialogues are, well, a literary genre that has incorporated philosophical content. The Socratic logoi as a genre ended up having a participating writer, Plato, and we now perceive the texts as predominantly philosophical. It seem that the direction of incorporation not only goes both ways, but also that our perceptions of these directions varies and switches. There’s very little stability, just as you say.

Note: The essay on Broch is included in The Art of the Novel, Perennial Library, Harper & Row, New York, 1988.   Excerpt on page 64.

General Petraeus at CUNY: Poor Judgment Under Fire

General David Petraeus‘ $200,000 deal with CUNY is no longer on; he will now teach in the fall at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College for the princely sum of $1. Yesterday, I participated in a Huffington Post Live segment–along with Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors and Kieran Lalor of the New York State Assembly–to discuss this development in the Petraeus at CUNY saga; like everything else in the sordid tale that preceded it, this latest bit of news, announced by the New York Times, merely adds to a picture of confused communication, insensitivity, and poor judgment.

In accepting a salary of $1, Petraeus is now posturing as the Magnanimous Public Servant[tm] showering the largesse of his knowledge and experience on the unworthy at CUNY. This is the same man who could barely contain his glee at salaries elsewhere–‘you won’t believe what USC will pay per week’–during the course of his grubby-enough negotiations with CUNY. What accounts for the change in heart? You, dear reader, get precisely one guess. (It has something to do with exposure in the press.) This sort of rapid retreat to an untenable position, under fire, does not speak well of Petraeus’ judgment. But it should not be surprising; this is the same man, after all, who thought it would be a good idea to try to negotiate a swanky deal, not with a private think-tank or consultancy group, but with a budget-deficient urban public university. Slipping into this condescending role should come easily to him. (As has been pointed out by many, Petraeus should have indicated a willingness to teach for the same salary that all adjuncts draw at CUNY: approximately $3000, with no benefits.)

The elitism does not end there, of course. Enrollment in the class is limited to sixteen students, and Petraeus, gallingly enough, will be assisted by, count ’em, two graduate students, at a university where faculty members have no teaching or research assistants that are not paid for by their grant funds. But it gets worse: three additional graduate students not from CUNY’s Graduate Center, its doctorate granting institution, will help him ‘assemble the syllabus’. These students are from Harvard. Nothing but the best for the General. Why would he ever deign to have a syllabus ‘assembled’ by the lowly students of the Graduate Center?  What could they offer this shining Messiah, descending from on high?

As I noted on the Huffington Post Live segment yesterday, this deal, and the sensibilities that underwrote it, have been dreamed up and implemented by an unholy blend of the management consultant and the corporate executive. It’s all there: the importation of  the rainmaking CEO, the inflated salary and perception of self-worth, the content-free mumbo-jumbo of the ‘value’ that Petraeus will bring to CUNY.

General David Petraeus does not strike me as a very smart or perceptive man. He–along with CUNY administrators–seems to lack the most elementary knowledge of the realities of public education, something that would have helped him adjust the parameters of the deal he could negotiate with CUNY: the content of the course, his salary, his assistants. And his response to a bout of sustained public criticism resembles nothing as much as panic.

CUNY students could, and should, take their leadership lessons from elsewhere.

The Perils and Pleasures of the Scatological

Warning: Please do not continue reading if scatological references and language upset and offend you.

A couple of weeks ago, I traveled with some friends to upstate New York. We were on a Members’ Appreciation trip organized by the farm that supplies our local community supported agriculture collective (CSA) with its beef, pork, chicken and lamb. As we sat together on that early morning MTA train, suitably fueled by caffeinated concoctions, it quickly became apparent that stories of urination and defecation–sometimes public, sometimes spectacular, sometimes embarrassing–were gaining considerable mileage, provoking considerable chuckling, guffawing and chortling. I spun out a few stories myself; indeed, I may have been one of the ‘worst’–or ‘best’ depending on your perspective–offenders. And as our train rolled on, and through, the bucolic landscapes of New York farmlands, the air turning blue–or perhaps brown and yellow–in our corner of the coach, I was reminded yet again of the curious attraction of the scatological tale and joke.

Talk of shitting, pissing, farting, sharting, and the like comes easily to some; equally facile are the offended responses of others. It is still not quite clear to me what accounts for this difference. One conventionally drawn line has been between men and women’s tolerance for this species of conversation. A dozen or so years ago, after a friend and I had finished laughing our heads off at a suitably shit-stained joke, my girlfriend asked, “Why is it that men find such jokes funny?” My friend responded, ‘What is it about women that prevents them from getting the joke?” But it is not clear to me such genderized lines can be easily drawn. My company during my ride upstate was a mixed sex group, with contributions and appreciation roughly equally shared, so conventional stereotypes about the relative tolerance for, and indulgence in, this variant of humor certainly seemed up for contestation and redefinition. And neither does class or income explain the relative differences in tolerance. The rich–in the right company and circumstances–talk of their shit and piss just as much, or as little, as do the middle-class and the poor. (Based on some rather unscientific sampling.) So do the young and old. And of course, even the supposedly highly cultured and sophisticated, like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, no less, have been known to give wings to their scatological flights of imagination.

Perhaps reveling in the scatological provides relief and release from daily, clenched-cheek, full-bladder, strictures on conversation and expression; perhaps tales of answering–in staggering variety and manner–nature’s many calls are one more way of emphasizing our sometimes malodorous connections with it; perhaps in recounting our incontinences, we make ourselves more human; perhaps as Freud noted, we are still proud of our ‘productions.’ Those of us that do indulge in these walks on the wild side might be entitled to look askance at those who refuse to let go and hold on tightly, veins popping, reluctant to acknowledge the ubiquity of the arse-wipe and pee-stain, desperately hoping to maintain the carefully crafted image of the pristine human, well above the fray and the spray. If only they’d relax and let the ease flow over–and under–them.

Note: While my diaper changing experiences in recent months have certainly induced new appreciation in me for scatology, they have not been my sole inspiration for this post. But they do deserve a post of their own. On which, as for many other issues, more anon.

William Pfaff on the Indispensability of Clerical Leadership

In reviewing Garry Wills‘ Why Priests? A Failed Tradition (‘Challenge to the Church,’ New York Review of Books, 9 May 2013), William Pfaff writes:

How does a religion survive without structure and a self-perpetuating leadership? The practice of naming bishops to lead the Church in various Christian centers has existed since apostolic times. Aside from the questions of doctrinal authority and leadership in worship, there are inevitable practical problems of livelihood, shelter, and finance, propagation of the movement, relations with political authority, and so forth. Clerical organization seems to me the pragmatic and indeed inevitable solution to the problem of religious and other spontaneous communities that wish to survive the death of their founders or charismatic leaders.

These are interesting and revealing assertions. Pfaff assumes that ‘religion’ is synonymous with ‘organized religion’; from this premise follow the rest of his conclusions. Pfaff does not indicate what he takes to be the extension of ‘spontaneous communities’; presumably these would include–as ‘charismatic leaders’ would seem to indicate–cults of all stripes. It might be that for Pfaff what distinguishes a ‘spontaneous community’ or a cult–as the early Christians would have been so regarded–from religions is more a matter of their endurance and organization than their content.  Two ‘spontaneous communities’ then, for Pfaff, could be similar in theistic and doctrinal, especially eschatological, content, but only the one with the requisite organization and endurance would count as a religion. A cult flowers briefly and dies out; a religion endures.

Pfaff’s conflation of ‘religion’ with ‘organized religion’ suggests that religions are properly thought of as organizations of sufficient complexity–in social, economic and political dimensions–to necessarily require some form of binding, cohesion and direction by ‘leadership’. Tantalizingly enough, we are not told how such a leadership is to be formed or selected from among the ranks of the followers; its ‘legitimacy’ to command, direct, and regulate its followers is left as an open question. (Pfaff does not address the issue of whether the survival of such an entity is desirable or not for the society that plays host to it.) But maybe not; is it the case that the legitimacy of the priesthood is derived entirely from its indispensability? A sort of ‘sans moi le deluge‘ argument, if you will.

This analysis of the necessity of clergies for the maintenance and propagation of religion also suggests leadership could be contested; rival contenders could stake their claims based on their alternative strategies for the continued flourishing of the religion.  This is not unheard of in organized religions; the Sunni-Shia schism in Islam dates back to a succession dispute, which even if not argued for on precisely these grounds, was still the kind that would be entailed by Pfaff’s claims of the indispensability of leadership.

So an interesting picture of organized religion emerges from Pffaf’s claims: its very survival relies on the creation of a space which could play host to a species of political dispute; this survival also requires ‘finance,’ ‘propagation’ and ‘relations with political authority.’ In short, it must be a political actor itself in the society in which it is embedded.

At the very least, this would seem to indicate organized religion should be treated like any other political force in society, and not one requiring special protections or immunities.

The All Too Inevitable Denouement of the Trayvon Martin Story

In commenting on the murder of Trayvon Martin last year, I wrote:

The killing of Trayvon Martin is a classically American nightmare: a suburb somewhere, a dark night, a young black man on the streets, guns in the hands of people who imagine it will make them safer, calls to 911 that provide grim, brief, staccato evidence of a deadly, preventable encounter. And at the end of it all, a dead man, grieving parents, a police force and a city administration making mealy-mouthed responses. When we reach that stage, a sickening sense of deja vu strikes, for we have memorized the rest of the script: a little outrage that soon blows itself out, some protest marches, featuring as usual, some ‘leaders’ of the black community, bland, banal responses from the police force, and a meandering march toward ‘justice,’ which, more often than not, ends in miscarriage.

Well, that familiar script has played out as predicted and the anticipated miscarriage of ‘justice’ is here: George Zimmerman has been acquitted of second-degree murder and of manslaughter; Trayvon Martin‘s parents are left grieving and inconsolate, resigned to spending the rest of their lives mourning a young life cut short. And the rest of us reduced to raging impotently, if eloquently at times, on social media timelines and playing parlor games in which thought experiments involving a white Trayvon Martin and a black Zimmerman are devised, with the same outcome every time: Zimmerman going to the gallows or heading for a life sentence in prison.

A few weeks, months or years from now, Trayvon Martin’s name will acquire some obscurity, and blend in with Yusuf Hawkins, Amadou Diallo, and oh, take your pick: a grim roll of black men who get shot on the streets, and whose killers always, somehow, manage to walk; his portrait will join those flashed at the rallies that will soon, again, be held for some other victim of the over-hasty, over-eager policeman or home-brewed vigilante.  Zimmerman will go back to his life, still armed and dangerous. If the perversity of our culture will play out in some of its most gruesome manifestations, we might see him again, perhaps on a talk show, or a book release event, justifying his unhinged reactions on that fatal night.

In the post from which I’ve quoted above, I also wrote:

[T]he final pull of the trigger, as in this case, was merely the spearpoint of a weapon that had been aimed at Trayvon Martin’s head for a very long time. Zimmerman lives in a society infected by racism; when he finally shot Trayvon, he wasn’t acting alone; he was accompanied by anything and everything that has conspired to make it the case that young black men in this country are taking substantial risks when they venture out alone into a dark street.

The ‘anything and everything’ includes legal statutes like Florida’s stand-your-ground law, but even more importantly, it includes the structural racism which made it possible for those thought experiments I allude to above to be run so easily.

That structure needs, and will take, some tearing down.