I’ll keep this short, because there’s stuff to do. My advice to anyone who wants to kill someone (non-white) with impunity is simply to follow these three steps:
- Invite said person down to Florida
- Take them somewhere where no one can observe you closely, perhaps the Everglades, and shoot them dead
- Claim they made you feel threatened, thereby invoking the “Stand Your Ground” law (signed by noted moderate Jeb Bush)
That’s pretty much all you 
need to know. Watching the Zimmerman trial, I can’t help but feel like he’s going to walk through that massive legal hole opened for him by bullet-brained state legislators (fueled by ALEC) and Big Jeb. I am struck by that sense, and by the overwhelming irony of the defense’s efforts to frame Zimmerman as the target of racial profiling. Cross examination of Trayvon Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel was ludicrous. The girl did not want to be there, but felt she had to. She lost her friend, and she was herself being stereotyped on the stand. The insinuation that her use of a very standardized form of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) was just bad speech, uneducated muttering, etc., was quite simply racist. Watching the defense attorney, surrounded by white people, disrespecting this young lady was truly nauseating.
Regardless, though the Zimmerman defense team seems less than stellar, their fight is downhill all the way. All they need to do is sow doubt. It’s Zimmerman’s word against the silence of a dead young man. Seems like there was a time when a jury might take one look at this 200-plus pound vigilante, look at the slight kid he shot, and toss him in the slammer. That time, if it ever existed, was before “Stand Your Ground”. (I’m not certain it ever existed when the young man was black and the shooter white, particularly in a place like Florida. )
Color me disgusted. On a week when they’ve gutted the voting rights act, it’s appropriate that we should be reminded of our deep cultural racism.
luv u,
jp
I was just thinking back to the bad old days in the 1970s when television was king and the internets were just a twinkle in DARPA’s eyes. On about five million occasions – maybe slightly more than that – I can remember watching an ad for 120 Classical Masterpieces introduced by the well-known character actor John Williams (not the classical guitarist … nor the composer of the Lost In Space theme song). Now that we are on the verge of releasing our third and perhaps silliest album ever, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, I only wish we had a marketing powerhouse behind us like John Williams. Or even Guy Williams. (Except that he‘s dead too!)
Still, it’s interesting that in both cases, the original impetus for the protest was a decision by the government affecting public services. Both Turkey and Brazil have been touted as relatively successful governments, and yet beneath many success stories there is often another story to tell, that of the poor, the working people, those left behind. You can see them in Brazil, in China, in India, in Turkey, just as you can see them here in the United States. True, the standard of living in Brazil has improved vastly over the last decade. But the people protesting increased transit fares are making us aware of the work that is yet to be done.
What would I do with all that brain power? Well, for one thing, I would get our next album out a bit quicker. Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick seems to be in perpetual becoming mode. I know you’re sick of it, I’m sick of it, Matt’s had it up to here, the president has started complaining, the ambassador from Madagascar has issued a protest against Big Green – suffice to say, no one is happy. Hey, well … we’re working as fast as we can. It takes a while to bake all those discs, especially without a convection oven like the big, famous groups have. And then hand painting all those covers. Jesus!
Already, I have heard more about the numbers of killed in Syrian than I ever heard about the Iraq catastrophe. Again, no surprise. The government and the press meticulously count the victims of official enemies, but when it comes to the corpses generated by our misguided policies, we don’t do body counts. They still won’t put a realistic number on the lives lost in Iraq, hovering around the casual 30K guess Bush made in 2007 or so. I suppose once we have both legs in the mire of this conflict they will stop counting again. But for now, the statistics are useful – they are trying to push the American people closer to intervention, and it’s evident that the effort isn’t working very well. Less than one in four is in favor of intervention.
Did you listen to this month’s podcast, 
Now, I’m not complaining. Upstate is nothing like Moore, Oklahoma, not by a long shot. But there can be no doubt that the weather here and everywhere else in the country is getting more severe. There is far more energy behind some of these storms than is normal. It takes a few mornings of driving through wreckage to drive home the notion that this may be the new normal. This may be the best we can expect in the years ahead. That is a disastrous prospect.