George Zimmerman Autographs are the New Lynching Photography

George Zimmerman signed autographs at the New Orlando Gun Show last weekend.

His claim to fame? Killing Trayvon Martin.

A question. What type of person would want George Zimmerman memorabilia? What type of person would want to endorse his stalking and murdering of an unarmed teenager whose "crime" was walking home and not being sufficiently submissive to a racist, gun toting, street vigilante?

Autographs are sought from celebrities. The man or woman on the corner; the local drunk; the town loser; or the anonymous median percentile average person is not a real "star". Nor does their signature or photo have any cache or quasi magical power as a type of totem or fetish which can be channeled by its owner.

Zimmerman's autograph is a way for his fans and public to idolize him.

Zimmerman's signed photo is also a way for his supporters to be closer to him, and to "own" part of his "success" and "power".

The autograph of George Zimmerman, a man who is "famous" only because he stalked, hunted, and killed an unarmed black teenager, is for those who seek it, a validation of their right to kill and murder at will those people that they deem to be the Other and somehow "less than". The South's hyper-masculine and racialized norms of honor both legitimate and sustain such logic.  

If one cannot be the hero who slays the dragon, at least he or she can touch the blood soaked sword or keep company with their idealized selves.

Consequently, for a particularly racist and pitiable part of the (white) American public, George Zimmerman is their knight and role-model because he sanitized, cleansed, and protected his community (read: castle) from an outside (black) invader.

Open Thread: Is He a Sociopath? George Zimmerman Signs Autographs at the New Orlando Gun Show

I will leave this as a quasi-open thread. I am still thinking about this video and the type of person/people who would publicly associate with the killer-street vigilante known as George Zimmerman. Doubling-down Tripling-down Decaling down As I have said many times before, I am convinced that George Zimmerman is sociopathic.

The above video is one more data point in support of that claim.

Am I wrong? What must Trayvon Martin's parents be thinking as they watch this fuckery desperate effort to be in the public spotlight from the person who killed their son in cold blood?

Here is a bonus. Have you ever wondered what George Zimmerman's "aura" reveals to a skilled "reader"? Where is Art Bell when we need him the most?

CPAC 2014: Do No Harm? Ben Carson is the Republican Party’s Newest Black Conservative Poison Pill

Dr. Ben Carson is a supremely talented and gifted surgeon. He is a credit to the medical profession.

He is also a black conservative darling who gave a rousing speech to the Right-wing faithful at the 2014 CPAC event.

These facts exist in tension with one another.

In some basic ways, Carson's role as a black human mascot and cheerleader for the White Right is a violation of the Hippocratic Oath he took as a doctor.

On a basic level, the Hippocratic Oath is a commitment to the truth. By comparison, Ben Carson's role in the Republican Party is based on lies and distortions.

Ben Carson’s fulfilling of the Republican Party’s fantasy that African-Americans are somehow hoodwinked and bamboozled in their decades of support for the Democratic Party is the first lie.

Here, Republicans, movement conservatives, and the White Right have reframed centuries of black citizenship and struggles for freedom into a narrative wherein African-Americans are dumb, stupid, and childlike. 

Apparently, African-Americans are not reasoning and sophisticated citizens capable of making their own decisions in the service of collective self-interest. No. They are stuck on a “plantation” and need black conservatives such as Ben Carson and Herman Cain to rescue them.

Ben Carson is a happiness pill. In any other context, this would be an extremely troubling role for a medical professional.

As a happiness pill, Carson is a placebo, a fake drug and a high, a salve for Republicans. His purpose, like that of other black conservatives, is to be human chaff, an ointment, which relieves them from the mountain of evidence and charges that the Republican Party is a racist organization.

Carson is also a poison pill for the Republican Party. 

Ah Pook is Watching. But Where is the Yellow King? What are Your Predictions for the Finale of HBO's 'True Detective'?

Ah Pook is watching. I wonder if he is jealous of all the attention the Yellow King has received about the latter's role in the show True Detective?

There has been much analysis of True Detective. I do not want to suggest that good thinking inspired by one of the smartest and most literate TV shows in recent memory is overwrought and excessive. However, some of the fan theories are a bit of a reach bordering on the ridiculous. In all, such reaches are a good thing: it is better for a work of literate popular culture to cause too much thinking and reflection as opposed to too little.

What do you think will happen in the finale? 

Will all of the various hints and winks to the Yellow King play out or will the final episode True Detective be a straightforward police procedural where the dots are connected and the audience is left satisfied (or not)? 

What themes should True Detective Season 2 focus on? Who should be the featured actors/actresses?

My thoughts/predictions are as follows.

1. It is pretty clear that there is a Satanic sex cult operating across Louisiana. The Tuttle-Childress clan are involved. The series has borrowed very closely from Lovecraft-inspired lore. One such story features many of the elements we have seen thus far in True Detective. Rust Cohle and Marty Hart will confront the ring leaders. One or both of them will be killed.

2. Is Maggie's father involved in the sex cult? Yes and no. I do think he has knowledge of it. He may have participated in the sexual rituals, but did not have the "courage" to kill. Alternatively, perhaps committing the ritual sacrifice is the last step before being fully vested in the secret society which worships the Yellow King. 

For whatever reason, Maggie's father was not allowed into that final circle of knowledge. 

I also believe that Maggie's father may have molested the oldest daughter Audrey. 

3. Are either Cohle or Hart the "Yellow King". No. Nor do I believe that Rust Cohle was committing the murders--I suspected that he was initially. However, I do believe that in his drug altered and elevated state Cohle has been working through and processing the events connected to the Dora Lange murders, as well as what happened to his daughter in her "accident". 

4. The wildcard. Was Rust Cohle's daughter a victim of the Tuttle-Childress Courir de Mardi Gras sex cult? I am not sure. This could be a great swerve for the finale and would explain a great deal of Cohle's behavior.

What Do Their Eyes Tell Us as We Watch 'The Act of Killing' and Look at Photos of Masters and Servants in South Asia?

There is a store in my neighborhood that sells incense, beads, and trinkets. In its window is a statue. I never make eye contact with the statue. There is a wave of energy around it. Lingering. Malevolent. One of my lovers would laugh when I would tell her I refuse to walk by the storefront. The statue watches people. One day, convinced, she said I was right. "No more" she said, no more walking by that place or going inside where the creepy people worked, to buy crafts or to make idle chatter. Something was wrong in there.

One of my great summer joys was languishing, spent, in the arms of a beautiful woman. We would turn the air conditioning on high and carry on all day.

Then we would go to one of the local dive bars and play some more because I have no self-control and I would let my hands wander under the table while we drank pitchers of mid-tier beer that would make me sick the next day.

I loved her bronze skin.

I liked watching her sleep.

She had long hair that smelled like perfume and cigarette smoke. She was immaculately clean. Those smells were right on her. She who would always use the "lota" in supposed secret even though she knew I watched. It excited her.

She came from money. I loved laying there, listening to her stories about her family's guru or Veda--the difference escapes my memory--and how there were people who could either cure illness or cause sickness with an intonation of the voice, a touch, a look, a song.

Recentering White Racism in How We Discuss 'The Psychology of Hate'

How do individuals and groups rationalize discrimination and hatred? 

Salon's new essay "The Psychology of Hate"--which is actually an excerpt from the brilliant Nicholas Epley's book Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want--offers some preliminary sketches of how those processes take place.

To point. The following example details how American law constructed various categories and types of human beings, where some had legal rights, and others were denied them:

Carrying his son’s bones in a bag clutched to his chest, Standing Bear and twenty-seven others began their return in the dead of winter. Word spread of the group’s travel as they approached the Omaha Indian reservation, midway through their journey. The Omahas welcomed them with open arms, but U.S. officials welcomed them with open handcuffs. General George Crook was ordered by government officials to return the beleaguered Poncas to the Indian Territory.

Crook couldn’t bear the thought. “I’ve been forced many times by orders from Washington to do most inhuman things in dealings with the Indians,” he said, “but now I’m ordered to do a more cruel thing than ever before.” Crook was an honorable man who could no more disobey direct orders than he could fly, so instead he stalled, encouraging a newspaper editor from Omaha to enlist lawyers who would then sue General Crook (as the U.S. government’s representative) on Standing Bear’s behalf. The suit? To have the U.S. government recognize Standing Bear as a person, as a human being...

Standing Bear was a man intelligent enough to lead his tribe along a six-hundred-mile journey in the dead of winter and back again, a man who felt love so deeply that he carried his son’s bones around his neck to fulfill a promise. Yet he found himself pleading with people from far-off places who had failed almost completely to see his mind and instead viewed him as a piece of mindless property. Facing those unable to recognize a sentient mind before their eyes, Standing Bear had been forced to show his to them.

Salon's feature on Mindwise has accomplished its goal: I want to buy the book because it appears to be a compelling and important text that offers readers some keen insights on the worst aspects of human nature. 

However, the Psychology of Hate does not contain any of the following words: racism, race, ethnocentrism, whiteness, or white supremacy. 

Barricades, Self-Sacrifice, and the Iconic Visuals of People's Movements in Ukraine and Egypt

Why do the photos, video, and tweets out of Kiev have such mythic power? Why do demonstrations, and barricades, and people shot down, young and old, men and women alike, wring such enduring emotion (like Les Miserables)? Why do citizen risings in big, capital cities have such a hold on us? 

For a start, citizen-risings in cities are not war. Even when there is lots of fighting, it is never a fair fight, and we are rooting for the underdog, where the force against them is always unfairly superior, professional, and heavily armed. Plus a group of poorly armed citizens are unlike an army in almost every way. But especially this way — Together, they are the whole community: Men, women, and children fighting together. Their backs are against the family hearth itself. Nothing could be more existential, or more motivating.

As we try to make sense of the events in Ukraine, this new short essay from Michael Vlahos at the Library of Social Science's website is helpful.

The Library of Social Science provides book reviews and essays on international relations, history, and military affairs with a focus on ideology and collective psychology.

The world is on fire.

[That is also an empirical question, are there in fact more wars and conflicts at present than there were in the near to mid past?] 

The reaction by the leadership class in those respective countries to the uprisings across the Arab world, and now in the Ukraine, has left me wondering the following: why didn't said governments unleash massive and quick violence upon the protesters/rebels before the latter had a chance to coalesce and win public support?

In an alternate reality, one in which I am part of the leadership cadre of an authoritarian or dictatorial regime, I would have ordered the protesters immediately wiped out if I was unable to either cooptate or discredit them.

However, matters are not so simple.

Lupita Nyong'o Versus 'Real' Ghetto Female Black Ratchet Hood Rat Street Authenticity

Lupita Nyong'o's performance in 12 Years a Slave was transcendent. The humble grace of her acceptance speech and honoring of those ancestors who are lost, but still with us, from the killing fields of white on black chattel slavery, to the "post racial" present, was an act of gracious humility, class, intelligence, and generosity.

Lupita Nyong'o removed the "I" and the self from her wondrous sharing of thoughts and ideas and emotions that came with her winning an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

Matthew McConaughey did the opposite when he was awarded the Oscar for Best Actor. He offered up a vainglorious speech that was a tribute to self-motivating, self-fulfilling, and self-praised ego. I am not criticizing Matthew McConaughey; I am making a basic observation.

I am very concerned about the present state of black respectability politics. The title of this project--We Are Respectable Negroes--is a naked tell in that regard.

I have this concern not just because of an unapologetic love of black people in America. Black respectability, and its various tones, hues, challenges, and travails, are a barometer for American political and social life. My concern about African-Americans in this regard is an act of patriotism.

What are black Americans if not a people who love a country that more often than not does not love us back?

I will proceed carefully.

Parrhesia ought not to be a phrase to sound cool with at the bar or riding on the bus with the knowledge that others are listening. Parrhesia is a life principle.

What are the Racial and Ethnic Politics of the Ukraine-Russia Crisis?

Is Niall Ferguson correct? Are the 20th and 21st centuries really a story of unending ethnic conflict?

Hutus and Tutsis. They all look alike to me. Apparently, the various black and brown people of the Caribbean are also different from one another. Again, they all more or less look alike to me. There are also different ethnic groups in China. Again, they all more or less look "Chinese" to me.

The developing crisis between Russia and Ukraine over the Crimean region has introduced all sorts of "strange" and "alien" "white" people to the American vocabulary. Apparently, those white people over there are not all the same: there are Tatars, "ethnic Russians", Russians, Cossacks, Turkmen, and others.

The Personal is Political: In Thinking About Barack Obama's New Initiative for Young Men of Color, Do You Have Any 'Brother's Keepers' That You Would Like to Publicly Thank?

Obama's proposed "My Brother's Keeper" initiative has encouraged me to reflect upon those folks who offered me advice in these four decades of life.

I have been blessed with many brother's keeper's along the way. I should have listened to more of their wisdom and advice. If I had done so I would be much farther along my life path, with much more money in the bank, much less debt, and more personal satisfaction. 

Who doesn't have like regrets? 

But, I did take in quite a bit of their advice and wisdom. And years later, I have discovered, after the fact, that some of my best guardians and allies were working behind the scenes to either clear the path ahead for me or beat back the vipers that were waiting to strike.

I have no doubt that the policy level analysis of Obama's proposal will be sidetracked by an embrace of the powerful symbolic elements of the showmanship which accompanied the debut of "My Brother's Keeper"--"Look Obama is on stage with black young boys and men! How beautiful!"

Those are nice words for empty stomachs.

However, symbolic politics are no substitute for dealing with the specific structural dynamics of white supremacy and class inequality that are over-determining, in a profoundly negative way, the life chances of black and brown youth and adults. 

Moreover, the very title of the program lends itself to folksy truisms about "villages raising a child" and how "back in the day" things were really so simple and different. 

Two related questions for the weekend, questions that are also a chance to say "thank you" to those who watched over us, and if we are lucky, are still doing so.