The Embarrassment of George Zimmerman

George Zimmerman, a predator of humans and clearly the stalker and by his own admission the subsequent slayer of a rainbow (my word for "black"-- the LGBT community doesn't have nearly as good a claim to the term) teenager named Trayvon Martin, was finally arrested a while ago, after a largely unexplained delay of several weeks.  After thereupon having been securely sequestered somewhere in the Florida justice system for a similar period, he was granted bail of $150,000, which seemed light when compared to the magnitude of his crime and its widespread notoriety, and now, after yet another long period, his trial on a charge of second degree murder has finally started, and this coming week, after an extended jury selection process, the first testimony is about to be heard.

Maybe some things that we didn't already read long ago will come out.

After Zimmerman came out on bail, his whereabouts again became unknown for a time.  Using a tactic calculated to help build up the sympathy that is sure to come in handy for him during this trial, his handlers, defenders, and apologists claimed that he was again in hiding, out of fear for his safety. But there can be no doubt that instead he was being carefully kept out of sight  because it had been realized that he is such a big embarrassment to all those on the conservative, hateful side of things that he is a big minus for everybody, no matter how one chooses to look at this.

After the incident in Sanford, Florida, there were numerous searches into the background of the murdered Trayvon Martin, in attempts to find anything at all of an unsavory nature that could even remotely be used to justify Zimmerman killing him, though at the time Martin was not committing any crime at all, short of indulging in the normal vacuousness of a 17-year-old teenager. He was merely noodling along that evening, strolling back to where he was staying in that gated community while packing nothing more than the inevitable cellphone and some tea and a bag of something called "skittles" (which to me denotes only chess games played purely for fun but these days seems to denote something that could be edible) that he had just bought. But the rightwingers could come up with nothing with a usefulness that didn't evaporate in about 10 seconds.  That's what happens when anything called "skittles" is involved.

Less effort was spent on Zimmerman's background, when it became obvious that his prior existence hadn't been anything that anyone, certainly not his Peruvian mother or his Euro father, could've been proud of.  He had no noticeable vocation or avocation, though I saw somewhere that some years ago he worked for a company that took care of yards and gardens, and he was fired for being too aggressive with the customers.  So what was that all about?

Otherwise, one looked in vain for any indication that Zimmerman, a supposedly grown man of 28 or 29, with a conservative judge for a father, had ever had anything resembling a program, that is, a set of worthwhile goals or interests that serve as consistent themes for a person's existence. Moreover, it should be noticed that very few statements from either his mouth or his keyboard have seen the light of day.

Some who studied the videos that were made of him during his first appearance in court on this matter described him as being "shifty-eyed," which suggested that he has marbles rolling around loose in his head.  That was verified when it came time to post that bail and, on the plea of indigence made by the latest of the several lawyers who had taken turns coming to his aid, the others having meanwhile seen fit to bail out on Zimmerman themselves, saying that he didn't seem to want to be bothered with staying in touch with them, his family had to put up the 10 percent of the 150 K that was required before he could leave the jailhouse and go back into unofficial hiding, and Zimmerman neglected to tell his new lawyer that via the weird website he had set up for donations, he had quickly raked in a cool $204,000 (which makes one wonder anew why hatred and bigotry is invariably so lucrative in this land that on one day of each year makes a big thing of celebrating peace on earth and good will to man.)

Aside from these indications of how mentally challenged this man gives so many signs of being, Zimmerman's numerous defenders and justifiers also cannot be happy with the way that he brought off his execution of Trayvon Martin, even if, in their eyes, that was an achievement of real merit.  ("One more of those subhumans off the street and a big warning to all those of his kind!" they would have happily mouthed to each other, over their martinis and beers.)  But the bad side for them was that he did it in a way and under circumstances that attracted far too many doubts and questions that prevented the killing from being swept under the rug in the usual expeditious manner. The fact that Zimmerman continued to follow the youth after being told by the police not to do that is damaging, big time, and it will be interesting to see how his lawyers will get around that, in this trial that, in Florida, is nevertheless sure to result in a sentence, if any, as light as his bail.

This will not be before his attorneys will have to sandbag their way over a host of other high hurdles as well, because their contentions will be based on self-defense and Zimmerman's statement that at the moment of the shooting he was on the ground under Martin and being pummeled badly.

His position on the ground, despite his big weight advantage of being 50 pounds heavier at the time than the 158-pound Trayvon Martin, might still have been actually the case, because Zimmerman had a gun and his prey didn't. If you have a gun, you feel that you're above having to use your fists, especially if you're weak on wits.   And Zimmerman had a gun while Martin's arsenal consisted only of some tea, the bag of "skittles," and the cellphone.  That stark disparity in weaponry bears no end of repeating.

  Ironically, however, this will be a defense with which Zimmerman, if he had a full set of wits, could not conceivably be otherwise happy, because it would say that by being the one that was flat on his back and under his much lighter adversary and getting the worst of it, as he claims, he was not nearly as much a man as the considerably slimmer teenager that he had accosted.

All indications are that G. Zimmerman's thought processes were too limited to permit him to expect that someone he was stalking would have the colossal effrontery to turn and ask him what he thought he was doing -- a question that Zimmerman would not have been equipped to readily answer, because he wasn't thinking.   That is, if indeed Martin did turn or circle around and challenge him.  The numerous media accounts of what happened say that while following Martin, Zimmerman lost sight of the youth, and then the next thing he knew Martin was jumping him.

The sound of that proposition, like most things about this case, doesn't sound right.  What?  Are Zimmerman's eyes and ears also severely impaired?  Well, his eyes do appear to be set so unusually close together that that might distort his perceptions of depth, position, and the like.

In any case it also appears that he didn't know that the gun he was carrying didn't automatically give him the power over others and the authority that he had expected.   Was this because he didn't quickly produce it?   But if he had, is it at all likely that his prey would have approached him in any manner? No. Instead we have the dead Martin already testifying himself, in the form of the cellphone call he made to his girl friend, complete with a photo, in which he is essentially pleading to  her or somebody, 'Get me outta here!"  Though, being a kid, and seeing Zimmerman's eyes, at first he could also have taken the whole thing as some kind of gag, and thus the photo.

 It could very well have been, then, that Zimmerman was trying to inform his quarry by struggling to get out the gun that he had no business having, there or anywhere else, only to find himself forced to fend off some blows first, in a furious melee that he had brought about but hadn't anticipated.

 All in all, carrying a gun into any situation that has a potential for being a whirlwind of happenstance and the unexpected is a recipe for disaster and a sign of a lack of intelligence.

I wonder how many of the above points will be discussed in the trial?

All these meanwhile are signs that G. Zimmerman is a dim bulb indeed, and therefore he even drops somewhat below the usually poor credibility for being cast as a hero of the conservatives.  Nevertheless they can be counted on to demand Zimmerman's complete  exoneration, for what to all intents and purposes amounts to being a clear case of premeditated murder, even while, because of the obvious scattering of his gray matter, they would also prefer to keep only the back of his head instead of the front turned to the world.