Trayvon's Hands

A hard-drinking roommate I once had challenged me to a fight. My response was that I did not want to fight because it would mess up my hands. Here's the thing. Boxers wear gloves so they can hit people in the head. If you do that with your bare hand, even a jab, your knuckles will get damaged, infected, whatever. My comment annoyed the roommate, who took about 30 swings at me, all of which I blocked, and I jabbed him lightly, mostly slaps, until he decided the fight was over. My knuckles ended up infected (nothing serious).

If Trayvon Martin really gave Zimmerman two black eyes, a swollen nose, etc., Trayvon's hands would be damaged and bloody. Instead they were found to be clean and totally undamaged, or so I heard on the radio. Pounding someone's hard head with bare but undamaged hands is just about impossible.

5-4

As you know, our somewhat balmy Supreme Court recently ruled in overturning DOMA that gays and lesbians are, in effect, human beings. I was heartened by their bold move despite the narrowness of the vote, which was not unprecedented. I refer, of course, to a similar 5-4 vote that made George Washington eligible to serve as President. You may recall the case, the Original Tea Party vs. George Washington, in which the Tea Party insisted that Washington was ineligible because he had not been born in the United States. He was a British citizen by birth. According to the Constitution, no person is eligible to serve as President except a natural born citizen or a citizen at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. It's obvious that as the Constitution was being gradually passed by the states, the United States had not quite been invented. Washington had remained a British citizen until after the nation was invented. At that point he became an immigrant. On paper he was ineligible. Then, as now, the Supreme Court had many nincompoop judges, but common sense prevailed, although my wife claims I made all this up. Washington became President. Gays and Lesbians have become people by virtue of a single vote. Makes you proud, eh?

 

Zimmerman's Gun

By now most of us have heard the 911 tape on which either George Zimmerman or Trayvon Martin is screaming. But which one is hysterically asking for help? Tough question. Is it the unarmed black kid who has been followed home? Is he terrified and calling for help? Or is it the grown man holding a loaded gun? I'm trying to get the picture straight in my mind: a grown man holding a loaded gun, screaming in terror while facing an unarmed kid?

"Mister Obama, tear down that wall!"

Tom Belton is opposed to building a huge fence along the Mexican border and adding 20,000 new border guards, but he does see some positive points in the endeavor. It's a good way to add jobs to the faltering economy and increase the federal payroll. The bad part is that we currently have a net outflow of Mexican citizens who want to return home. Will the fence trap them in Texas? Tom more or less expects the Mexican President to be saying, any day now, "Mister Obama, tear down that wall!"

UCLA Sweeps & Press-Democrat Weeps

Yesterday the UCLA Bruins baseball team won its first national baseball championship in school history. The lame Press-Democrat sports department managed to cover that event. What they left out was that the winning pitcher, Nick Vander Tuig, who threw a shutout for his eight innings, has been drafted by the SF Giants, home team for the paper's readers. Vander Tuig won four games in the tournament.

Names and Games

What are their names? Let's see. . . .  John Roberts, Republican button man, looks like the plastic model used in underwear ads. Clarence Thomas, hates his dark skin, named to the court to represent stupid sexist males. Sammy Alioto,  the court's moral cancer, greedily eating from within.  Tony Kennedy, two blank eyes. Tony Scalia, a genuine nutter, conducts his own digital prostate exams, trusting no foreign finger. 

Voter suppression is their game. These five Supreme Court Republican politicos are 100% committed to blocking three kinds of Obama voters: college students, black people and Latinos. They'd love to suppress women, too, as the Founding Fathers did, if they could find a way to do it. In the meantime they'll settle for vaginal ultrasound.

Hamlet, the Fascist

By the time you read this, everyone will be
comparing President Obama to Hamlet, thanks to Jill Lepore of The New Yorker.  You know how the story goes, of course. One of the leaders of Denmark, Prince Hamlet, is a villainous fascist, so unscrupulous that he steals the private mail of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, does not care for the contents of the letters, and has both men put to death. This is exactly like Obama and the NSA with the exceptions that they do not read the contents of the private communications they intercept and, of course, we don't know the name of the anyone the NSA has murdered, the dirty bastards.

The Vigil

A few months before George W. Bush launched his war against Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands of ordinary people and sent home troops with nightmares enough to last a lifetime, the Healdsburg Peace Project reinvented itself. It has now been standing in a vigil on Thursdays in the Healdsburg Plaza for  12 years. We never miss a Thursday. Most of us are old. Many were founding participants in marches for civil rights and peace. Yet today we feel a bit like re-enactors.  We stand there with our signs and our friends. Because we live in wine country, north of San Francisco, we see a lot of tourists. Many of them wave and honk. We hold up our signs and flags and banner. I'm thinking we might look quaint. I'm beginning to suspect that the town should put us on salary. I'm wondering if the tour books list us as an attraction for foreign visitors. "If you arrive at your wine country attraction early on Thursday, you can see an authentic American peace vigil re-enacted by genuinely wrinkled old people dressed in faded denim, holding signs supporting a variety of causes. Honk and they may throw you the original two fingered peace sign. This is a rare chance to experience 1969."

To Each His Own

About the time my children were entering high school, I attempted to convince them that in the 1940s I'd really liked a black singing group called The Ink Spots. "Good try, Dad," they told me. "That never happened."