Et tu America?*

Oh shit say y'all heard of this dude George Zimmerman?  That fool fatally shot Trayvon Martin and just got away with it.  It's weird to think that in this country an unarmed black teenager is considered fair game for a gun-toting adult, but I guess that's what our Founding Fathers had in mind when they designed our criminal justice system.  God bless America.  While I unequivocally disagree with the verdict, I can’t help but marvel at the effectiveness of the defense’s closing argument.  The picture that defense attorney Mark O'Mara painted was so precise, gripping, and evocative that I felt, as I'm sure the jury did, that I was right there alongside Zimmerman on that fateful February night in Florida as he fearlessly sacrificed his own safety to ensure the safety of his, yes his, neighborhood, a neighborhood beset by robbery and burglary and ebony, a neighborhood direly in need of a watch, a watch to be undertaken by a hero, not just any hero but an especially valiant hero who, not satisfied with merely watching, goes the extra mile and CAPTAINS SAID WATCH (our plucky hero presumably wears a tinfoil badge issued to him by the retired mall cop next door and has a neato decoder ring retrieved from the depths of a particularly foreboding box of Cap'n Crunch).  It was such a textbook example of compelling legal rhetoric that I just had to quote it in its entirety on this here blog of mine:

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, um, I mean ladies of the jury, look at my client.  Just look at him.  Do you really think that such a pudgy paranoid pants-pissing coward would stand a chance with anyone in a fair fight?  He had no choice but to use his gun.  I mean look at him.  Really look at him.  For fuck’s sake.  This is the same man, if you can even call him that, who once tearfully dialed 911 to report that he somehow got both hands caught in Pringles cans.  How he managed to dial the number, we’ll never know.  But that’s a matter for another time.  

"Trayvon Martin may have been unarmed, but he certainly had arms.  Two of them.  Which could be used to punch my client, or perhaps even poke his distended belly in an attempt to elicit a delightfully high-pitched squeal.  How was my client to know that the Skittles and iced tea Mr. Martin was carrying was not actually Mentos and Coke?  Can you imagine the carnage that Mr. Martin could inflict on my client if that were the case?  Surely my client, the pathetic loser that he is, and at this time I’d like to politely ask the jury to look at him one last time, just soak it all in, had reason to believe his life was in danger.  Now sure, if my client were charged with eating a marshmallow, I’d ask you to find him guilty of cannibalism.  But you cannot find him guilty of murder.  If you poke his stomach too many times, even the Pillsbury Doughboy has the right to stand his ground.  Or, if he’s too tired to stand, he can wallow in his unvacuumed ground, surrounded by Twinkie wrappers and empty Big Gulp cups, intently polishing his beloved gun/surrogate penis, visions of perp walks, shootouts, and car chases dancing in his head."  

 

*what Trayvon Martin’s brother tweeted after the verdict.