The ferocity of the response to the lion-killing story has been breathtaking. Today I see something called “#wedontcryforlions” trending on Twitter? I’m too bored to see what it is all about, but wtf? I am happy when anybody is crying over ANYTHING these days, at least it proves that we still haver feelings. When the lion story broke, I was the subject of some borderline concern trolling – pointing out that that same ferocity could have been profitably directed toward Sandra Bland’s killers, or any number of murderers in badges. It’s true, I was not immune from the same feeling everyone else has about ol’ Cecil’s death. I was disgusted. I joined the digital lynch mob, gleefully.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” And, while the two ideas here (wanton destruction of wildlife/black lives matter) are not fundamentally opposed, I’ll invoke it anyway. The neo-Patriots arguing that banishing the Confederate flag won’t stop murder doesn’t change the fact of the long running dispute about that despicable flag needing to come down. It’s the nature of modern media to exploit one issue at a time (a missing plane, school shooting, earthquake), creating a perception of selective outrage.
When the fat guy who hunted and killed a black teenager who was armed with only a bag of candy was acquitted 2 years ago, it became a Rorschach test for the American public. For conservatives, it was triumph of permissive gun laws and a victory over us liberals, who had been unfairly rooting for the dead kid all along. For liberals, it was a horrifying, heartbreaking and glaring example of the gaps that plague our criminal justice system. For people of color, it became a vivid reminder that they- must always be deferential to white people, or face the very real chance of getting killed.
Trayvon Martin was hunted like prey by a local paranoiac psychopath known for being “fixated on crime and focused on young, black males”, a cretinous, pathetic, underachiever, an imbecile, a zealot, a racist who harbored deep insecurities about his penis size. He was drawing a line in the sand and protecting his (actually Trayvon’s) neighborhood, from swaggering thugs who refuse the authority of the armed, self-appointed Neighborhood Watch guy (who the 911 dispatcher told not to follow the kid). The cretin won his claim of self-defense against his Skittles-wielding foe based on Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, an ongoing experiment in civic destruction that lets assholes off the hook for choosing to escalate (actual) dangerous situations, instead of just walking away and coming up with a witty retort a few hours later, like normal humans.
Trayvon Martin was not gunned down by a “vigilante” – that’s not the right term. His killer did not know him. He was “tired of them getting away with it” and went on a hunting expedition. It was America in 2013, and 6 Florida jurors just said it’s OK to kill a black teens if you’re really scared of black teens. Meanwhile, a hillbilly idiot named Cliven Bundy was allowed to break the law for decades, have his inbred thugs point loaded weapons at federal agents, and proudly proclaim that he doesn’t even recognize the existence of the United States Government — and he’s treated like a fckng folk hero. And that, quite simply, is the power of race. Just reverse the participants. It’s truly that simple.
And yet, here we are as humans getting very excited about a lion.
Trayvon’s assassin and the Dentist are here to remind us that there really are few limits to human depravity. Christopher Columbus, the Conquistadors, wiped out entire native populations they regarded as savage. Centuries of Christianity in Europe had countless people tortured, garroted or burned over some turn of phrase in the liturgy. The Crusades over centuries killed entire populations owing solely to their religion, with popes in Rome as their biggest abettors. And Hitler, etc. etc. It’s how we respond to these that tests our resilience, our humanity and also reveals our shallow nature and our apathy.
How does one even deal with the nauseating familiarity to the senseless deaths of black men and women after encounters with police? Like how Freddie Gray threw himself against the walls of a police van hard enough to sever his spine, or how Tamir Rice forced cops to shoot him within 2 seconds of pulling up to the playground. Or how Walter Scott forced a South Carolina cop to shoot him in the back by hobbling slowly away from him. Or how Sandra Bland put herself a jail cel for 3 days for a manipulated lane change violation and hung herself in her cell. Or how Victor White, a handcuffed, 22 year old shot himself on the head while sitting in a police cruiser. Or how a black motorist scared a South Carolina cop into shooting and wounding him by reaching for his gun iidentification. Or how Henry Davis got himself arrested in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2009 for having the same name as a completely different guy with an outstanding warrant, then asked to be beaten by cops and charged with “destruction of property” for bleeding on their uniforms. Or, this just in, how Samuel DuBose, shot himself in the face by a college toy police officer during a traffic stop over a missing license tag. Black people surely love killing themselves while in police custody!
The steady stream of artlessly jingoistic vomit, spewing forth from helmet-headed hairspray conservative news sacks who move their lips while reading important reports on hurricanes and other outrages against Heartland (= white, irrespective of actual location) America. When they do report on outrages against Urban (= black, etc.) America,it’s a “justified shooting! Just watch the video, you will clearly see the victim “bulking up”, while rapping “Fuck the Police” before “reaching into his waistband”!!! And how much marijuana did this guy smoke to make him want to leap like Superman in front of the officers bullets like that?! And where was President HUSSEIN during all of this and why didn’t he use his magical NEGRO powers to stop this from happening? Trayvon Martin would be alive today, if he hadn’t worn a sweatshirt, or he didn’t have a “street attitude!” Well gosh, why didn’t the kid just tip his hat and step off the sidewalk like his kind are supposed to? Maybe if Tamir Rice could have switched fathers with Michael Brown, he’d still be alive today? Or maybe if feminists would stop trying to Have It All? Or maybe if Obama would just impeach himself already? Or maybe if frogs had wings?
I have no fear of being murdered by the police. I’m a pretty bad driver and I’ve been pulled over, ticketed, even mildly harassed. But I was never afraid they would kill me. Recently I was pulled over by a young Latino cop on a freeway in Compton on my way back from the ranch where I volunteer. I deserved a ticket. He did not ticket me because he “didn’t want to ruin my day like his had been ruined”. Modern American policing is a direct descendant of the Southern slave patrols, with one crucial aspect remaining unchanged: Wide latitude for the use of violence to make an apprehension. The sobering truth about our modern police state is that it’s less about doing the job, protecting innocents, or even saving their own lives than it is about violent power fantasies and blind hatred.
I am amazed, every day, at people’s restraint in the face of these horrors. I was in LA during the Rodney King riots and I think about what is happening every day in every city of this country, the glaring injustices…what has changed? Could it be America’s heavily militarized security guards for the white 1% peacocking around pepper-spraying, macing, stomping and bloody the faces of America’s citizens (you know, what they’ve dreamed of doing for decades). lt takes quite a lot of tax money to keep a bunch of vicious thugs overfed and dressed like fat Darth Vaders with their portable hard-ons, on the off-chance some citizens might want to protest this nation’s revolting descent. Draped in the holy garb of the public service, these peace officers do not see themselves as actually beholden and accountable to the people they police, rather as overseers in a very large, open air prison. The police department’s utter disdain for the people who pay them to protect them is not an aberration, but endemic, as is their disgust for those attempting to hold their co-workers accountable for their actions. In Egypt, the cops refused to attack protestors. East Germany – then the whole Iron Curtain – collapsed when the local cops wouldn’t smash heads when ordered to. What about America? Where are the cops who walked off the job rather than attack their neighbors drowning in debt and despair
We are all being driven crazy by the sense that the world had spun so far off its axis that there is no hope of righting it. Underneath the outrage is a defining despair in making things right. And under that despair lies our tragic flaw, a deep and abiding faith in America, in its institutions and its ideals. For all our cabinets and committees, institutions and customs held among us for reconciling our conflicting opinions, assuaging our mutual resentments, and adjusting our respective interests, there is a history of factions, contentions, and disappointments, and may stand among the most dark and degraded pictures which display the afflictions and depravities of the human character.
The killing of animals for sport is so difficult on the psyche because it is just so acutely depressing, because these beautiful, emotionally complex creatures are so utterly at the mercy of the worst of us – uber rich, lily-livered idiots who, in an infinitely pathetic play at bravery and sportsmanship, continue to stubbornly assert dominance over mammals who lost the battle for this planet around the time when our ancestors learned to make tools. Aren’t we doing enough to destroy the world? Must we pick them off one by one, too? (also, don’t “Trophy Hunters” seem dangerously close to any men who use brutality to usurp the power of the powerless (they also seem to kind of serial killers, keeping mementos and stuff? You stalk and kill some living creature so you can display its parts? I see. And the locks are keyed on both sides of the door? Fascinating. What a lovely murder shed this is!). We all know from TV that the most consistent finding of FBI profilers is that childhood animal torturing is a common behaviour among serial murderers and rapists – with psychopathic traits characterized by impulsivity, selfishness, and lack of remorse. Animal torture and cruelty is part of the “Dark-Triad” which includes three specific characteristics of personality – Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy).
There are a couple of unspoken truth to the outrage about the lion, with a name, monitored on camera, a well-known lion, a collared lion. He reminds us of our cats! None of us would give a rat’s ass if Cecil was a crocodile. The other is simply the brutality and horror of how Cecile was lured off the property of the national park so that he could be murdered in a slow and painful fashion, decapitated and skinned, to satiate the wealthy American dentist’s bloodlust. This suspiciously rich dentist PAID for the right to kill endangered animals, to have them shepherded to him, so that he didn’t have to break a sweat. There is a photo of the dentist, that I will not post, shirtless, posing with a dead leopard: the gladiator emerged victorious from a battle royale with the big cat.
The thing about animals is, humans and human technology are so predominate on the planet now that human duty is to behave “humanely” or at least not cruelly. The lion is representative of the devastation visited on Earth’s nonhumans in such a cruel, selfish, negligent and casual manner–because in the minds of people like the dentist – or Donald Trump’s psychotic seeming sons or Mike Huckabee’s sadistic dog torturing sons – only humans matter. Only male humans. Only white male humans. Only Republican white make humans. That dentist cannot possibly respect or value humans. It’s not just about the lion. It’s about the brutality of humans. It’s the blatant disregard for the life that makes me so sad/mad. Native Americans would have a ceremony for the animal’s spirit and thank it. They respected the life of the animal and their role in the taking of it. That guy killing that lion represents all other animals, terrible, savage people, hatred, loss, ignorance, and our indifference to all of it.
The thing is, I am mad/sad about so many things. I’m basically mad/sad all the time. I grew up in avery integrated bubble in the 1970’s, in a country that was on top of the world. We were the economic, industrial and technological powerhouse of the world. The Democratic Party had all but disowned the south and it appeared that racism could finally be made truly, politically, and even morally, incorrect. People with guns hardly ever worshipped them.Then Richard Nixon was elected, and his southern strategy re-institutionalized racism as a viable attitude and political cover was provided for it’s continuation. More wars were waged, we were sold out to business, our industrial and public infrastructure are crumbled, gun rights have usurped freedom, civil rights – even the basic right to vote – has taken a back seat on the bus again. Whenever I think this country’s reached a tipping-point, the Mighty Right rallies and takes advantage of what was already there. Hard to know if cracker culture would have faded out, had the GOP not re-empowered it. The economy still has it’s head held down the toilet, hobby shops and fetuses now have more rights than citizens, the slaughter of a classroom full of six year olds or a church full of worshippers is not enough to get even a fckng background check law passed.
When it happened, the murder of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his murderer was just the latest step in the policies that have taken what was to be (could have been?) the greatest nation in the world down this long tortuous path toward becoming hell on earth.
Selective outrage is human nature and is not limited to the animal world and we don’t need to “suppress” our empathy to animals like Cecil the lion, but rather moderate our prejudices with understanding for the value of all species, for the long-term welfare of humanity and our planet. There are those things that are generally accepted by human beings to be a moral trespass. Anyone who callously slaughters a living being is not someone I would trust to fill my dental cavities, or patrol my streets.
Keep crying, America!