Cowans, de Cervantes, and Some Made-Up Dude Named Paarfi
Iceaura said:
The police did not even arrest him and investigate his account until a national publicity and petitioning forced their hand, his eventual account turned out to be unlikely and contradict the physical evidence, the prosecution was oddly and suspiciously inept, the jury made little sense and created much suspicion in their explanation of their verdict, and every ugly racial bigot in the national woodwork slid out and started yakking about liberal PC racebaiting media bias against the abused and innocent Zimmerman. So there's going to be racial tension round this, and it's going to be a touchstone event for a long time to come.
I adore that precarious sentence because it is at once reasonably accurate and subjectively demonstrative in allegory. That is, I say it's precarious because even trimmed as it is according to an obscure rule of ellipsis, its one hundred and four words in danger of toppling under their own weight, though explaining the connection between Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and Paarfi of Roundwood as it applies here would be something of a digression.
But at the same time that internal, wobbling notion also accurately characterizes the nature of the broader public discourse and, to some degree, the emotional instability the case has brought many individuals.
Some, though, seem to think that what people are upset about is, well, it's kind of hard to figure unless we focus on specific examples like the presumption that we who are disappointed and aghast at this outcome ... well, that's the thing. Well, it doesn't matter how many times you tell them. As we've seen even in our recent discussions of the case here at Sciforums, Zimmerman's supporters are building tremendous straw men to dig a moat around them. There is a reason
I invoke Lester Cowans.
The only thing I would add to it is the recent discussion raised by Juror B29, who has now publicly stated that George Zimmerman got away with murder, and suggests that between the law and the jury instructions there really was no way to convict. But since the sentence survives its appearance of being wobbly for having so many parts stacked atop one another, it would be a shame to knock it over trying to cram one more piece somewhere into the middle.
I suppose, though, it might help to be specific; we might note a neighbor who would argue repeatedly that Zimmerman is a scapegoat. And recognize the actual meaning of
scapegoat here:
The scapegoat is an innocent sacrifice offered to bear the burden of society's sins. George Zimmerman may be "not guilty", but apparently even the jury knows he's not "innocent". This fixation that it is somehow about how the jury should have broken the law to convict an innocent man is unhealthy, both to the individuals and the discourse at large.
You have pretty much encapsulated the general problem, and if Zimmerman's advocates get a little confused trying to work their way through that sentence, well, that's kind of the point. This is how complicated the situation has gotten; this is how sublimated the problems have become.
What happened in Sanford, Florida, happened. We cannot change it. We might, however, strive that it doesn't happen again. But it will. And for some of our neighbors, that's just fine and dandy. Indeed, such outcomes are what some of our neighbors want.