The Trayvon Martin Bonfire

The Trayvon Martin Bonfire

Themes of Tom Wolfe’s blockbuster 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, are being played out in real time in Sanford, Florida with the tragic death of Trayvon Martin serving as background and inspiration.

In Bonfire, white bond-trading “Master of the Universe” Sherman McCoy is falsely confused of killing a poor, black Bronx youth in a hit-and-run accident.

McCoy is arrested, hounded by the media, crooked politicians, and African-American activists into bankruptcy. He loses his family and contemplates suicide, not because of anything he actually did but because of what may best be described as a bizarre societal frenzy.

Henry Lamb, the dead victim in Bonfires, becomes the central character in a circus of political and racial dysfunction; Trayvon Martin has become the center of shameful exploitation of a young man’s unfortunate death.

Characterized by the MSM and his other supporters as an innocent, high school honors student who wouldn’t hurt a fly even though his death occurred late at night when he and a friend approached McCoy’s vehicle on a dark Bronx street in what most people would regard a threatening fashion, Lamb is all but canonized in the book as Martin has been in real life.

Neither was a saint anymore than Sherman McCoy or George Zimmerman were saintly.

Certainly, few comparisons can be drawn between the cocksure millionaire McCoy and Zimmerman, except for the comparably baseless campaign of villification by the media and professional black exploiters.

Based on available evidence and eyewitnesses, twenty-eight year old, half-Latino, Neighborhood Watch captain, George Zimmerman, is being unjustly crucified.

He has been painted as a murderer. The New Black Panther Party has posted “Wanted Dead or Alive” signs in Sanford. Spike Lee has tweeted his home address and he has been forced to go into hiding. The usual provocateurs have descended on Sanford to instigate hatred and discord.

Adding a farcical note, the president of the United States leapt into the fray. Barack Hussein Obama tends to do that when he scents a political advantage as he did in the Rush Limbaugh-Sandra Fluke matter. Obama ostensibly wanted to insure a fair and just investigation into Martin’s death, implying that local and state authorities would have whitewashed the incident had he not intervened.

Adding an almost comic touch to the month-old tragedy, Trayvon’s grieving mother laid out $650 to trademark “Digital materials, namely, CDs and DVDs featuring Trayvon Martin,” etc. not, mind you, so she could cash in on her son’s death. (http://bit.ly/GRXC29)

Aside from turning a tragedy into a travesty, Trayvon Martin’s shooting has evolved into yet another example of African-Americans turning a regrettable incident into a world-class debacle.

Much like Wolfe’s novel concerning Sherman McCoy and Henry Lamb, local and national media depicted Trayvon Martin as an innocent young man who was merely carrying a package of Skittles and a can of iced tea home to a younger sibling when he was senselessly accosted, followed, and shot by a trigger-happy Zimmerman.

However, just as Lamb turned out to be anything but an innocent victim in Bonfires, apparently Martin was not exactly what the racially-conscious, politically correct media presented him to be. . . (Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=19151.)