Pulling It All Together: Joe Horn

I have a habit of getting worked up for a couple weeks about stories in the news, then forgetting them entirely, when I should be integrating them into a personal history of how I saw the world around me as it happened.

I wrote the following (I'd give myself too much credit to call it an "essay", as if I know how to write, but "pissy rant" swings that pendulum back too far) back in December, and barely chanced upon remembering it today. Chronology assembly begins now.

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Joe Horn is an out-of-shape (really he's fat, that old-guy style fat, but I'm showing restraint and civility for reasons I'll explain later on), middle-aged Texan who witnessed two men breaking into his home, and, after several minutes of hand-wringing w/ the 911 operator whether to grab his new shotgun and confront them, ends up going outside and shooting the men, killing them both. Horn is white, the two burglars were black. At least one of the burglars left behind a family: a wife and an 8-month-old son.

Quanell X, a figure in the New Black Panther Party, took a group of what looks like on the video around 20 to protest and speak to the media in front of Joe Horn's home. They were met by a few hundred counter-protesters , including some bikers. Conservative blogger Blogs of War took this video showing the counter-protesters getting as loud and rowdy, by far, as I've ever seen a group of people get without violence breaking out:





Doesn't take long for Quanell X (do I just call him "X"? "Mr. X" There's no way to treat his placeholder last name as normal and not seem sarcastic about it, and calling him just Quanell has a similar air of derisive flippancy) to briskly haul ass away from Horn's home (I don't think Horn was home-- haven't read anything about any reaction of his to the protest) and chat up the media at safe distance from the angry din.

To their credit, the visibly livid counter-protesters not only don't chase after Mr. X, they keep their protestations evidently racism-free, with not so much as a stray N-bomb showing up on any of the video-- the closest is a muffled "my neighborhood" in a white woman's voice sounding like "my nigger" at first blush, which is funny on a couple levels. Quanell X, though, takes the spectacle of a large, intimidating white mob and Rashomons sights and sounds that just weren't there.





(go to 7:20 and watch to the end for an egregious distortion, then skip back to 7:02 for a more understandable, though still wrong, reaction)

My temptation, of course, is to angrily applaud Joe Horn's actions, then cite Chris Rock's "Black People vs. Niggas" routine as a preface to the biggest carpet N-bombing since Tokyo in 1944. But I've come to understand I'm not smart enough to get good n' pissed off and think straight at the same time. So if my ugly ass wants to make sense of anything, I have to imitate all the civil, erudite discussions I've seen on PBS or wherever the hell it was, where the debaters address each other as "my worthy opponent" and mean it, and smile and shake hands at the end and aren't gritting their teeth and muttering "Yo Mama" vulgarities under it all.

To say the least, I'm out of practice, so for now I'm just amassing facts and putting them together as best I can. I don't totally know what to think about the Joe Horn jigsaw, because I only have so many pieces. I think I can make out what looks like a photo cabin in the woods, but maybe a deer or some other woodland creature is the real focus of the thing, and all those pieces are still rattling around in the box. And maybe what I thought was gray sky is really a couple upside-down pieces. Don't know yet, is the whole point.