The East Coast awakened to the news overnight of at least 12 deaths and 50 woundings in Aurora, Colorado as a 24-year-old madman opened fire during the midnight showing of The Dark Knight movie.
Continue reading → In Love with the Gun: A Deadly Night for the Dark Knight
A friend of mine recently returned from a trip to the “Rusty Midwest Bible Belt” and gave me two refrigerator magnets he bought in a Church store.
While traveling to California and back, I was certainly glad that, for whatever reason, the TSA did not ask my family to undergo the scary full body screening. I was apprehensive about being asked to choose to do either that or go through a rather unpleasant pat down that some people have characterized as feeling like being molested. I have always wondered how efficient the TSA really is at actually catching people who are up to no good, and when I found out about a gentleman who somehow made it past the TSA and flew without either a valid ticket or a passport, I really had to wonder. It therefore made me raise an eyebrow when I read about the case of Tam Nguyen, who was imprisoned because he brought a handgun to the airport — albeit not intentionally.
Continue reading → When A Gun At an Airport Indicates Forgetfulness
SuperGenius guitarist Slash — of Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver fame — released a new album this week called, genuinely enough, “Slash” and it is the number one selling album on iTunes right now.
Does carrying a gun indemnify free speech or condemn it? Recently, in New Hampshire, a citizen appeared at an Obama Town Hall wearing a sidearm and wielding a Thomas Jefferson quote about “Watering the Tree of Liberty” — a favorite quote of Oklahoma City Bomber and homegrown domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh. Is the man with a gun and a protest sign suggesting a living semiotic that supports President Obama or is he really there to actively chop down the first Black president?
Continue reading → Rise of the Disenfranchised: Shooting Free Speech
This Urban Semiotic blog has been dedicated — for the last five years or so — to digging up and discovering the signs, images and visual imprints that coerce the city core. After writing over 2,000 articles for you here, I can confidently share with you the American Urban Center is governed by, and dug into, two unflayable, and perpetually un-learnable, lessons in dueling images: The Bullet and The Body.
Continue reading → The Bullet and the Body: Bam Bam Bam in Binghamton
Two days ago a Haitian immigrant friend of mine — who recently landed in Far Rockaway, Queens to find a better life and to chase the American Dream — heard a fight in the street below his apartment.
He then made the fatal mistake of the curious and went to his window to see what was happening. A stray 9mm bullet shot from the street blasted through his window, ricocheted off his collarbone, and punctured his heart. He was dead before his body slumped to the floor.
Continue reading → A Shot Heard in Far Rockaway is Felt in Fulham
Public Opinion is formed in America in the disparate experiences of the masses that the major media then forms and congeals into an entity that can be measured and exploited via advertising.
The Editorial Cartoon, however, has always found its most purposeful purchase just outside that mainstream media venom line to pock and poke fun of falsely considered mainstream media values with sticks of truth and the bones of what is real.
People are shocked to learn in New Orleans gunshots are being fired at helicopter rescuers, cellular tower technicians and levee engineers. Why the shock? It all makes perfect human sense: There is profit in chaos. In a crisis, a grab for power can bring new life and tempt an old death. Right now those in power are those who best know the backwater streets and flooded alleyways.
Those who control the ground are required, as willful instruments of human impulse, to finally enforce their minority will on the majority with muscle and bullets. Those creating the chaos must perpetuate it with fear against those who wish for a quick return to law and order because there are riches buried in the Katrina rubble and restoring access and electricity and good people defeats the mission of those who seek to reap profit from death.
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