Calling Dylan "Zimmerman" was obviously done in the spirit of "naming the Jew," and this idea of Zimmerman being a distinctively Jewish name made me think of the fact that the only Zimmerman I've ever known in real life was definitely not Jewish. When my family lived in Fallston, Maryland, in the late eighties, our Mormon ward was led by a Bishop Zimmerman, known for his enormous house featuring several secret passages and a Q*bert arcade machine. Thus I forgot all about Bob and his music, instead trying to remember as much as I could about this other Zimmerman.
The name Freeman has been in the sync-stream recently -- see "Syncs: Tropical dreams and not-dreams, 555, Freeman and not-Freeman" (September 29) and "Where Dreamers Become Doers" (September 30). So when I checked the Junior Ganymede last night and found a post referencing a "Sister Freeman" who had spoken at the recent CJCLDS General Conference, I clicked the link in case it should turn out to be synchronistically relevant. Sister Freeman's talk didn't do anything for me -- it falls into the travelogue-as-testimony genre all too familiar to anyone with a Mormon background -- but this part got my attention:
When I returned home from Israel, I listened more closely to the conversations around me regarding covenants. I noticed people asking, Why should I walk a covenant path?
My immediate reaction was: No, you didn't. Why should I walk a covenant path? Who the hell talks like that? Not Mormons! Did I somehow wander off lds.org onto Radix Fidem or something? It turns out I'm just behind the times, though. A word search on lds.org reveals that for the past several years they've been meming the living daylights out of covenant path -- a phrase which did not exist at all in the Mormon discourse of my day. (There's a 2018 Rameumptom post about how Russell M. Nelson -- the M stands for Man -- manpropriated the phrase from some unsung female genius and deprived her of her Nobel Prize. Many such cases.) I also feel I should point out that a single tap of the space bar transforms the phrase into coven ant path.
(This "covenant path" digression doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of this post, by the way. As Charles Kinbote would say, I trust the reader has enjoyed this note.)
This morning I did a bit of desultory browsing on /pol/, including this thread asking "How'd you even first discover /pol/." One anon, responding to the claim that "no one cared about /pol/ until the Trayvon Martin case," posted this dated meme:
Trayvon Martin was a while back (2012), and I wasn't paying much attention even at the time, so I don't get this. I don't recognize any of the faces or understand what the joke is. What I do understand is that it says George "freeman" ZIMMERMAN, followed by a bunch of anti-Semitic buzzwords.
Freeman first entered the sync-stream when I was reading Mike Clelland's novel The Unseen and somehow misread Foreman as Freeman. George Foreman is a household name, but here we have George Freeman. It's also a reference to a non-Jew named Zimmerman (like the Mormon bishop) but still in an anti-Semitic context (like the original Robert Zimmerman reference).
One final sync-link: Yesterday's post "Bigfoot? Bigfoot" included a photo of a T-shirt for sale in Taiwan, printed with rap lyrics referencing the cough syrup-based beverage Purple Drank -- a drug I don't think I've ever had occasion to mention before. The next day I get this Trayvon Martin stuff. You may recall that the justice-for-Trayvon contingent adopted as their symbols the Purple Drank ingredients he had bought just before his death.
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