Tom Wolfe called it The Bonfire of the Vanities-Tom Hanks may still call it 'the movie I wish I'd never made' but I like to think of this as the dawning of the Age of the Shameless Charlatan.
Earlier last week, Alyssa Rosenberg made an impassioned plea that Miley Cyrus, not Pope Francis I, should have been Time Magazine's Person of the Year. She'd get no argument from my brother Kelly, though not for the reasons she advanced.
The article was brilliant stuff-read it for yourself-albeit bogus I suspect because her larger point, that weekly magazines here in the second decade of the 21st Century are reading material now found in the waiting room of Jurassic Park, was completely overlooked.
No matter.
Over forty years ago George Carlin had the "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" (a/k/a the same seven I cannot type here or link to the clip from, without getting my hands and fingernails washed out with Lava soap) and now what's not sacred and to be left unuttered? We are Thoroughly Modern, Millie, and don't care who knows it.
Current contender for Poster Child for We Are the Crown of Creation: Ethan Couch of Fort Worth. I can wait right here while you read it again if you'd like.
I know I needed multiple passes on it because my brain just kep thinking my eyes were playing a practical joke on.
Affluenza. Affluenza Seriously? That's the argument offered by the young man's attorneys on all of this.
Yeah, he did it, but it's not his fault, he has an illness and needs treatment. How does the defense attorney who thought this up pull his trousers up every morning considering the size of the set he has to have to have dreamt it up in the first place? Who spoke with the families of Breanna Mitchell, Brian Jennings, Holly Boyles and Shelby Boyles (her daughter), the people this sack of one of those words killed.
Tell me you don't love the last sentence of the story. Jetzt bleibt mir die spucke weg. Talk about making lemonade when life hands you lemons (or somebody runs over your lemon tree).
Stories like this make me want to revisit my tee-shirt business idea from decades ago where you put on the front of the shirt the visage of some despicable person (my current favorite is Ted Cruz but those shirts are available only in 'large, y'all' size right now) and on the back just had I'm a Victim, Too!
Sort of like the Austrians after World War II arguing they, too, were victims of Nazi aggression. Turns out, they said, it was other Austrians who partied at the border crossings as the Wehrmacht tanks rolled through not the ones with their heads in nooses on the gallows at Nuernberg. From a distance all criminals look the same. My problem is I can never get far enough away from them to see if that's really true.
Fred and Tonya Crouch, there's got to be somebody you can sue, too. There's got to be someone else whose failings enabled, nay, coerced you into being the terrible parents who raised this abomination of a child. Stay here while I go off with your crack legal team and see who we can find. Here, put these shirts on, so you'll be visible from space. Perfect.
-bill kenny
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