Casey Anthony and Nancy waste O space Grace. Symptoms of a bigger problem.

Did the jury get it right? Wrong? Everyone and their  cousin has chimed in, mostly with self righteous indignation. Nancy was so beside herself she claimed the Devil was dancing. Since the outset of this case Nancy has referred to Anthony as Tot Mom. Grace, a former prosecutor and a blood sucking waste of space, must have forgotten how the system works. We, the public, tried this case and handed down a guilty verdict, not based on evidence or facts, but on emotion, hyperbole, and the incessant media coverage. I called her guilty somewhere in this blog. My opinion hasn't changed, but that doesn't make me right. It doesn't make Casey Anthony innocent either. The verdict just means she couldn't be found guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

The bigger problem is not that our justice system is flawed. As distasteful as it may be to so many, the system worked. The media inundated us with pictures of the absentee mother, partying while her child decomposed a short distance from her family home. She lied more times than we could count. We hated her. We will never understand how a mother could behave as Casey Anthony behaved. Her baby was missing, she partied on. In the end, all of the media shit storm turned a tragedy into a circus side show. 

My initial reaction when I heard the verdict...The biggest miscarriage of justice since the OJ trial.  After a little reflection it was clearly a knee jerk reaction. OJ got off not for lack of evidence, there was plenty. OJ got off because of a racist cop, and a jury that was split between race and fear. The black members of the jury saw a brother getting railroaded by a cracker cop. The whites feared another LA riot. You'll never convince me otherwise. Casey Anthony got lucky. She got a jury that weighed the evidence and found it lacking. She'll get a fat book deal, develop a substance abuse problem, and eventually crash and burn.

And therein lies the bigger problem. Casey Anthony has become a Celebrity. Nancy Grace played a huge role in Anthony's celebrity status. The countless internet sites, threads, and blogs who obsessed nonstop throughout this trial also played a major role in the Celebra-tation of Casey Anthony. The morbidly curious and delusional  came in droves for the trial. People spent hours and days, months and years, bloviating on what worthless excuse for a human being "Tot Mom" was. While I don't disagree, I do find it fascinating.

The truth is a hard thing at times. Getting at it, accepting it, looking it in the eye and recognizing it for what it is.

The truth is this....We live in a world where we have come to need people like Casey Anthony and Nancy Grace. They make us feel better about ourselves and our own flaws, shortcomings, and character defects.  It goes like this, some bored housewife in bum fuck Iowa sits on her ass all day eating bon bons and writing poems to a child she doesn't know. She shares it in a thread or comment section with other unhappy people with no sense of purpose in their lives. For a few hours they forget about the mortgage, the neglectful partner, the ungraitfull kids. They forget about fucking the next door neighbor while the husband was away on that business trip. Pick your poison. Give it a name. For a minute or a few hours we get to luade over the world, show them how much better we are than this child killing whore. It's like Valium and Vodka. What it isn't about, all of this outrage and obsession, it isn't about a dead child. It never was. I'll wager the same people who raged so obsessively day in and day out couldn't tell you how many  (read mostly minority or poor white) children were killed in their own city or state this year.  The case they focus on is the case that is getting the most media attention. They inject themselves into the sideshow, and swell up on the crumbs of that attention. They tell the other obsessed types how horrible Casey Anthony is, how angelic poor Caylee was. They write poems, they wring their hands, they make this murder about themselves. Like Vampires. Like Nancy Grace.

In the end, that child is just as dead as she can be. The people who should have protected her, loved her, failed miserably.  In a few days or weeks those nut jobs who pretended to know and love a child they never met will move on to the next media circus. Nancy Grace and her ilk will find another dead body to beat to death. There will be long threads on the internet. There will be websites devoted to the victim, manned by someone who never knew them. There will be crazy people at the trial.  Because it's never really about the victim, not really.