Once again the estimable Joseph Epstein hits it out of the park on how addictive and dispiriting watching and reading the news has become these days. I feel his pain. It’s sort of like road kill, isn’t it? You know you shouldn’t look, but you find yourself doing so against better judgment. We need to keep up with the continuing catastrophe our culture and politics have become. But it can be soul-crushing.
I never saw anything remotely like what went on in Juan Merchan’s courtroom.
For my Exhibit A, I would guess most savvy TAS readers had as much difficulty as I did keeping our eyes off the recent show trial in Manhattan, a kind of judicial road kill conducted on the same rules of engagement that applied in the Queen of Hearts’ court. The charges, of course, were complete balloon juice. But I said all along that all Fat Alvin had to establish to secure a conviction with a Manhattan jury was that the defendant’s name is Donald Trump. I don’t think even Horace Rumpole could have gotten the Donald off on a charge of spying on the Eskimos before this lot. My sources tell me the International Association of Kangaroos is suing Big Al and Juan Merchan for plagiarism and cultural appropriation.
For a couple of years in my newspaper reporting days, when the world and I were young, I covered the courts in a large judicial district in Central Florida. During that time I was present in court, wire to wire, for about three dozen criminal trials, where I saw and heard everything the jury saw and heard, and observed how the judge conducted the proceedings. I never saw anything remotely like what went on in Juan Merchan’s courtroom. Manhattan “sophisticates” might consider Bartow or Lakeland Florida to be Dog Patch (they aren’t). But any case brought by a prosecutor there that depended on the testimony of a an opportunistic porn star, a publisher of tabloid newspapers whose last name would have gotten one arrested for repeating over the air 30 years ago, and a convicted and disbarred perjurer, would have been thrown out of court on first reading. Any judge who attempted to abuse court time with such would have become a figure of fun, and, on the occasion of the next election, a former judge.
With any luck Mr. Epstein’s new TV will also throw a rod, and he’ll enjoy a few more days of peace. May I suggest a cable package that includes movies and sports channels only for those weary of the carnage and totally at sea on what to do about it. And if the kind of political knee-capping that took place in Judge Merchan’s courtroom becomes standard practice, it’s America that will become road kill, just another squalid, one-party dictatorship in a world full of them.
READ MORE from Larry Thornberry:
Yakima Canutt: The Little-Known but Great American Stuntman
Too Much of a Good Thing — Head Butting in August?
