Jeff Simon - Buffalo (NY) Radio & TV Columnist

Poster's Note: Agree or Disagree you always know how he stands on an issue. Many area media folks are "no love lost" on Jeff Simon


Updated: July 1, 2011, 9:04 AM

“You’re watching, aren’t you, Jeff?” That was what a woman whom I often see at movie screenings wanted to know.

She was talking about the Casey Anthony trial in Florida, which is scheduled to actually get to the jury this weekend (so promises the judge who has been almost as interested in judicial dispatch as home TV audiences).

My answer to her was simple: No. Not really. It’s fascinating, though, that so many people are obsessed with it. I’m always working during the day, so I can’t watch it unfold “in real time,” but I do sometimes catch up with some of the cable TV news commentary, which is trying desperately to treat it as the equivalent of the race/celebrity/ sex/sports entitlement apocalypse that the O. J. Simpson trial was.

It’s not, not even close, but I do try to catch up sometimes on the Headline News Network (or, as cable calls it, HLN, otherwise known as the Harpies Love Nastiness network). You have to see what HLN’s shrill crime sirens Nancy Grace and Jane Velez-Mitchell have been making of the trial of “Totmom” all along to believe it. We’re not even talking about the other cable news outfits, where they’re supposedly not in the shameless Anthony wallow business.

Thursday was the day that the ongoing soap opera was scheduled to have its dramatic climax—would the defendant herself take the stand? Or to ask that question another way: Just how bat guano crazy is her defense team? (No, she didn’t take the stand.)

You’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to understand why in our televised global village this trial has lit the match under the back-fence philosophers and gossips. It’s an exercise in disbelief and loathing for a defendant whose every action, in court or out, can be turned into mind-boggling villainy.

The prosecution story is a true crime horror tale assembled from circumstantial pieces. Casey Anthony, 25, is charged with murdering her beautiful little daughter, Caylee (abundant pictures prove adorability through the roof). During the period when her daughter was “missing,” she was photographed partying it up and entering hot body contests. And, at the time, she shopped like a Sun Belt semipro.

Meanwhile, the 2-year-old child’s grandmother was frantic, and the grandfather, an ex-cop, reported the odor of death emanating from the trunk of his daughter’s 1998 Pontiac.

Here, in capsule form, was terminal cross-generational suspicion:A beautiful, sexy young woman celebrated youth, heedlessness and irresponsibility while claiming to everyone that her daughter had disappeared with a nanny.

An older generation that prided itself on parental devotion registered horror that the 25-year-old defendant’s party-down consumerism might have concealed the ultimate crime in our world: the murder of a child. (We have a different world view from the one people had a century ago, when patricide and matricide led the list.)

It is, in other words, a great episode of “CSI” or “Law and Order.” Except it’s one that doesn’t operate on a prime-time TV schedule, where everything happens quickly and is wrapped up in an hour. It happens during the day at its own pace, where the housebound can dwell on every detail.

And, by God, everyone in the case seems determined to provide details by the dozen.

The defendant, to my knowledge, has no significant partisans— only onlookers in varying degrees of disbelief that such a monstrosity came from middle-class America. On top of that, there is her defense team, which is either engaged in Abbott and Costello buffoon incompetence or the damnedest and most dogged projection of “truth” ever in a TV trial.

The tale the defense tells is this: Anthony is screwed-up because she was molested by her father, George, who covered up little Caylee’s death after the child died accidentally in the family pool.

That explains everything, right? (You’ve got to get that current fave in there—parental molestation—even though there are jailhouse tapes of Anthony praising George Anthony’s paternal splendors. Wouldn’t molestation, after all, explain that hearty partying caught on camera?)

George Anthony denied all of that on the stand Wednesday and, for good measure, threw in a full tearful breakdown and reports of a suicide attempt because he thought he’d failed his granddaughter and couldn’t believe what the daughter he’d raised may have done. While he was crying out all that in open court, a split screen showed a stone-faced Casey.

She did appear to wipe away (suspiciously dry-looking) tears when a grief specialist—who had never spoken to the defendant— reported that hypothetically people her age can resort to grief through carousing and shopping.

Generational warfare, that sickeningly pervasive subject, seems to be the fuel for the obsession with the case, as if Casey Anthony were the ultimate vile serpent’s tooth, the ungrateful child whose own life advantages were so cruelly withheld from her own daughter.

Grandparent love has never been presented more nakedly on TV news.

No, the issues in the Anthony case aren’t nearly as compelling as those in the O. J. Simpson trial, but I fully understand why this piece of “reality TV” has obsessed so many and brought out maximum incendiary commentary from the Harpies Love Nastiness stars, Grace and Velez-Mitchell.

Journalistic puritans dismiss the significance of the case’s bottomless well of tabloid drama.

But we live in a world where there are actually tabloid TV people “reporting” that Kim Kardashian—daughter of O. J.’s buddy and lawyer Robert Kardashian (the Simpson friend whose apparent shock at the Simpson verdict told us everything we ever needed to know) —predicts a “shocking” finale to the case when the jury finally gets hold of it.

In one way, the renown of the case in our culture has probably been shocking enough.

Unless the Anthony jury decides that Robert Blake did it.
jsimon@buffnews.com

http://www.buffalonews.com/entertainment/columns/jeff-simon/article474457.ece