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| The 'affluenza teen' is just another example of privilege with no conscience | The 'affluenza teen' is just another example of privilege with no conscience |
| (about 2 hours later) | |
| It seems fitting that this particularly gruesome year in the annals of American plutocracy, which has seen a pouty billionaire insult comic rise to the summit of a major-party presidential primary field, should end with an entitled, life-destroying teenager’s dissolute, south-of-the-border joyride. | It seems fitting that this particularly gruesome year in the annals of American plutocracy, which has seen a pouty billionaire insult comic rise to the summit of a major-party presidential primary field, should end with an entitled, life-destroying teenager’s dissolute, south-of-the-border joyride. |
| Yes, Ethan Couch, the drunken, manslaughtering lout known to headline writers across the land as the “affluenza teen”, spent the waning days of 2015 on the lam from Texas law enforcement after incautiously advertising a possible violation of the terms of his 2013 probation in view of a smartphone camera. | Yes, Ethan Couch, the drunken, manslaughtering lout known to headline writers across the land as the “affluenza teen”, spent the waning days of 2015 on the lam from Texas law enforcement after incautiously advertising a possible violation of the terms of his 2013 probation in view of a smartphone camera. |
| Related: 'Affluenza' teen wins stay of deportation in Mexico as mother flown to US | Related: 'Affluenza' teen wins stay of deportation in Mexico as mother flown to US |
| When it gradually dawned on the now-18-year-old Couch that this latest display could cost him 10 years behind bars (or 40, in the event that he’s tried as an adult this time), he adjourned for jurisdictions south – in the company of his boundaries-challenged mom, naturally – to keep indulging himself without interruption. | |
| All this is diverting enough cable-ready fodder for class rage. But the rest of us, by now long conditioned to growl and bay every time we see the hideous “affluenza” coinage scroll by on a cable chyron, badly miss the point if we insist on viewing Ethan Couch’s case in isolation. The organizing conceit of his short criminal career – that he will not, by virtue of his accidental perch in the hierarchies of wealth, be held accountable in any meaningful way for the negligent killing of four human beings and serious injury for several others – is not some reckless deviation from the American norm. | All this is diverting enough cable-ready fodder for class rage. But the rest of us, by now long conditioned to growl and bay every time we see the hideous “affluenza” coinage scroll by on a cable chyron, badly miss the point if we insist on viewing Ethan Couch’s case in isolation. The organizing conceit of his short criminal career – that he will not, by virtue of his accidental perch in the hierarchies of wealth, be held accountable in any meaningful way for the negligent killing of four human beings and serious injury for several others – is not some reckless deviation from the American norm. |
| It is, rather, the essence of the American norm - which is why the enforcement of the law is a very different thing if (for example) you’re a 12-year-old black kid from Cleveland, a 43-year-old black man from Staten Island, or – much closer to Couch’s home – a 28-year-old black woman left to rot, and eventually die, in jail after a baseless traffic stop. | It is, rather, the essence of the American norm - which is why the enforcement of the law is a very different thing if (for example) you’re a 12-year-old black kid from Cleveland, a 43-year-old black man from Staten Island, or – much closer to Couch’s home – a 28-year-old black woman left to rot, and eventually die, in jail after a baseless traffic stop. |
| So as we bid farewell to 2015, we have one last totem of our collective moral amnesia rubbed in our face: the puffy, seemingly hungover countenance of Couch as he was packed off to a Puerto Vallarta hoosegow, sporting an absurd jet-black dye job, presumably in a failed effort to escape detection. This image was not exactly a chilling admonitory study in pure evil, akin to Mephistopheles or Dorian Gray; it was far closer to the what-me-worry/get-out-of-my-way rictuses of a Gob Bluth or a George W Bush. | So as we bid farewell to 2015, we have one last totem of our collective moral amnesia rubbed in our face: the puffy, seemingly hungover countenance of Couch as he was packed off to a Puerto Vallarta hoosegow, sporting an absurd jet-black dye job, presumably in a failed effort to escape detection. This image was not exactly a chilling admonitory study in pure evil, akin to Mephistopheles or Dorian Gray; it was far closer to the what-me-worry/get-out-of-my-way rictuses of a Gob Bluth or a George W Bush. |
| This latter likeness is truly what should give us pause. For there’s a deceptive distancing effect in the wall-to-wall coverage of the Ethan Couch saga’s tabloid wretchedness. Beyond the awful human costs of the Couch family’s hubris, the de facto treatment of Couch as some kind of moral and behavioral outlier works to obscure the pronounced affinities he shares with other malefactors of great wealth. | This latter likeness is truly what should give us pause. For there’s a deceptive distancing effect in the wall-to-wall coverage of the Ethan Couch saga’s tabloid wretchedness. Beyond the awful human costs of the Couch family’s hubris, the de facto treatment of Couch as some kind of moral and behavioral outlier works to obscure the pronounced affinities he shares with other malefactors of great wealth. |
| Again, consider Potus 41. George W Bush was another Texas-raised hellion who had every gilded path before him lovingly smoothed by his fabulously well-to-do family. It’s true that he never killed anyone with a car. But once he completed his lackluster tours at Andover and Yale, he careened carelessly from one family-arranged sinecure to another, sinking deeper into general dissolution and alcoholic depression. | Again, consider Potus 41. George W Bush was another Texas-raised hellion who had every gilded path before him lovingly smoothed by his fabulously well-to-do family. It’s true that he never killed anyone with a car. But once he completed his lackluster tours at Andover and Yale, he careened carelessly from one family-arranged sinecure to another, sinking deeper into general dissolution and alcoholic depression. |
| It was only after a spiritual heart-to-heart with Billy Graham – still another moment of life-reckoning arranged courtesy of Bush family clout – that the middle-aged wastrel began to straighten up and fly right and, much to the ruination of the American republic, to launch himself into public life. (As to the never-solved mystery surrounding Bush’s failure to come anywhere near a Vietnamese battlefield, and his missing weeks in the Texas national guard, more conspiratorial-minded readers can now do some freelance speculating in the movie theater.) | It was only after a spiritual heart-to-heart with Billy Graham – still another moment of life-reckoning arranged courtesy of Bush family clout – that the middle-aged wastrel began to straighten up and fly right and, much to the ruination of the American republic, to launch himself into public life. (As to the never-solved mystery surrounding Bush’s failure to come anywhere near a Vietnamese battlefield, and his missing weeks in the Texas national guard, more conspiratorial-minded readers can now do some freelance speculating in the movie theater.) |
| Related: 'Affluenza teen' and mother traced in Mexico after ordering takeaway pizza | Related: 'Affluenza teen' and mother traced in Mexico after ordering takeaway pizza |
| And Bush was, of course, but one in a long American train of dubiously accomplished scions of privilege kept at fastidious arm’s length from the consequences of his own actions. The Kennedy clan is a sturdy, time-tested manufactory of scandal swept under any number of well-appointed rugs, from the grim and boozy exploits of Edward Kennedy to the notorious drug-and-sex indulgences of JFK. (The Kennedys, like many high-rolling American clans, left an especially grim roster of bruised, broken and dead women in their wake – a legacy that, as Maureen Callahan rightly notes, gets briskly swept under the stirring woe-is-them rubric of the “Kennedy curse”.) | And Bush was, of course, but one in a long American train of dubiously accomplished scions of privilege kept at fastidious arm’s length from the consequences of his own actions. The Kennedy clan is a sturdy, time-tested manufactory of scandal swept under any number of well-appointed rugs, from the grim and boozy exploits of Edward Kennedy to the notorious drug-and-sex indulgences of JFK. (The Kennedys, like many high-rolling American clans, left an especially grim roster of bruised, broken and dead women in their wake – a legacy that, as Maureen Callahan rightly notes, gets briskly swept under the stirring woe-is-them rubric of the “Kennedy curse”.) |
| Meanwhile, if you want to check out the annals of patrician chief executives who, like Couch, lived under the shadow of a mom with no functional boundaries, look no further than Franklin D Roosevelt, whose mother actually moved to Cambridge to oversee the course of the Knickerbocker scion’s Harvard career. | Meanwhile, if you want to check out the annals of patrician chief executives who, like Couch, lived under the shadow of a mom with no functional boundaries, look no further than Franklin D Roosevelt, whose mother actually moved to Cambridge to oversee the course of the Knickerbocker scion’s Harvard career. |
| Even alpha leaders who are not to the manor born alertly pick up on the mores of the American predator class once they land in its orbit. Bill Clinton, poor Arkansas son of a widowed single mom, became notoriously possessed of Kennedyesque fleshly appetites as he rose to prominence – and once he was restored to private life, he gleefully consorted with the likes of tumescent supermarket mogul Ron “Air Fuck One” Burkle and Jeffrey “Lolita Express” Epstein. Meanwhile, in Clinton’s last act in office, he graciously extended the hand of presidential mercy to rogue fraudster-cum-megadonor Marc Rich. | Even alpha leaders who are not to the manor born alertly pick up on the mores of the American predator class once they land in its orbit. Bill Clinton, poor Arkansas son of a widowed single mom, became notoriously possessed of Kennedyesque fleshly appetites as he rose to prominence – and once he was restored to private life, he gleefully consorted with the likes of tumescent supermarket mogul Ron “Air Fuck One” Burkle and Jeffrey “Lolita Express” Epstein. Meanwhile, in Clinton’s last act in office, he graciously extended the hand of presidential mercy to rogue fraudster-cum-megadonor Marc Rich. |
| Of course, compared to this sort of company, Ethan Couch is a mere piker – heir to a Sunbelt sheet-metal fortune, son of fractiously divorced-and-remarried parents, inept master of disguise. No Kennedy scion – not even comparatively downmarket ones as William Kennedy Smith or Michael Skakel – would be apprehended in a disheveled Puerto Vallarta condo ordering Domino’s. | Of course, compared to this sort of company, Ethan Couch is a mere piker – heir to a Sunbelt sheet-metal fortune, son of fractiously divorced-and-remarried parents, inept master of disguise. No Kennedy scion – not even comparatively downmarket ones as William Kennedy Smith or Michael Skakel – would be apprehended in a disheveled Puerto Vallarta condo ordering Domino’s. |
| No, Couch is much more Ed Hardy than John Varvatos. He’s nothing so much as a bit player in Rich Kids of Instagram – a royal screwup absolutely convinced that his birthright translates into world-conquering entitlement, no matter how grotesque, shabby and bathetic the actual circumstances of his life or actions are. | No, Couch is much more Ed Hardy than John Varvatos. He’s nothing so much as a bit player in Rich Kids of Instagram – a royal screwup absolutely convinced that his birthright translates into world-conquering entitlement, no matter how grotesque, shabby and bathetic the actual circumstances of his life or actions are. |
| Still, we shouldn’t be shocked if, even after all this breathless cable outrage, Couch manages once again to game things in his favor. The operational logic of our two-tiered, two-faced system was memorably summed up in a great American novel about the gruesome real-world consequences of another case of vehicular manslaughter covered up by a loutish, clueless Ethan Couch of the Jazz Age. F Scott Fitzgerald wrote knowingly of this early 20th-century iteration of our predator class because he grew up in its midst: | Still, we shouldn’t be shocked if, even after all this breathless cable outrage, Couch manages once again to game things in his favor. The operational logic of our two-tiered, two-faced system was memorably summed up in a great American novel about the gruesome real-world consequences of another case of vehicular manslaughter covered up by a loutish, clueless Ethan Couch of the Jazz Age. F Scott Fitzgerald wrote knowingly of this early 20th-century iteration of our predator class because he grew up in its midst: |
| “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” he wrote in bitter estimation of the privileged married couple in The Great Gatsby. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made.” | “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” he wrote in bitter estimation of the privileged married couple in The Great Gatsby. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made.” |
| That malediction applies with equal force to Ethan Couch, Bill Clinton and his cronies, and any number of Kennedys. It’s our chronic inattention to that fact that keeps it from having any lasting, tragic weight. Part of being careless, after all, is never once heeding the lessons of the past. | That malediction applies with equal force to Ethan Couch, Bill Clinton and his cronies, and any number of Kennedys. It’s our chronic inattention to that fact that keeps it from having any lasting, tragic weight. Part of being careless, after all, is never once heeding the lessons of the past. |