Friday, July 15, 2011

Who is Casey Anthony?

In a few days, Casey Anthony will leave jail as perhaps the most famous and reviled person in America. Her trial was the primary American obsession for many months. Although judged not guilty, she has been all but convicted of the murder of her child. Her life has been exposed and eviscerated by the media, and she has been a constant target of public reprehension. Her experience sets her apart from the rest of us. Even if she is actually innocent of the most horrendous crimes, she nevertheless has had – and will continue to have – an experience that we’ll never have – with any luck at all. From having been a “nobody,” she has become something more and less than a person. Her life has taken on a mythical dimension.

People have compared her to O.J. Simpson, but O.J. Simpson’s story is easier to comprehend as myth. A kind of god of the NFL, a star running back, he was always different from us. He’s the tragic hero, the great but flawed man who falls from grace. Our interest in his story is motivated partly by envy.

That can’t be the case with Casey Anthony. O.J. Simpson was a celebrity before his murder trial. In the popular imagination, he was a man who became a monster. But she has been elevated from absolute obscurity into a celebrity defined from the beginning by her fallen condition. She arrives on the scene already destroyed. What sets her apart, from the beginning, is her outcast condition, her monstrous nature.

In this sense, Casey Anthony is the anti-celebrity, the anti-American sweetheart. By contrast, Lindsay Lohan, whom Anthony knocked to the back of the tabloids, at least began as America’s sweetheart and survives as a remnant or wreck of her former self. A kind of condescending sympathy is possible there. But where did Casey Anthony come from? She came from us. She came to our attention only as the mother of a missing child. In those early days, she benefited from the anonymity that we all share. We wanted to protect her from the limelight. But since then, like all reality TV stars and other celebrities who are famous for being famous, she has suffered increasingly from a loss of anonymity, and she has taken on a singularity of identity that separates her from the community. The rest of us enjoy a community partly because we don’t claim or can’t achieve any sort of universal identity. We are nobodies, lucky little nobodies. Yes, Casey Anthony shows us that there are far worse fates.

Through her, we remind ourselves of the great good luck of escaping notice, of being, or seeming to be, thoroughly ordinary. I see her at trial, and it is almost as if I’m looking at myself – no one special, just somebody on trial, someone trapped, justifiably or not, in the public eye, viewed from all angles, questioned, interrogated endlessly, analyzed, picked apart, exposed as utterly inadequate, worse than a lost cause, irresponsible beyond belief, worthy of – precisely death, the death penalty. Gradually the sense builds that death is the fate we must force her to accept. To accept her original non-identity as a nobody. It would be like welcoming her home. Isn’t it after all our own sense of guilt that makes the death penalty acceptable to us in principle? Something tells us to kill only monsters, but certainly to kill them. And we recognize them infallibly. We know them. We know them when we see them.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on July 15, 2011 • WVPE's Audio Archive
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