Brothers (1984) … Could it happen in daytime (2011)?

My latest entertainment obsession is TVLand’s “Happily Divorced” starring Fran Drescher, John Michael Higgins (Peter), Tichina Arnold (Judi), Valente Rodriguez (Cesar), Rita Moreno (Dori), and Robert Walden (Glen).  The premise:  “Fran” is awakened in the middle of the night by her husband, “Peter”.  After 18 years of marriage, Peter realizes that he’s gay! It’s news to Peter, news to Fran, but not news to anyone else in their lives.  Loosely based on Drescher’s life with ex-husband Peter Marc Jacobson, what follows is the transition of “Fran and “Peter’s”  life together as a happily married couple to happily divorced friends who still share their lives, while also sharing an unsellable home in a tough housing market. Each enters a process of self discovery that neither had the courage to engage in 18 years before.  It’s warm, funny, and an all around entertaining show. 

As I’m watching, it’s actor Robert Walden who has changed the most over time, for me.  I can recognize the face, but not place his name.  As I look him up I not only realize who he is, but search youtube to find the clip below  from an earlier show in which he played a lead character.  That show?  Brothers (1984) .  Even with the first clip of the first episode, it’s clear how progressive the writing is given the time.  The writing would be progressive in the current field of daytime shows!!! 

 The clip below features at least one daytime star well known to BnB fans and one primetime star well known to, nearly, all “Fresh Prince” fans.  Enjoy!

As a woman of color, I’ve always felt robbed by daytime’s difficulty with diversity.  As the genre is winding down, it would be nice to know that someone will have the courage to bring back characters like Victoria Rowell’s transformational Druscilla, or introduce Asian characters (shame on you OLTL… Blair Daimler – though I am loving the fractured Patel family).  Sexual diversity is just one more diversity failure.  Whether there are  gay characters who get to have fun with straight stereotypes about gay characters (as with the second “Brothers” clip, or a character on the journey of self-discovery (as in the first clip), daytime is lacking.

OH, and just in case you’re into all sorts of trivia – here’s one more tidbit, not that the cast and melding of shows above hasn’t provided enough trivia to keep you busy for years, Brandon Maggart (older brother, Lou Waters) is the father of singer, Fiona Apple, and actor Garett Maggart.  Joe’s daughter, Penny?  Penny is played by actress Hallie Todd, better known to Disney fans as “Lizzie Maguire’s Mom”.

BnB: Taylor the Vulture! Oh the Places You Will GO!

There are moments when you just want to KISS the BnB writers!  Whether they mean to or not, they certainly validate fans’ memories of the show and what made Taylor Hayes an unpalatable character from the beginning.  They may have found a way to add intrigue to the character and keep fans guessing about who she REALLY is and what she REALLY wants, and just how long she’s been pulling the wool over Stephanie Douglas’ eyes!  Remember this clip:

Fans knew long before that  moment that the not-so-good doctor was after her dead patients’ husband and may have had designs on him before that!  How curious is it that TODAY, Steffy informs the audience that her mother knew her father was “the one” the first time she saw him and that for her it was “love at first sight”.   We’d never heard that line before.  Veteran fans will remember that the first time Taylor saw Ridge, he’d come to her to find out what was happening with Caroline’s medical treatment.  She was his dying wife’s doctor!  She fell in love with him THEN, while watching Caroline’s unbearable pain at the thought of leaving her family?  She believed that she was meant to be with Ridge at THAT moment?

WHAT!??!?!?  It’s just batshit crazy… and I LOVE IT!

So… does this mean that Taylor plotted her way into the Forrester family?  If so, how?  Stephanie, at one point, did confront Taylor with her mistrust of the not-so-good doctor who seemed to be on her doorstep more frequently than she should be, given Ridge’s circumstances!  Would that be revisited?  At the time, of course, Stephanie wanted Brooke to be there, at Ridge’s side,  so that Eric would be free for the taking.  Stephanie greatly distrusted Taylor.  She was right to distrust her.   What patient/psychologically frail man has Taylor avoided taking advantage of:  Grieving Ridge?  No. Grieving  Thorne? No.  Rebounding Eric? No.  Psychotic Blake?  No.  Traumatized Nick?  No.  

Now this?

Are we witnessing the birth of the new Sheila Carter?  EH!  I doubt it but imagine how much fun it would be to see Stephanie choke on knowing she’d been protecting Taylor, while suspecting that Taylor may have actually ushered Caroline into the great beyond!  Imagine that Taylor’s TRUE fear of Bill is that he might one day find out… and Bill is no Brooke.. he bites back.

Oh writers, Oh the places you could go!

GH: Some Days, Watching This Show Is a Little Like THIS (warning: brief nudity)

Yes, yes, and since the nudity involves Paul Bettany – seriously, .. you should thank me!  As for GH  “blame” more than “thank” is the word I’m looking for when thinking about what sort of credit should be given.   What follows is what I LIKE about GH right now and what I hate, though hate me be too strong of a word since it motivated me to find a nude Paul Bettany clip!

What I love!

I love that the writers can make me love (some) couples when I thought that my feelings for them were forever dead.  You know where this is going!  Lucky and Liz.  She has long been, for me, one of the sleaziest most unbearable women in daytime.  With respect to her lovelife, she’s the female Sonny Corinthos.  If there’s a man she’s been involved with that she HASN’T carried a child for, surely he must be sterile.  For a nurse, her knowledge and use of family planning devices carries as stellar a record as Port Chuckle’s cognitively limited Dapper Don.  That Liz and Sonny don’t have a child together amazes me.  Somehow the writers let that one slip by – unless my memory is so shoddy I just don’t remember a Lonny Love Child.  

Everything about Liz makes me cringe, and yet when Liz and Lucky are together, the magic happens!

It’s not just having JJ back in the role of Lucky because honestly, I wasn’t the biggest fan of that move.  Greg Vaughn’s soulful eyes and hunkalicious abs still haunt me, folks, and I miss him in the role.  I wish both “Luckys” could have survived, in whatever weird storyline plot the writers could come up with – I’m easy like that.  As for Lucky and Liz?  Somehow, the writers have figured out how to use the LL2 family with precision accuracy.  Even with Vaughn in the role, the LL2 writing, as centered around the family, is thoughtful, loving, sweet and tender.  They’re the kind of moments the writers use to give us more of in the glory days of GH.  It was the loving and tender moments that balanced against the occasional dark scenes when darkness on GH meant a huge and adventurous battle between the villains out to destroy Port Charles and the heroic men and women who fought back. 

Now?  The frequent darkness (violent and vile) is balanced against he occasional loving family scene.  When I see them, they breathe new life into the show for me, even if for a limited time.  I can thank the writers for that.  More of THAT, please.

What I still hate!

Real men, like Jax, have to be taken down a peg when they cross paths with the Apple Dumpling Gang (Carly, Sonny, Jason).  Women in Sonny’s life have to proclaim him a hero, no matter how low or how sleazy he gets.  The only time they stand up to him is when the actress in the role is leaving the show.  The idea that Carly gets to put on blinders to sacrifice another man’s child to stay close to Sonny makes me terribly ill.  In Caroline Benson – Carly Corinthos’ world:

•  being kidnapped by your father’s enemies builds character. 
• Being photographed “dead” by a loon who fakes your death only toughens you up – besides, isn’t that photo now sitting on her mantle?  Good.Times.
• getting shot in the head and spending most of your formative years in a coma, shot while someone was aiming for dad?  Well that just gives you one kick ass essay for your college apps (Let little Mr. Kappa Kappa Legacy top that one!). 
• if your son ends up in prsion because his idiot father makes self defense look like murder in a cover up?  WELL!  The hell he suffers there is just his initiation into how hard life can be at times.  Welcome to the majors, future crime boss! 

DAMN Jax for worring about his little girl ending up with a bullet in her brain – or worse.

DAMN Brenda for not being a woman tough enough to stick out a few hard times, just because she’s already been kidnapped while under Sonny’s protection and her son was threatened.   Weenie.

DAMN the world for thinking that little Corinthos children who plan to kidnap a child to “save” her from the graceful love of her father are somehow wrong and pathological!  Future criminals don’t become desensitized to right and wrong all on their own!

Thank goodness for Sonny and Caroline-Carly, making childhood a little less safe, one tragic event at a time.  Someone should remind Carly of these moments:

Yeah.  Good.Times.

To which I can say that I will not miss Bob Guza when he’s gone.  Not.One.Bit.

BnB: Adult Soap Children who need to “Get a Life”

Riddle me this, fellow soap fans and pockets full of sunshine: which adult children in daytime are OBSESSED with their parents love lives? Which other soap writers have wasted countless hours penning scenes in which adult children spend their waking hours manipulating to get their parents back together(as if they’re babies who need them both at home when they drop by!)?  No other soap?  I can’t think of one beyond The Bold and The Beautiful!

Why is this ok on the BnB? It’s weird and a waste of viewer time.

Has anyone else noticed that it’s only Stephanie and Taylor’s children who do it? Is that a sign that they don’t believe that their fathers truly love their mothers so they have the ‘help’ them along? Does it mean that they see their mothers as too weak to live their own lives? Do they see their mothers as obsessed with their fathers so they become obsessed with reuniting their weak/frail, emotionally stunted mothers with men who don’t love them as they once did?

The writers haven’t found a way to give real meaning to this bizarre behavior. Most adults are trying to live their lives and build their own families – while the children of these two women, who’ve obviously done a bad job of showing their children how strong women find happiness, are becoming emotionally stunted and have become parents to their parents!  

How ridiculous is it that Ridge divorced his beloved and planned to marry the spare before even telling his namesake son (the child he always wanted and WAITED to have, his word) and is then at dinner with his beloved and his parents on the SAME day he was supposed to marry the spare?  That must have come from somewhere and I think it comes from being raised by a mother whose connection to human emotion is tenuous at best.   It would be nice for Ridge to come to some realization about how he’s lived his life thanks to the way he was raised as a way of showing soap fans that there is hope for a REAL change in Ridge this time and that his mother’s manipulations will have no further hold on him.

BnB: You Always Hurt the One You Love

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If you: repeatedly work to end a woman’s marriage, facilitate her rape after calling her a whore, leave her fragile Alzheimer’s afflicted mother alone to drown, facilitate having her children  to grow up without a stable family, behave in such a heinous way that her brother flips out trying to stop you and ends up eventually taking his life once his switch has been flipped, repeatedly try to take custody of her children for your own personal gain, and attempt to murder her on more than one occasion – alternating murder attempts with bouts of public humiliation… well!  Don’t lose hope!  There IS a way to make it up to her in one magical truly painless (for you, that is)  moment:

Even for daytime, this was one weak response to Brooke finding out that the woman she believed had finally come to love and respect her had instead intentionally inflicted harm yet again.  If I had a nickel for every time the writers have had Brooke fall for that lie, I’d own controlling interest in Microsoft!  Granny Stephanie talked idiotic  Thomas into lying and allowing his father to believe that he slept with his stepmother and that she was covering up the ‘dirty deed’.  Brooke raised Thomas for part of his young life – when he was still a decent and loving human being.  She supported him when he  had no support from the rest of his family.  In the end, Stephanie was able to convince him to turn on his stepmother with very  little persuasion needed.

Given the level of betrayal and inflicted damage, it’s disturbing that the writers have chosen to resolve the storyline this way. It feeds the stereotype about the lack of seriousness in daytime writing and production and helps any newbie who attempts to watch the genre understand why so many actors divorce themselves from their daytime past once they make it beyond the fuzzy daytime curtain.  The title of the song could have just an easily applied to the impact of the writing on daytime fans, or would if anyone actually believed that daytime writers even LIKED, much less loved or respected their fans.   On one hand, I’m sympathetic to the need to end a stinker of a storyline (like the trudge reunion) as quickly as possible.  I have to wonder if BnB writers needed to hurriedly wrap the non-reunion storyline to make Steph and Brooke allies in the fight against Taylor, Bill, and Steffy.  The problem is that I (and I’m betting most soap fans) don’t need Stephanie to be Brooke’s ally. I would have loved for the writers to have cast Elizabeth Hubbard (ATWT’s Lucinda Walsh) or Melody Thomas Scott (Ex-/Maybe Current Nikki, YnR) as Beth’s wealthy sister who has been estranged from the family since Beth married Stephen Logan — the man she loved first.  Aunt Patience Logan could have suffered a recent loss — her own husband dying tragically.   With her adult children living their own lives, the loss leads her to realize how alone she is, and how ashamed she feels that she never made peace with her sister, Beth, before she died. It would motivate her make peace with her newfound family, learn the lay of the land, and then go all kick ass on Steph and her trashy crew, knocking them all on their butts.  Aunt Patience would help empower her nieces as they’ve never been empowered before. I’d love her to have a vast fortune, big enough to make the Spencer fortune look like spending change and to use it to bring the pain!  The BnB doesn’t often promote strong female leads and when it does, they often become psychotic, whether they’re recognized as such (Sheila Carter) or not (Stephanie Douglas Forrester).  Aunt Patience would hopefully avoid becoming such a caricature.

Double my pleasure!  Make Aunt Patience’s first-born son, a cousin the Logans have never met,  a dead ringer for Stormy Logan, assuming it’s even possible for  DeVry to return given his busy filming and taping schedule … Is he Stephen’s son or is the resemblance due to their shared maternal lineage?    New Storm (Thunder/Rain Cloud/Lightening) could end up falling for Felicia, complicating his mother’s plans to ruin the Forresters once and for all — but  make that complicate, not end or deter.  I would DELIGHT in watching Aunt Patience, sitting back in the FC CEO’s chair, forcing Stephanie to drop to her knees and beg for the life of her family’s company.  I would REVEL in watching Aunt Patience turn over half of FC stock (maybe 60%)  to Hope because she has never been involved with a Forrester and would be less least likely to sign over the shares at some point.  She could then allow the Forrester family split the remaining stock.  Brooke would, of course, manage her daughter’s interests.

If the writers aren’t invested in bringing in new characters, how about forcing Stephanie to sign her 25 percent over to Brooke?  Brooke and Ridge would then, as a couple, effectively run FC again. 

How about having Brooke and Steph rehash the forgotten forged letter that ended Brooke’s marriage to Eric, only to have Eric overhear it and dump Steph once and for all?  (No, REALLY, no going back!)   It’s time to bring a woman into Eric’s life that makes him a romantic lead again, instead of having him live out his days as Stephanie’s sock puppet.  As a parting shot, Eric could inform Stephanie that she’s been blinded all these years about who the viper in her bosom actually is and then tell her about Taylor sending him to end things with her  for good  to prove that he wanted to be with her and only her.  Stephanie would wake up too late to the realization that Brooke has never been out to destroy her and in trying to destroy Brooke (Hope, and RJ – Bridget and Rick before them) she’s lost the family she claimed to love.   Jackie and Eric, Part 2?   Wouldn’t that leave Owen free to go back to Bridget and his son?  I could stomach that at this point — especially if Bridget and Owen then found out that Nick was the child’s father and had to figure out how to make their relationship work in light of the news.

What if Stephanie really WAS ostracized this time?  Why not begin to build a brand new storyline around her?  Get Stephanie out of the fashion industry and doing something with her life that benefits others.  The current storyline has trivialized her work with the homeless, which was apparently a hobby in between her moments of obsession with Brooke and Brooke’s marriage to Ridge.  Rather than another physical illness, which leaves most fans with little sympathy for her) why not have Stephanie go back to her abuse storyline and have her work with a competent psychiatrist to break her bad habits to manipulating, betraying, and controlling?  Maybe Dayzee has an abusive ex-boyfriend  who shows up and jump starts the storyline.  What if Stephanie accidentally kills him during an altercation and tries to hide the evidence of her crime in a real ‘whodunit?’.  What if the writers have his father/brother/sister come looking for him, slowly putting the pieces together, and who begins tormenting Stephanie until the truth is revealed.   Anything that keeps her from meddling in her adult children’s lives works for me.

Brooke forgave the rape Stephanie facilitated.  She forgave Steph for the fake heart attack she used to break up her family.  She forgave Stephanie leaving her agitated mother to drown.  She forgave Stephanie’s torment of her brother and her siblings. She forgave Stephanie’s various attempts to destroy her children’s happiness.  All the while she was maltreated by Stephanie, she’s has repeatedly fought for Steph’s health, her life, and has done everything she could to become ‘true family’ with  her.   After more than 20 years of torment, closer to 30 years onscreen, at what point does Brooke get to kick Stephanie’s butt, figuratively or literally?

The above  “forgiveness scene”  was the equivalent of ordering a cup of tea, savoring every bit until the end, where the last taste is bitter.  What a pity. I don’t want Brooke to become the vicious and angry pantload Stephanie has always been.  I just want a feeling of ‘satisfaction’ when one of the BnB’s “big” storylines is resolved.  The level of betrayal Brooke experiences at Stephanie’s hands, the sheer number of TEARS that woman cries, suggests that a much stronger response is needed.  Double dating with the man who left you last week, and his parents, on the eve of his would- be wedding, while his psychotic mother warbles out a classic just doesn’t do it for me.

BnB: “Bitch, Please” and “the Bearded one”!

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Sadly, a good Brooke and Ridge (BRidge) reunion has always piqued my interest enough that I’d tune in and follow what’s going on.   Not so much this go round, but I have kept up enough to know two things:  1 -The writers have tacitly confirmed that taylor “mail order psychiatry degree” hayes Jones is nothing more than a crackpot, and 2 – The writers view Ridge as nothing more than a cluesless lamb to the slaughter in the BRidge meltdowns.  It’s time for the writers to let Ridge grow a pair, and KEEP THEM!  This BRidge break up was the most pathetic yet (Ridge planned to rebound with a marriage to his ex before his son even knew that he’d divorced his mother and left the family) The second point first.  Ridge:

Colore me stunned to see Ronn Moss’ (Ridge’s) heavy growth of facial hair.  WHAAAA’?  Has it dawned on anyone else that the last time we saw such heavy growth, not just the occasional 5 o’clock shadow we’ve seen,  it coincided with another ‘big loss’ storyline on screen?  Shortly after Ridge lost Caroline, he grew a beard that would make a dense patch of forest sick with envy!  The mail order psychiatrist, hoping that she’d broken through to Ridge in order to get him to take his attention off of his grief for his dead wife and turn his attention to her, tried to get him to shave it.  His response?  NO!  Brooke – the other woman he loved as much as Caroline, told him, as he sat at her bedside attending to her every need while she was in labor with his father’s child, that his beard was itchy.  To taylor’s shock and chagrin, Ridge ran to shave it to make Brooke more comfortable.

That the timing of this storyline is coincidental with RM’s decision to grow facial hair shouldn’t be considered immaterial. How nice it would have been for the writers to have thought about those earlier scenes and then use them for this show.  Imagine Taylor remembering that time and finally putting  together the facial hair and the look of being lead to the gallows emanating from Ridge’s dead eyes whenever they’re together.  Imagine a horrified Taylor realizing on her own that Ridge was grieving for Brooke as he grieved for Caroline, and that she truly was back on the sidelines, hoping that for once she wasn’t the rebound betty she’d been for Ridge from the day they met.  She could have at least gone out with a little dignity.  Maybe then she would have seemed slightly human had she crumbled under the weight of the realization that she’d emasculated her husband by laughing at her inability to remember his name in bed, calling out Ridge’s instead.  She could have broken down in utter disgust that she’d tossed Whip aside, treating him as if his absolute devotion to her made her skin crawl.  Nah… that’s too much like right for the broken down half-wit psychiatrist.  The writers didn’t have it in them to have her think about what she’d done.  She was too busy falling back on her uusal refrain, “… but what about ME?”  In her rush to proclaim herself the victim, taylor’s statements about the tragedy of her non-wedding to Ridge made her seem callous, dumber than usual, and absolutely insane… all I can say is:

Bitch, PLEASE!

1.  Taylor thought her son was  “molested” by Brooke?  (I can’t even deal with the writers’ trivialization of the word, right now).  Suffice it to say: BTICH, PLEASE!  This is the woman who called herself young Rick and Bridget’s “new mommy”, used a young Rick to keep the secret that she was dating his father behind good friend Stephanie’s back ,and then turned around and slept with Rick when he became an adult.  She loved throwing in it Brooke’s face that she’d intended to marry her son.    Yet she thought that Brooke “molested” her son when they were BOTH stoned on wild berries and neither had any real memory of what happened? 

Given Thomas’ historyof violence and aggression and his prior attempts to get romantically/sexually physical with his stepmother (for the sake of publicity), she would have made more sense worrying about Brooke than worrying about Thomas.

2 – She wondered if Stephanie and Thomas even knew who she was and what she was about when they played their hand?  BITCH, PLEASE!  Stephanie, the woman you ran to when you were afraid of losing Ridge?  The woman you thanked for keeping Ridge with you because the two of you would never made it without her?  The woman who watched you a) accept a wedding gown/ring/proposal meant for someone else?  b) accept her arm twisting of Ridge to keep him away from a child he thought was his child with Brooke for your sake?  c) accept her help in trying to give a child she thought was yours with Thorne to his brother to force Ridge to be with you to give his brother’s child a father? d) sneak into Brooke office and cackle like a mad hen over listening to Steph call Brooke names? e) try to profit from doping Ridge up and giving him alcohol and taking him to bed after that?  Honey, that’s your SHORT list.  How could any writer expect an audience to believe taylor’s innocence given her own history?

3.  She’s tried to live her life with integrity?  If the emphasis in on the word ‘tried’, she gets away with that statement, though I could argue that the writers didn’t have her try very hard.  If the emphasis is on the work “integrity”?  BITCH, PLEASE!  This is the woman who called Brooke a whore and who mocked her for marrying the Forrester men and yet has slept her way through TWO families (plus the men she didn’t know while drinking and trolling the wharf around Chuck’s bar).  Taylor lied about killing her sister-in-law, allowed the family to think that Darla had been left to die like an animal in the road, and then encouraged Darla’s child and husband grow close to her.  She hid her infidelity with James Warrick, at her husband’s family’s beloved Big Bear cabin, for YEARS while making her husband think she was as pure as the driven snow.  She’s slept with almost every male patient she’s ever had (onscreen), lied about her college relationship with Grant Chambers, committed bigamy, trashed her best friend’s marriage behind her back, betrayed her now deceased daughter, used her psychologically frail – physically violent husband to try to make a young Ridge jealous by sleeping with the ex-husband (license and ethics be damned) … and again, the short list.

That taylor didn’t have the decency to feel sorry for anyone other than herself means that if the writers didn’t intend for the character to seem shallow, vain, and pathetic someone should be playing the lottery because they hit on all three traits without breaking a sweat.

Casey Anthony and the CSI effect: are we all doomed?

I wish I could simply accept the jury’s decision in the Casey Anthony case and be done with it, but I can’t.  I’m stunned, I’m sickened, I’m fearful for the future of American Jurisprudence.   There are at least three  points that I think that most of us should be able to rationally accept:

1. When murder (accidental or intentional) occurs, the perpetrator rarely takes the time to film the event
2. Equally rare are murderers (accidental or intentional) who conduct the act in front of witnesses.
3.  People who commit murder are rarely willing to confess to the event, knowing that they’ll have to suffer the consequences.

Outside of that?  We are left with the talents and dedication of hardworking police officers, detectives, and investigators who lay their asses on the line for us each and every day and who work damned hard to stitch together the pieces of highly difficult cases.  The victims aren’t able to tell us what we need to know and their murderers rarely step forward to tell us what happened.  In far too many cases we are left with circumstantial evidence to try to come as close to the truth as any human being can without having been present at the time of the unfortunate loss of life.  Prosecutors, working in partnership with officers, detectives, and other investigators try to bring justice to the victims and their families.

So is it the case that shows like CSI, and any myriad of crime dramas on air, seem to have us convinced that if legal cases aren’t solved with 100% certainty (relying on evidence such as DNA matches, hair, skin cells, and fibers) then those cases are specious and should be approached with cynicism and distrust?  Are we to believe that every single case is wrapped up nice and neatly?  Are we so mistrustful of our legal system and the science that drives so many cases, that even in a case when a mother ADMITS she daughter died in her presence and that the child was wrapped in a trash bag and disposed of (after possibly spending days in the trunk of a car, depending on whose evidence you believe) that the very same mother could escape any sort of legal reprecussions for her actions?  

Would this jury as much as convicted Casey Anthony of abuse of a corpse had they been given an option?  I seriously doubt it.

One alternate juror has stated that he/she didn’t believe George Anthony on the stand.  (But the individual did seem to believe the mother who knew her daughter was dead, allowed hundreds/thousands of people to become caught up in a search for a dead child while other missing children did not receive that help, and who partied for a month following the death was believeable?).

Another alternate said that he/she had difficulty believing that Caylee was ever in the trunk of the car.  Based on what?  Not believing it was possible for a mother to do something like that?  (Bella Vita, Baby!  “A Beautiful Life” tattoo purchased as the child lay dead and rotting, gnawed on by animals… a mother who does that would be incapable of leaving a child’s body in the trunk? ).  Have we become a nation that believes our own opinions, and CSI influenced mindset, than the actual evidence before us?

So many posters/twitter users/facebook fans have commented on the fact that Nancy Grace will have a heart attack and die over this verdict.  It’s sometimes said with glee.  In all honesty, Nancy Grace is the equivalent of chewing shards of glass, in my book, and I’m sorry that she has become as much the face of this trial as Casey Anthony or (RIP) little Caylee.  This case should always have been about Caylee.  She is the person all seemed to think the least about, save the prosecution … it was all about Casey’s demeanor, George Anthony shoving his member in his daughter’s mouth and sending her off to school, Cindy Anthony and whether she was a pathological matriarch protecting her wild-child daughter and her (allegedly incestuous and groping) son, Lee… it was about the cameras, validation for the defense team, persecution of the prosecution, but this trial was never about Caylee, in my opinion (see, I have them too!)

Caylee was least well served by this trial and to some degree so were the rest of us.  Those who’ve said that Casey shouldn’t be convincted because the cause of death could not be determined make me recall the (very) old joke about the defendant accused of the murder of his parents throwing himself on the mercy of the court because he was just a lonely orphan.  That Casey made it impossible for anyone to determine the COD by keeping the body hidden (that was not at all intentional, I’m sure, just a coincidence).  Should that mean that given all other evidence she should have been allowed to walk free?  What lesson is there in that for any other alleged perpertrator of a crime? 

What happens at this point now that Casey Anthony has been found “not guilty”?  Does she go home to the father and brother who assaulted her (given the defense she put on)?  Does she press charges against her father for sexual assault?  Does she seek charges against her brother for attempted sexual assault?  Can the state charge them both?

SURELY she won’t go home with those threats to her person living there? Not now that she’s spoken her truth, right?  If her family is calling her claims “baseless” (meaning that it was a lie?) what must they think about the rest of the story her? 

Do you know who  isn’t so likely to forgive the lies associated with this case?  Zenaida Gonzalez!  As I understand it, she has a case moving forward based on the false allegations that she, Zanny the (never was the) Nanny, abducted Caylee — a girl her mother knew was dead.  As a result, Gonzalez was threatened, the lives of her children were threatened, and her life was turned upside down.  If a huge win for Zenaida in a case against Casey is the best anyone can hope for, I’ll take it.  I hope a lawsuit will make it impossible for Ms. Anthony to ever profit from the lie that harmed Ms. Gonzalez and her family and that she never makes a dime from Caylee’s death.

It’s all we have… oh, and CSI, in the place of appreciation of real police work.

ETA:  Just found this online (CA and the CSI Effect)…   I agree in some places, obviously, and disagree in other…