SOCIETY DOWN: Murderer, Corey said!

TUESDAY, JULY 16, 2013

Part 1—Dismantling society’s norms: Angela Corey is a real piece of work, although she’s hardly alone.

Corey is the “crazy-ass prosecuta” we pseudo-liberals have come to adore. Yesterday, she was interviewed by HLN’s Vinnie Politan about the Zimmerman trial.

She sat with Bernie de la Rionda, who had argued her case in court. At one point, Politan asked the type of question which is dragging our intellect down:

“One word to describe George Zimmerman.”

A long silence ensued. It seemed that no one was going to speak. Finally, Corey provided her word:

“Murderer.”

That was a remarkable answer. We’d say it was the latest symptom of what we’d call “society down.”

As our society keeps fragmenting into tribes, its basic norms unravel. One example: Increasingly, we no longer have facts. Instead, we have pleasing stories our varied elites have invented.

When she gave that remarkable answer, Corey was walking away from one of our society’s most basic norms. But that should hardly be surprising. Corey is a real piece of work, even though the pseudo-liberal world has decided to follow her.

Corey is the biggest crackpot in Florida’s prosecutorial system. This explains why the loathsome Rick Scott handed her the task of chasing after George Zimmerman.

What makes Corey a real piece of work? For starters, consider two recent examples:

In 2011, Corey charged a 12-year-old boy with the first-degree murder of his 2-year-old half-brother. But don’t worry—before he was questioned, he was read his Miranda rights! For more on the case, just click here.

(Just so we can pretend to care, the 12-year-old boy was Hispanic.)

Currently, the pseudo-liberal cable world is pretending to be upset about the disgraceful prosecution of Marissa Alexander, who received a 20-year prison sentence last year for firing a warning shot over the head of her long abusive husband. Cable pseudo-liberals feign anger about the jury’s conduct, while ignoring the fact that this too was Corey’s work.

In short, Corey is the spawn of Nancy Grace. Like Rick Scott, she’s the kind of crazy person progressives have always worried about.

But now, we tribal pseudo-liberals like the cut of her jib! That’s the way a tribe will behave when society’s norms are devolving.

Why was Corey’s remark on HLN so strange? Consider the norms which have always guided our legal community.

Everybody understands that trial by jury is imperfect. In many cases, there simply isn’t enough evidence to let a jury know what has happened in the particular case. And in cases where there is plenty of evidence, juries may make strange decisions—or they may simply reach a decision with which you disagree.

Trial by jury isn’t perfect. But it is the practice enshrined within our legal system. The voters speak on Election Day. A jury speaks in the case of a criminal trial.

Our legal system also includes a long-standing “presumption of innocence.” In theory, a defendant is presumed to be innocent. The state is required to prove that he or she broke the law.

Traditionally, prosecutors state their respect for the decisions of our juries. But Corey, a crackpot, is part of a tribe which increasingly respects its own norms and beliefs as our society atomizes.

Corey is part of the (right-wing) tribe in which every defendant is presumed guilty. In her remarkable answer to Politano, she kept faith with the views of this tribe while breaking faith with the values which have defined the larger society.

What happens when we make way for the values of this particular tribe? For one thing, our prisons fill up with innocent people, a problem which has become more obvious in recent years.

Let’s consider two recent cases in which the gods of cable stupidity helped drag our society down, thanks to the influence of crazy people like Corey:

In June 2002, 14-year-old Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped from her family’s Salt Lake City home. The cable gods were of course very happy when this crime occurred.

The repellent Grace played a leading role in the cable witch trials which followed. At one point, Grace convinced herself, then much of the world, that the abduction had been committed by Richard Ricci, a handyman who was working in the Smart home at the time of the crime.

Largely thanks to Grace’s conduct, Ricci was arrested on an outstanding warrant. He was put in prison, where he died of a pre-existing condition, due in part to poor medical treatment.

After Ricci died, Grace even began suggesting that the police should go after Ricci’s wife. There is nothing people like Grace and Corey won’t say and do.

Later, of course, it became clear that Ricci had nothing to do with Elizabeth Smart’s abduction. In a glorious outcome, Elizabeth Smart was found in the grip of the actual perpetrator.

On March 12, 2003, Larry King publicly lamented the way Ricci had been tried and convicted on his program. Inevitably, Grace insisted that she had done nothing wrong. Finally, Mark Geragos said this:

GERAGOS (3/12/03): Nancy, I have reserved any kind of comments tonight because you have been, all along in this story, one of the worst perpetrators of convicting people. And you’ve done it on this show in this specific case. I don’t even remember the name of the guy before Ricci that they had focused on, and you had convicted him as well.

Grace said she had done no such thing. Along with everything else, Nancy Grace was now lying.

(For a fuller review, see THE DAILY HOWLER, 5/2/03.)

Alas! That's part of the way the world starts to work when the Tribe of Grace holds sway—when we hand society’s reins to crackpots like Angela Corey. But then, let’s recall another recent case—the so-called Duke lacrosse case.

In that instance, it wasn’t the tribe of the Crazy Prosecutors who drove the cable frenzy. In that instance, it was the tribe of the Hapless Professors, a tribe which includes some of the dumbest people who ever drew breath on the earth.

As Nancy Grace had convicted Ricci, so did the country’s all-knowing professors pre-settle the facts of this case. As it turned out, the Hapless Professors were horribly wrong, as they so typically are.

In that case, the Hapless Professors followed the ethos of Corey’s tribe. They threw away presumptions of innocence. They threw away the long-standing requirement that we have to establish real facts before we start telling the stories our dim-witted tribe may prefer.

The hapless professors invented their facts, just as Nancy Grace had done. Their facts turned out to be wrong.

Yesterday, the biggest crackpot in crazy-ass Florida appeared on your cable TV machine thingy. While there, she walked away from the tradition in which a prosecutor is expected to show proper respect for a jury’s decision.

Despite the jury’s decision, despite the presumption of innocence, she once again called Zimmerman a “murderer.” It was an extraordinary act.

Also extraordinary was the clowning conducted by cable pseudo-progressives. Last night, they lamented the prosecution of Marissa Alexander, failing to note that it was Corey who engineered this vile act.

At such moments, we think we see something. We think we see our highly imperfect society breaking down.

Over the past thirty years, our highly imperfect society has been breaking apart into tribes. Each tribe reserves the right to invent its own facts and logic.

Each of these tribes reserves the right to walk away from the larger society’s most basic procedures and traditions.

The Zimmerman case has helped us see the way we pseudo-liberals have purchased this trend. And make no mistake:

When we walk away from our most basic traditions, it’s a case of Society Down.

Long ago, in the 1960s, Norman O. Brown was suddenly very hot. Brown, a classicist at Cal Santa Cruz, had published Life Against Death in 1959. In 1966, he followed that with Love’s Body.

We can’t even recall what it was that made Brown so hot. But we’ve always recalled a vision he expressed in Love’s Body, a vision about the way societies die:

BROWN (1966): I sometimes think I see that societies originate in the discovery of some secret, some mystery; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned...And so there comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new.

Is our society ending in exhaustion? Is its mystery being profaned? Or is our civilization being renewed? Is a new mystery being discovered?

Increasingly, we live in a world of invented facts and deeply inane tribal novels. Multimillionaires go on TV to hand each tribe its official stories. We the people then rush to our comment threads, where we repeat the phony facts our multimillionaire leaders provided.

We may not be able to see that this process is unfolding. But this process is unfolding on cable TV every night.

In our view, the Zimmerman trial brought this process into a new stark relief. To us, it looks like exhaustion more than new mystery. On that, opinions may differ.

It’s hard to keep up with all the nonsense. We’ll examine this process all week.

Tomorrow: In the current instance, where did the fake facts come from?

Crazy-ass crackpot speaks: By traditional progressive standards, Angela Corey is a crackpot. So is Governor Scott, who unloosed her on this case.

Yesterday, the crackpot spoke. This is what she said:

POLITAN (7/14/13): One word to describe George Zimmerman.

COREY: Murderer.

POLITAN: George Zimmerman.

DE LA RIONDA: Lucky.

POLITAN: Trayvon Benjamin Martin.

DE LA RIONDA: I don't know there's one word that can describe a victim.

POLITAN: Trayvon Benjamin Martin.

COREY: Prey, P-R-E-Y.

Corey, a genuine crackpot, was walking away from our society’s most basic norms and traditions. Tribal atomization is like that.

Our own tribe was wrong in the Duke lacrosse case. But so what? Flinging our poo all around our cages, our tribe didn’t much seem to care.