Another Newsletter

Dearest Debunkmates (and Lee Atwater’s ghost, if you’re listening),

I’ve been threatening this for a while. When Mike and I started the Patreon in *checks watch* APRIL, we listed a newsletter as the only reward for patronage, and to my knowledge not a single one of you has ever brought it to our attention that, hey, we owe you a newsletter. (And at this point we owe you at least seven.) But newsletters always make me think of that Mitch Hedberg joke about someone giving you a flyer on the street--they might as well be saying, “Here, you throw this away”--and I think I might not be alone. Yet here I am, typing.

Three weeks ago I relocated to Philadelphia, and for a while I’ve been telling people about my grand plans to “dedicate more time to long-term projects” and “develop a daily work routine” and “stop recording so many episodes in McDonald's parking lots.*” So far I have accomplished the last of these goals. The others have been more complex, and when I think about the projects I want to take on not because they seem novel or scary, or like something a “real journalist” would do, but because they seem like fun, I think of this newsletter. So I'm doing it because I feel like it, and I hope you will read it for the same reasons. 

Basically, there’s a ton of material that comes up in the process of making the show—which includes reading, re-reading, hunting down decades-old tabloids, and, of course, driving around listening to Michael Bolton in an effort to mindhunt my way into Paula Barbieri’s brain—that we can’t fit into the episodes themselves, but wish we could. They’re the kinds of things of quotes and facts and weird rabbit holes you shout about to your roommate as you’re reading, or text to your friends, and maybe still feel the need to pass on. Some of them are ephemera, but ephemera can say a lot. 

I want to let you in on this part of the process, too. And, well, I feel like you deserve a little something extra from us--especially when we have to let two long, unconscionable weeks go by between releasing episodes. The best thing about making this show for you is that I get to stay immersed in the story day by day, and I want to offer you more of that experience, if you want to join me.

*”Elián González” and “The Preppy Murder”—can you tell?

Right now, my life is all about the O.J. Simpson trial. I feel like I’m manufacturing my own personal 1995, to the extent that my friends and I often spend time discussing the trial; they know it’s where my head is, and often end up doing a little time-traveling themselves. The issues the trial contained—and then failed to contain—may be even more alive for Americans than they were twenty-five years ago, if it’s possible to measure such a thing. Even the new edition of Marcia Clark’s memoir begins with a new foreword in which she writes: “seeing the hideous, vividly detailed recent footage” of police killings of black men has given her “a deeper understanding of why the jury acquitted Simpson and why mistrust of law enforcement is pervasive in the black community.” 

Yet she still goes on to call the verdict “a travesty” a few lines later—and something I’m thinking about a lot, as we get deeper into this story, is why so many Americans see an acquittal, despite significant evidence of guilt, as the kind of result the legal system must carefully guard against. One of the prevalent feelings in white America at the time of the verdict, I think—if this audience’s response was any indication, anyway—can be summed up in Norm MacDonald’s joke on Weekend Update: “Well, it is finally official. Murder is legal in the state of California.”

The joke here—if I may destroy it through dissection—is that things fall apart, the center cannot hold, if you acquit one defendant in a high-profile murder trial then the rock-ribbed laws holding us all in check will degrade just a little more, and the country will become more dangerous. There’s something ideological and intangible in play here that I cannot quite grasp, but I think it comes back to “law and order,” and Law & Order, maybe in equal measure.

On February 1, 1995—essentially in the opening moments of the Simpson trial, but after seven and a half months of pre-trial media obsession—Law & Order aired an episode I now suspect drew equal inspiration from that trial, and from the recent (and now mostly-forgotten) case of Joseph Jett, a black bond trader who “scammed” Wall Street in a way I frankly don’t fully understand, but that had something to do with inflating the value of his trades. Basically, I understand it just well enough to be convinced that these were some of the headlines that this Law & Order episode was ripped from. It was called “Rage,” and it featured a guest performance by a young actor named Courtney B. Vance. Another episode that season, titled "Family Values" featured a riveting performance by an actress making her very first TV appearance; her name was Sarah Paulson. Two decades later, they would return to a TV courtroom not as defendants, but as lawyers, and face off in Ryan Murphy's The People v. O.J. Simpson.

After I watched "Rage," I treated myself to the rest of the season. And I realized that in 1995, while Marcia Clark was being pilloried in the media for everything from her clothes to her hair to her ongoing custody battle, America was falling in love with Sam Waterston, who had just begun his first of 236 seasons as Jack McCoy. (Or at least it feels that way now.) 

What can you say about Jack McCoy? Maybe you just have to experience him. But I'm beginning to suspect that a lot of our current beliefs about what a prosecutor should do--what a prosecutor is--came directly from him. He prosecutes cases on surprisingly slim evidence, but it doesn't matter, because the audience is his grand jury, and we are always with him. And it's not that the show doesn't depict him making mistakes: we know he's a loose canon. That's part of his charm. Maybe he swings wide of the mark a lot, maybe he starts off bringing the full force of his office down on the wrong person, but with very few exceptions, his zealotry and mistakes lead him straight to the truth, in 46 minutes or less. Law & Order is a show where the ends always justify the means, and the means, I'm starting to realize, can get pretty unconstitutional. 

It only occurs to me as I'm writing this that the reason we think McCoy gets it right is because that's the story the show tells us; he could be much more wrong than we know. But again, it doesn't matter. What everyone loves most about McCoy, I think--because the show's writers seem to have leaned on it more and more as time went on--is the part at the end, where he finds the ultimate culprit, and just sort of.... lectures them. I don't know what viewers find more satisfying, in the end: knowing a character is being taken to prison, or watching McCoy scold them for their deeds. And the worldview present in all his lectures seems to be this: You could have been good. But you wanted to do evil. I can't explain why. But you did. You committed violence because it was what you wanted, because you chose it freely, maybe because you enjoyed it, and because you thought you could get away with it, but you can't, because I saw you, and the buck stops here. And in a country that craves a gravelly-voiced Daddy telling them what to do--when this is what we believe a prosecutor looks like, how he should make us feel--how were people primed to respond to Marcia Clark? 

Speaking of all of the above, the single aspect of Law & Order that now makes me most deeply uncomfortable--more than the hilarious jokes about getting a search warrant without probable cause, more than Detective Logan's occasional Big Fuhrman Energy, more even than the fact that Lieutenant Van Buren is basically never outside her dark little office and I'm worried about her well-being and yes I know she's a fictional character from the 90s but still--is the relationship between Claire Kincaid and Jack McCoy. She enters the show as a straw feminist, and about five episodes later is spouting tough-on-crime policy like she's been doing it all her life, the thesis of the show being, I guess, that good d is a gateway drug to conservative politics. I find this idea debatable at best. But mostly, I'm sad for Claire, who started off with the potential to be a real character, and ended up more like a foil. Maybe Americans wanted Marcia Clark to be more like Claire Kincaid: someone who sat at the counsel table, sure, but silently, while a man did all the talking. 

I'm not such a revisionist that I believe Detective Lennie Briscoe would have been any more amenable to my own soft-on-crime ways, but these days he's about the only male character on the show who I don't find myself yelling at through the screen. And he and Claire always had--am I the only one who sees it?--a certain energy. Anyway, I ship it.

Announcement: We’re finally selling merch! (we’re not sure how we feel about that word either)

We don’t post many announcements here because most weeks our "news" is just whatever topic we are berating our friends with, but this week is different: We have a store! 

After months of researching our options (OK, procrastinating), we found a website that lets us  print listener-submitted designs on coffee mugs, stickers, T-shirts and lots of other stuff. 

Here’s the link: https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about?ref_id=10420 

In keeping with our general We Feel Weird-ness around these sorts of things, we want to reiterate that if you can’t afford to buy something or simply don’t want to, that’s fine! We never ever want to make you feel like you’re not supporting us enough or doing it wrong. 

Listeners have been sending us their incredible illustrations and requesting our presence on their tote bags for months, so here we are. We hope Atwater waits a day or two before crashing the site. 

Mike's Recommendations 

• Eat, Pray, Britney: A Mariana deep dive into what has happened, and still is, to Britney Jean Spears. The Justin Timberlake episode makes me want to get the gang back together and re-do the live show about Janet Jackson. 

• This nostalgia-ruining video essay about "stalking for love." Basically the majority of romantic comedies are written from the male perspective, meaning that when men stalk women it's a sign of devotion. When women stalk men, it's a sign they're disturbed. Come, discard the last few '90s movies you thought weren't problematic. 

• I'm currently researching an article (and an episode obvs) about human trafficking. One of the most interesting researchers I've come across writes about the history of the sex work abolition movement and how it brought together neoconservatives, evangelicals and first wave feminists — a coalition our listeners will recognize from the Victims' Rights Movement episode! Anyway, here is one of her fascinating articles on the subject.

Sarah's Recommendations: 

• Check my belly button for jewels, I guess, because I'm about to be a troll. Since starting to research the Paula Barbieri episodes of the show (that's right--you can expect another one soon), my attitude toward Michael Bolton has gone from indifference to curiosity to gentle mockery to, uh, love. When I found myself listening to "Said I Loved You...But I Lied" every time I got in the car, I felt he was somehow getting revenge for the way I talked about him on the show, and then I just embraced it. This song, with its Pure Moods instrumentation* and its weird fake-out of a title, is, to me, both cringily of its time and totally delightful, and I think what saves it is Michael Bolton's complete commitment to the moment. And the video is.... listen, it's been a long time since I took a class on the Romantics, but I think this qualifies as sublime. 

• For years, I've been searching for the perfect alarm clock. I bought one that rolls around beeping until you catch it and turn it off; I tried an app that makes you solve math problems to turn off the sound. I've tried a lot of different alarms over the years, because I'm a deep sleeper, and am capable of hitting snooze for two full hours without ever really waking, and most recently I was contemplating buying a clock that very expensively simulates a sunrise. But then my friend Emma Eisenberg gave me her old clock radio, and may I just say: Clock radios. It turns out what I need more than any high-tech solution is the sound of a voice; and halfway dreaming is sometimes the best state to be in when you hear the news.

• In 2016, I got the bright idea to make a t-shirt that said "IF MARCIA CLARK COULD GET THROUGH 1995, THEN I CAN GET THROUGH THIS DAY" (in homage, of course, to the classic Britney meme). Despite the idea's obvious brilliance, it didn't catch on at the time, except with my friend Elizabeth. We have both worn those shirts with pride ever since, and when YWA's Marcia episode came out this week, my friend Hava suggested it might be time to bring back this classic design, after its initial print run of two. I agreed. And in conclusion, if you see my mom,  please don't tell her I'm giving this to her for Christmas. 

*THE THEME FROM THE EXORCIST WAS ON PURE MOODS, what the heck was that about???