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WELL, HE’S JUST AN EXCITABLE BOY …
Dec. 15th, 2013 09:32 pmI’d never heard of the term “affluenza” until Ethan Couch successfully used it as a defense for stealing beer, getting drunk and then killing four people with a pick-up truck.
And looking it up, it turns out affluenza doesn’t even mean what Couch’s attorneys claim it means. It’s supposed to be a state of emotional stress brought on by excessive consumerism and the drive to acquire more things. Couch’s defense team say affluenza is when rich parents spoil their kids to the point that they never have to face the consequences of wrongdoing.
I’m pretty sure that’s called “really bad parenting”.
But you already know this. There’s a lot of commentary on the interwub about the case, most of it negative. And why not? There’s not a lot good you can say about a case where a rich teenager kills four people and gets sentenced to ten years probation at a California beach resort, with a defense that his parents told him rich people don’t go to jail, and a sentence that basically proves his parents were right.
It's not exactly news that money buys a different kind of justice. But you can’t really expect that kind of thing to play in an era where people talk more and more about the 1% and the 99%, the growing gap between them and where all this is ultimately leading.
All I can really add is that Warren Zevon has the perfect song for this kind of thing. And he wrote it back in the 70s.
Okay, technically Warren wasn’t talking about affluenza, or even rich people per se, according to sources. But you get the point.
Money changes everything,
This is dF
And looking it up, it turns out affluenza doesn’t even mean what Couch’s attorneys claim it means. It’s supposed to be a state of emotional stress brought on by excessive consumerism and the drive to acquire more things. Couch’s defense team say affluenza is when rich parents spoil their kids to the point that they never have to face the consequences of wrongdoing.
I’m pretty sure that’s called “really bad parenting”.
But you already know this. There’s a lot of commentary on the interwub about the case, most of it negative. And why not? There’s not a lot good you can say about a case where a rich teenager kills four people and gets sentenced to ten years probation at a California beach resort, with a defense that his parents told him rich people don’t go to jail, and a sentence that basically proves his parents were right.
It's not exactly news that money buys a different kind of justice. But you can’t really expect that kind of thing to play in an era where people talk more and more about the 1% and the 99%, the growing gap between them and where all this is ultimately leading.
All I can really add is that Warren Zevon has the perfect song for this kind of thing. And he wrote it back in the 70s.
Okay, technically Warren wasn’t talking about affluenza, or even rich people per se, according to sources. But you get the point.
Money changes everything,
This is dF
