Here is Nancy Grace, same as she ever was: pencil-thin eyebrows contorted in dismay like EKG waves; seashell-size pendant necklace; hair bleached to crunchy blond straw; perpetually discombobulated, as if in every moment of her life you are witnessing her after she'd just gone to the bathroom in a stall where there was no toilet paper.It is January 27 of this year. Grace is debating with a panel of Informed Men the dangers of legalizing marijuana. Grace is struggling with the most primitive syllables of the English language as if they were pieces of a skyscraper she had to erect with her bare hands. She has very strong opinions on "Drugs," or " DUR-UHG-GUHZ." This past August in Denver, Colorado, a deranged man with a face like a rotisserie ham named Richard Kirk was suspected of killing his wife. Kirk had, prior to the incident, repeatedly described his mood swings to his children as his "blood moon." He was $40,000 in credit card debt, and reportedly climbed in and out of his children's bedroom window, shouting about the end of the world.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
She is a hysteria merchant who traffics in outrageous gestures, finger wags, incendiary comments tossed off as by-the-ways. She is not malicious; she is an infant. She half-attempts to put bits of honesty and reason in her mouth and instead just smears them on the walls and on her face. Horrors are condensed to punch lines she can gleefully recite to Jay Leno , America's other babbling disseminator of populist ruminations. There is " vodka mom " and "gin baby" and " microwave baby " and "#totmom." Death only has a currency to her if it can be pillaged and peddled as a scandalous hashtag. She says things that could not even be slander because they are never designed with any purpose but to seem LOUD and BOTHERED. She is the wailing id of the couch-dwelling Middle American who can respond to things only on the most visceral, involuntary level. There is no analysis, just shock and wild hyperbole and "HE LOOKS LIKE HE'S CLIMBING THE FENCE. DAMMIT HE IS CLIMBING THAT FENCE" as she watches video of a fugitive being chased on foot. She is mad as heck, and she's not gonna take it anymore, by golly. Grace is the thought bubble above your delirious grandmother's head. She is the magnetism of piercing, semi-appropriate noises. She is an assassin of logic, of good taste and restraint—not by precise calculation but by tossing a grenade of "WHAT IS HAPPENING TO AMERICA, FOLKS?" and plugging her ears. She is a child making crash sound effects with its mouth while ramming two trucks together. She is our ability to interpret Things Happening only through incredulity and seemingly genuine utterances of completely generic phrases.
Advertisement