Following Dan Solove’s post at Co-Op on the utterly disgusting conduct of California Highway Patrol Officers who posted photographs of the decapitated Nikki Catsouris online, I jumped in to express my outrage and disgust that our protectors would do something like this.  Now Marc Randazza (of the Sicilian Randazzas) at the Legal Satyricon has stepped into the mix, and brings a very different perspective to the mess.

In an extraordinarily powerful post, Randazza, after noting that his utter disgust for the photos and the conduct of the wealth of nutjobs who enjoy such images and frequent the internet earth, hiding their diseased minds in feigned normalcy and online anonymity, reminds us that offended sensibilities, no matter how justified, shouldn’t move us to forget why we have freedom of speech.  That said, he goes into an entirely different area.

“Cultural class warfare,” Randazza explains, distinguishes the Catsouris case.  Here’s a young woman, high on cocaine, driving a Porsche, and now she’s dead with hideous pics to prove it.  Had it not been a “privilege, young white girl,” no one would have cared enough to post her photos.  And if they did, no one would have cared enough to write about it.  And if they did, no one would have cared enough to be outraged.  What was once the object of envy of the poor is now the subject of ridicule.  They got their revenge at the expense of the Catsouris’. 

Sadly, Randazza’s right.  Horrible things happen to poor people, to black people, to poor black people.  No one bothers to post the photos or bemoan the wrong done them.  It just doesn’t seem to matter.

This “phenomenon” can be more easily observed, and happens with far greater frequency, with missing, murdered and abused children.  The back of milk cartons are filled with faces, often of color, and yet we hear nothing about them.  Yet, when a white child of well-to-do parents goes missing or turns up dead, it becomes a national story.  It’s shocking how bald the distinction is.  Think Natalee Holloway.

So when images of Nikki Catsouris appeared on the internet, horrible photos that no one should ever want to see, it was time for payback.  As if the Catsouris family was to be blamed.  But this really had nothing to do with the Catsouris family, though they suffered directly,  Randazza says that this “provides a salve to the daily suffering that comes from being a low-life.”  So much of our cultural angst derives from some miserable human being needing someone they can deride to feel a momentary sense of being better than someone else.  It explains why the sickest, stupidest, lowest white man will ridicule a successful, educated black man, as if the color of his skin made the former intrinsically better.  The former needs to hate black skin to show that he isn’t at the very bottom of the ladder of humanity, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

The “solution” to the Catsouris dilemma is that we ought to be far better people than we are, and by no means is there any excuse for the conduct of the CHiPs officers who initially distributed the photos.  But we aren’t better people, and those who seized upon the photos to rub it in the face of Nikki Catsouris’ family are the worst of us.  No law has ever been enacted to change the diseased mind of the miserable.  And there will always be miserable, disgusting human beings.  It’s our nature.