License to Shrill: Nancy Grace and Getting Pretend Angry

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.

But then it was revealed that on the night of his wife's death Kirk had eaten part of a "marijuana candy."

All rise, Honorable Judge Grace presiding.

"When you HEAR a story like THIS, where the guy is HIGH, on a LEGAL, marijuana COOKIE, how can you CONTINUE, to insist that pot be LEGALized?" Grace shrieks, to the camera, to the panel members, to the planets, to the universe, to the miniature Nancy Grace in Nancy Grace's brain that is throwing rocks through the windows of the abandoned ETHICS & MORALS CO. building. "And I'm not talking about medical marijuana. So don't start up with that. I'm talking about recreational marijuana."

She lurches her head forward as she concludes each thought fragment, like she needs physical momentum to shake the words from her head and out of her mouth.

She uses air quotes and huffs and cranes her neck. She speaks in sentences that are each punctuated by "?????" She is our nation's emoji board for deviant crimes. She seems both terrified and confused by marijuana's existence. What is it? Where does it live? Who are its parents? Do you even KNOW if marijuana HAS parents? Actually, Nancy Grace seems confused and terrified by nearly everything. Somewhere, in a panicked sweat, she is climbing into a refrigerator to understand how the light turns off when you close the door.

On the phone is Dr. Michael Arnall, Informed Man and Forensic Pathologist. Grace asks him, "Dr. Arnall, you're there, you're in the middle of it all… uh… Dr. Arnall, joining us, from DENVER… where the Colorado ASSEMBLY deemed it OK to legalize recreational use of pot—Dr. Arnall, I wanna hear your thoughts on this."

What Arnall should have said is this: " MARIJUANA, LIKE OREOS AND JOY DIVISION AND PORNOGRAPHY, IS FREQUENTLY USED TO COMBAT PSYCHOLOGICAL IDIOSYNCRASIES. SOMETIMES WE FEEL FEELS AND IT IS VERY TRAUMATIC."

He said this instead: "Well I can tell you that it's relatively common to find THC—marijuana—in the blood after individuals either shoot or hang themselves, get in front of guns and are shot during homicides… So my impression is that there is just an appalling human carnage associated with this psychotropic drug."

And then, if just for a moment, Grace had nothing else to say.

Nancy Grace has said this about marijuana: that "hopped-up reefer maniacs are strangling people, killing whole families." That anyone who disagrees with her is "lethargic, sitting on the sofa, eating chips… fat and lazy." She said this about soda: "I mean, when my husband drinks a Diet Coke, Brad, I make him put it in an opaque plastic cup. I don't even want [my children] to see him having soda, OK? If they want to when they're 18, that`s their decision."

She is a provocative manifestation of our country's most puritanical set of morals. She is taking a stand and throwing up her hands, shaking her head and tsk-tsking, calling bullshit without the actual temerity to say "bullshit." In an interview with rapper 2 Chainz, she refers to B-roll footage of him smoking "a big fat doobie." She is a not-skinny white woman with just-so synthetic hair and a Macon, Georgia, accent dripping in oh-mah-LAWRD faux sincerity. Nancy Grace's fiancé was murdered while the two were in college, which makes her not only a martyr-by-association but a Champion of Justice with 100 EXP. If you have been molested or kidnapped or intoxicated, Grace is there to twist in her chair and let her mouth hang open in mock disgust, waiting for a hypothetical chorus of Midwestern housemoms to fill the void with a thousand gasps.

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.

Nancy Grace is a vigilante who does not want justice; she wants to hold the megaphone. She doesn't want to find the boy; she wants to be seen marching through the woods. She is the opponent of Bad, only because the implication then is that she is the champion of Good. She doesn't care; she has Liked the "Cares" page on Facebook. It is an affectation, an opportunity, a platform, a trademark. She is in business because people are simultaneously fascinated and frightened by disasters. It is the canker sore they rub their tongue over. It is the human experience writ large—the devastation, the anxiety, the moments of fleeting hope. Her show is an emotional fantasy camp, both a mildly threatening departure from comfort and a moment to feel righteous.

***

In August of 2006, the son of Melinda Duckett, a 22-year-old Florida resident, was reported missing. Duckett came under suspicion because of some inconsistent responses to police questioning. Duckett appeared on Nancy Grace's show a few weeks later, where she was relentlessly harassed by Grace. Grace asked Duckett for details; Duckett was skittish. Grace said, "Ms. Duckett, you are not telling us for a reason. What is the reason?"

The next day, Duckett killed herself. In response to the suicide, Grace said, "If anything, I would suggest that guilt made her commit suicide."

And there she is again. Because there is no crusader without a crusade, and there is no crusade without a tragedy, and with no tragedy there is no one holding their head in their hands. Nancy Grace only exists because somewhere, on a front lawn on a cul-de-sac, or on a stoop in a steel-gray urban sprawl, people are crying because they have lost someone. A child's terrible death does not matter; his parents' reaction to the terrible death does not matter. What matters is Grace, howling on one side, and everyone else on the other, either sad or pretending to be sad, or watching and listening and feeling nothing at all.

John Saward likes O. V. Wright and eating guacamole with no pants on. He lives in Connecticut. Follow him on Twitter.