WONDER LAND
She Got Life, He Was Live
How Rusty Yates talked with Larry as Andrea left.
opinionjournal.com
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, March 22, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST
Once you've seen and listened to Rusty Yates on TV's talk shows, it's not hard to see why so many women want to lynch him. This column was going to comment on the social and psychiatric issues raised by the Yates case and guilty verdict. But the case itself--with its arguments over psychosis and major depression--seems intellectually austere compared with trying to explain the psychopathologies of American television. For me the Yates story landed on another planet Monday evening when, while surfing the cable waves, what should roll in but Larry King interviewing Rusty Yates. Isn't he supposed to be in mourning, or something similar?
Larry was leaning on his elbows, sleeves rolled up on a lime-green shirt, the way he'd look if he were interviewing Liza Minelli on her new marriage (that would be Wednesday night's show). Rusty Yates was sitting really upright, in a very smooth, blue shirt and shiny tie. Bright blue eyes, brown hair that is nice and neat, and a smooth face. It doesn't move much.
Earlier that same day in Houston, a judge sentenced Andrea to life in prison. Rusty was on Larry King. The disjunction--Andrea hearing she was going away forever, her husband talking with Larry--was hard to process. There was more.
About an hour later, another cable wave rolled in, offering a replay of Rusty being interviewed by Katie Couric. But wait, isn't Katie Couric on in the morning? Wasn't Rusty's wife in Houston, being formally sentenced to life about when Katie Couric had him talking in New York about his support and love for Andrea?
Here, from Yahoo news, is the description of what happened that day in a Houston court and on TV. It sounds like a short story by Flannery O'Connor, or Stephen King:
She was fingerprinted in court. Yates looked into the gallery--but her only close supporters were two jail psychiatrists. Some of her relatives, including her husband Russell Yates, were out of state being interviewed on national TV programs. After the sentencing, Judge Belinda Hill said, "Good luck to you, Mrs. Yates."
There are moments--and watching Rusty, Larry and Katie was one of them--when one wants to go out to the street, stare up at the stars in the dark sky and admit, I don't get it anymore. It's also getting hard to know who to get mad at first. It's hard by now to get mad at a Larry King or Katie Couric. Like androids, this is what they do--interview anyone and ask them anything. It's beyond shame. It's a subset of pornography. But what the presumably real pornographers do on the Playboy Channel seems almost earnestly innocent by comparison.
At least the porn producers maintain the quaint pretense of committing private acts in private places, like a bedroom or the backyard. Mainstream television, blowing on us like ocean winds against the beach, has by now worn away any norm of what is appropriately private. If the persons closest to you have been slaughtered and your wife sent to a cell for 40 years, it is now, truly, the most normal thing in the world to take this opportunity to "share" with Larry King and 10 million total strangers--and then answer call-ins. Caller: "Rusty, I'm interested in knowing how has the public's reaction to this case affected your opinion about people in general? And also, Rusty, I'd like to also commend you for the way you've stood by Andrea. Thank you."
Flannery O'Connor, an eerie genius, wrote about the personal and mental interstices that stand, like sentinels of social sanity, between more or less normal life and acts that would strike most people as unacceptable and as often, unexplainable. There is a strange line at the end of one O'Connor story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," about a gang that shoots a family. "She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." Can't explain it? Toward the end of their interview, Larry King asked Rusty Yates how he thought Andrea would handle incarceration. "I talked to her doctor at the jail about it," said Rusty Yates. "She thinks she'll do fine. Andrea can get by with not a lot. She's a good woman." A good woman is also hard to find.
People keep looking for reasons deep inside the Yates case. But I keep wondering what's happening to all the rest of us, soaking up these recurring, weird events from our living rooms, in a gray zone between honest interest and prurience. Sometimes solid ground is hard to find.
CBS's recent "9-11" special, about the firemen that day, with the loud sound of falling bodies, seemed acceptable. The special service for surviving families at Ground Zero, letting us stare into their stricken faces, swam uncomfortably between solidarity and voyeurism. But watching Katie Couric call forth Rusty Yates's personal testimony at the very hour Andrea was in chains in a Houston courtroom was more than even the national neurology, so accustomed to social overload, should be expected to endure.
People say, you don't have to watch this stuff. That won't let you pretend it isn't happening. And one could say, rightly, that we ought to come to grips with the case of Andrea and Rusty Yates. But why bother. That was last week. We've been watching this California dog-mauling case that's been all over television this week, and yesterday's guilty verdict is really interesting, and this is what I think . . .
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com. |
