Hildegarde

I am having one of those weirdly amorphous days when things aren’t so much going wrong as just petering out.

Work went, but that was about all you could say about it.  I tried four times to throw a girl in a white dress in front of a speeding green Chevy without actually killing her off–or killing off the driver–and all I got was a green Chevy mess in a ditch on one try and a tangle of rain-soaked confusion in the other.  This was obviously not what I was looking for, so I’ve put it aside to get back to tomorrow.

With work not going anywhere, I find myself fretting about things that could not be changed or fixed, and that I don’t think it would be a good idea to try.

The unchangeable and unfixable this morning has to do with what I think of as the natural history of start ups.

Somebody gets a great idea to produce a product or service that nobody has thought of before.  He goes to work, founds the business, builds the business, and then gets hugely successful. 

At that point, a large conglomerate comes along, offers to buy him out for a gazillion dollars–and the guy takes the money and runs.

Before we go haring off in the direction of Big Evil Corporations, I want to note here that I find nothing at all wrong with this sequence.  Businesses are hard to start and hard to run, and if you start one as a young person you’re likely to find yourself facing that conglomerate’s offer at about the time other people retire.

There’s nothing magic about “entrepreneurship” that makes it unlikely that you’re going to want to chuck the work when you’re sixty five–or, better yet, fifty. 

And that is particularly true in this particular time and place, where getting bigger and more successful as a business inevitably lands you with increased regulations and mandates. 

There is a problem, however, for your customers.  Almost always, when such a new business emerges as successful, it’s because it’s addressing a demand that nobody else is addressing.

In other words, there’s something out there that at least some people want that nobody else thinks it worthwhile to supply, and you’re supplying it.

Whatever this thing is is almost always a minority taste–it doesn’t tap into the most profitable demographic, say, or it appeals to a relatively small segment of the population.

What happens next, of course, is that this large conglomerate takes a look at this business of yours it’s bought and starts to smooth out the edges, make the thing more palatable to a larger public, make it more like everything else…

…and, in no time at all, the business you founded is no longer supplying the need you identified. 

It is also nowhere near as successful as the conglomerate projected it would be, because it’s now just like everything else, and there’s a lot of competition for the attention of people who want things that are just like everything else.

I want to stress, again, that I don’t see anything wrong with this series of events.  I don’t think the conglomerate is a Big Evil Corporation enforcing conformity on the American public, or harrassing quirky new businesses until they have to run for cover.

Nor do I think the resulting (temporary) homogenization is some kind of public menance that ought to be constrained by government power.

There is often another stage in this series of events, the one in which the entrepreneur, having waited out the three or five or ten year period in which he promised not to start a competing business–starts a competing business.

And the whole cycle starts all over again.

At the moment, the particular example of this cycle that has me annoyed concerns a television cable channel that used to be called CourtTv.

CourtTV had a very simple premise–provide real-time life footage (and later replay the recordings) of real trials in real courtrooms.

Some of these trials were famous and important, but a lot of them were not. 

They were just the day to day stuff of (almost always criminal) courtrooms.  I have no idea who chose the trials to broadcast, but whoever it was had a good sense of what might make a trial interesting to the general public.

It was on CourtTv that I first heard about the woman who had hit a man with her car while she was drunk–and with a suspended license for a previous DUI. 

The man she hit flew up into the air and came down on her windshield, with his head smashing right through it.  He was still alive, and instead of stopping and calling the police, she drove the car and the man home, parked it in her garage, and spent the next several days getting high as a kite on everything imaginable while drifting out to the garage to apologize to the (still living) guy with the head through her windshield.

The man did die eventually, of course.  And the first time I heard about this woman, CourtTv was broadcasting her trial for murder.

The CourtTv case that affected me the most and stayed with me the longest was a lot less bizarre.  In fact, it was entirely too commonplace.

It concerned a young woman in her twenties who had gone out one night, alone, to a two-for-one Tequila Sunrise happy hour at a local bar.  She drank about seven of these things, and then she got into her car and started to drive home.

By then, it was getting dark, and she was in no condition anyway.  She ran a stop sign at a deserted intersection a mile or two away, and ending up t-boning a car coming through from the other direction, instantly killing all four of the teen-agers inside it.

Unlike the the woman on trial for carrying the body around in her windshield for days, it was impossible to make fun of this person.  She was completely and utterly distraught, so much so that she kept pulling her hair over her face as if it were a curtain.

There is a lot of stuff in the law about how a defendant is supposed to be able to assist in her own defense.  This young woman couldn’t assist in her own lunch.  Long before the inevitable verdict had been pronounced, she was just plain gone. 

Of course, I have no way of knowing if she was gone because she was wracked with guilt over what she had done, or because she was devastated to see that her life was over.

Still, I’ll never forget her.  And my instinct says it was the guilt.

There is no longer anything called CourtTv.  It changed its name a few years back, having been taken over by one of the large media companies, and is now TruTv.

When the change happened, there was a lot of fanfare about how the name indicated even more, even better CourtTv–with a slogan that was something like “not reality, actuality.”

What we got instead, of course, was yet another cable channel that seems to be dedicated to nothing but “reality” shows, most of them indescribably boring, and compliation shows like World’s Dumbest Criminals and World’s Smartest Inventions.

I loved watching real trial on CourtTv, but I’m under no illusion that anybody owed me the service.

And sometimes, if a case is making enough noise, we get the old format back–TruTv did broadcast the Casey Anthony trial, for instance.

I’ve been wondering over the last couple of days if this case in Wisconsin will merit a return to broadcasting trials.

For those of you who live on Pluto and haven’t heard any of this: sometime in the past week, police in a small town in Wisconsin arrested two twelve-year-old girls after they lured a mutual friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. 

According to the girls, they did this in order to meet a person they’d met online, who wanted them to kill somebody as a kind of introduction.

The somebody turned out to be a fictional character with no real life counterpart, the protagonist in a series of very popular web horror stories.

And nobody was entirely sure where the girls got the idea that you had to kill somebody to meet him, since that isn’t part of his character, or why they thought he lived in a nearby national park.

The stabbed girl was in critical condition but still alive last time I checked the news.

The whole incident reaches well beyond the bizarre into the surreal.

And the prosecutor in Wisconsin has charged to girls as adults.

To restate something I actually managed to say on Twitter yesterday:  I’ve met chihuahuas with stronger holds on reality.

I think the likeliest outcome here is that somebody with a cooler head and more common sense will talk the prosecutor down from the trying-them-as-adults thing. 

There is certainly something very awful going on here, but I don’t think it’s a Bad Seed kind of thing.

On the other hand, I’d be hard pressed to tell you what I think it was.

This is the kind of thing I think we ought to have an answer to, but we don’t.

In the meantime, if CourtTv was still in its original incarnation, I’d know for sure I’d get to see any trial that came out of this case.  Now, I’m not sure.

And yes, that has me annoyed.