Poetic License

More so than ever in my rather long life, a lot of untruths, half-truths, or outright pure horseshit is flying around. It made me wonder–How do you know whom to believe? How do you just know you’re being fed a line of absolute garbage? My parents might not have meant to do it (because I often go against many things they believed), but they helped me to become a critical thinker. A college education and lots of reading took me the rest of the way. Part of critical thinking, of course, is listening and discerning the real from the fabrication. It is important to not stay static and rigid in one’s opinions. You take in new information, evaluate it based on common sense, education, and the basics of scientific knowledge, and determine for yourself whether your views have changed or not.

I’m not rigid, not rigid in my opinions, in my politics, or in my own self. I think it’s a strange person who becomes so utterly convinced of something that they cannot fathom changing their mind. So I’m interested in what you think. Would you classify yourself as a rigid person or as someone who listens and can possibly be convinced of a different way of looking at a topic? How do you know that what you believe is the honest truth? How often are you able to take in new information and apply it to your own schema of the world?

Perhaps the thing that made me think about this the most was watching the latest installment of the Monsters series on Netflix (The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story). I’m thinking that many of you, dear readers, were not old enough (or even alive) during the August 20, 1989 murders or during the protracted trials of the brothers to have a deeply held opinion about the outcome of the trials. I am. But just like many of you who might be encountering this story for the first time, I went into my own evaluation of the trials angry on behalf of the murder victims, José and Kitty Menendez, and ready for justice to be done. I was ready for those boys to get the death penalty, just like the final and decisive penalty they exacted on their mother and father. I listened to a lot of the trial proceedings, at least the segments that were aired after I got home from work every day, and listened to the reports about the trial. Of course, I heard all of their tales about sexual abuse at the hands of their parents, but I didn’t believe them. I didn’t believe them then, and. though my opinion swayed a bit during the nine episodes of Monsters, I remain certain that I don’t believe most of what they said.

I will warn you that the series is rather graphic. The murders play out with detail and gruesome camera work, thanks to modern visual effects, but they are not overblown. They are presented as they are believed to have happened, based on the eventual confessions of the Menendez brothers. The brothers went out into the greater L.A. area and bought two Mossberg shotguns in the days leading up to their crime, specifically to commit these murders. The two of them came into the house late in the evening, and, finding their parents napping, shot them to death in the family room, its wall lined with trophies the sons earned from playing tennis. Lyle even took the time to go out to the car and reloaded his shotgun, because his mother was still alive, despite being shot multiple times with blasts of buckshot. He reloaded and came back and shot her in the head.

The series is also graphic in its depiction of the sexual abuse stories that Lyle and Erik told their defense attorney (Leslie Abramson) and, later, Lyle’s pen-pal girlfriend, who turned her recordings of Lyle into a book. The brothers concocted grand stories of abuse at the hands of their parents, mostly their father, but told their stories long after the killings. Immediately after the killings, you might imagine they would be bereft and perhaps confessional, but they weren’t broken boys regretting their actions. Instead they went on a $700,000 spending spree. May I remind you that $700,000 went pretty far in the late 1980s. Only Erik seemed to start to break down eventually, but only after he and Lyle were arrested.

If you are new to this story, you might wonder how close to reality the depiction is of the boys. I can assure you, the two brothers were spoiled rich kids who never worked and who spent their father’s money like it was water. They were the Kardashians of the 1980s, without the reality show. Yes, they wore Tommy Hilfiger, white tennis shorts, and popped collars. Yes, Lyle wore a toupee. Whether they listened to Milli Vanilli, I can’t say, but that little detail in the series just highlighted their general ridiculousness. They were completely out of touch with the real world.

The series spends a fair bit of time expanding on their stories of abuse during the earlier episodes, to the point where I began to wonder if I had misjudged the brothers. Some of these details had been kept out of the press (and reading Lyle Menendez: In His Own Words wasn’t something I was willing to do). But by Episode 7, I saw that the other side of the story was emerging, the one in which they were liars and con men who had thought about doing this for a long time. Because a previous client of Abramson’s had walked free after giving the “abuse excuse,” the boys seized on the idea and manufactured one helluva tale. I couldn’t help but wonder if this ever would have happened had they simply put the boys in separate jails at the beginning of their incarceration. They would not have been able to discuss what they were going to say, pass notes back and forth between cells, and make several failed plans to escape. But that is all history now.

The brothers’ first trial ended in a hung jury. A mistrial was declared. After some time, a second trial was held, but the honey pot had run dry and they were broke. Abramson stayed on pro bono, and a public defender was provided to Lyle during his second trial. He was found guilty of first-degree murder, and the same verdict was delivered to Erik, too. All of their tall tales got them nothing. Now, not only are they broke, but they are also in prison for the rest of their lives.

Throughout the series, another character served to represent our attitude toward the brothers, as well as our conscience. Dominick Dunne (played by Nathan Lane, who knocked it out of the park) was a reporter for Vanity Fair magazine (and others in the series described him as a failed movie producer, which I found very harsh). Dunne was a brilliant writer, if a little gossipy, who lost his daughter, Dominique, to an assault in which her then boyfriend, always abusive, had choked her for five solid minutes. She was left comatose. When she was discovered, she was taken to the hospital and placed in ICU. She died a few days later. Dunne had endured the loss of his beautiful daughter and then watched in horror as his daughter’s killer was convicted of a lesser second-degree manslaughter, which resulted in him being released after only three years in prison. Dunne learned during that brutal period of his life not to trust the criminal justice system in Los Angeles, and really, can you blame him?

There is so much more I could say about this series. I might watch it again, if only to dive a little more into some of Nathan Lane’s brilliant dialogue. This time I will likely skip listening to all of the stories of abuse.Being a survivor myself, I found it brought unwelcome memories to my conscious mind, things I’d rather put away for good.

When the brothers were put away for good in the 1990s, I pretty much put them out of my mind. I felt certain I knew enough of the story to have the matter settled in my mind. But during this series, the wavering of my opinion shook me. When it was over, I found that my original thoughts about the case still held true for me.

But this all started me thinking about all of the other things in our daily lives that we have to make judgments about, especially politics, of late. When I see and hear so many of the orange one’s followers spewing absolute nonsense and parroting the conspiracy theories and utter hogwash he spouts, well, it is disheartening. Whatever happened to critical thinking? Whatever happened to thinking at all? As I told a group of friends recently, I don’t want to tell you how to vote, but for god’s sake please form your own opinion about what is right and what is wrong. Decide what is real and true for you. Don’t let someone make you believe in dog-eating Ohioans. For the record, I have some dear friends in Springfield. Their dogs are safe from zombie immigrants. Let’s hope they’re safe from the orange one, too.

Namaste (and VOTE!)

Jude

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZbUENJ5FjBk?si=XcUCn6R_0hvQmgsW