Azaria again

And now, both she and Gerry have been made arguidi, or “suspects” in their daughter’s death by Portuguese investigators. That a “suspect” in the civil law system is akin to someone “assisting the police with their enquiries” at common law seems to have passed many people by. It has given the media free reign to speculate, in part because the civil law does not allow the police to discuss any of their lines of enquiry, thus fuelling doubt and innuendo. In an eerie echo of the Chamberlain case, traces of blood have allegedly been found in a car the McCanns hired. The fetal blood in the Chamberlains’ car, you may recall, turned out to be rust inhibitor.

“She is rogue property,
she must be taught her weeping.
It is done for the millions.
Sometimes the millions join in
with jokes: how to get a baby
in the Northern Territory? Just stick
your finger down a dingo’s throat”.

Much of the most risible commentary comes from people who think that their personal experience as parents can be used as a template for everyone else’s experience, a mental collectivisation that forgets the singularity of individual lives. Here is Andrew Pierce again:

I salute their courage in trying to prevent Madeleine becoming just another forgotten missing-child statistic. Some of my friends who are parents tell me that, if they had been trapped in the same nightmare, they would not have been able to face the media at all, let alone three times a day. But they have not lost a child, of course.

We have been transfixed by the story because Madeleine is a pretty child whose parents are as removed as it is possible to be from the stereotypical image of a single mother going to the Costa Brava leaving the kids home alone. The fact that they are doctors, who save lives rather than take them, added to our fascination.

How many times in the past 127 days have you debated whether you would leave a three-year-old and two-year-old twin siblings, without adult supervision, while dining in a tapas bar a 52-second walk away?

But the other reason we have been absorbed is because we’re filled with a mixture of admiration and disbelief at the way Kate McCann always appeared so immaculate in public, when most mums would have broken down long ago.

Only mathematicians can make firm predictions, and only in certain branches of mathematics. As a lawyer, I advise my clients on the basis of precedent, but no lawyer is foolish enough to pretend to complete predictive power, no matter how “regular” the area of practice. “Too often”, as George Clason once wryly observed, “the lessons of experience are wasted on dead men”.

Kate McCann has wept on cue, has kept her womanly end of the bargain. It remains to be seen whether Les Murray’s bitter view of Australia’s treatment of prominent (but unsettling) women is true of Britain as well.

“Most times, though, the millions
stay silent, and the jokes
are snobbish media jokes:
Chemidenko. The Oxleymoron.
Spittle, like the flies on Black Mary.
After the feeding frenzy
sometimes a ruefully balanced last lick
precedes the next selection”.

The poem quoted throughout this piece is Les Murray’s A Deployment of Fashion.