CLEVELAND — The word “perspective” has lately become a virus of our vocabulary, an easy catch-all to artificially minimize other problems.
Your air conditioner doesn’t work? Well, you just found out your next-door neighbor ‘s wife had an affair. That put it all in perspective.
Derek Jeter’s bat seems a little slow? Well, it could be worse. He could’ve been a political prisoner the old Soviet Union. A little perspective, please.
You know something that really did inject a substantial dose of perspective yesterday? The Casey Anthony verdict. Look, this isn’t the right part of the newspaper to debate whether or not justice was served or not. But there isn’t a human being with a working soul who doesn’t cry for one horrible fact:
Caylee Anthony is dead. And nobody has yet been forced to answer for it.
This was the kind of case that merited all the time, all the attention and all the energy of our judicial system. A 2-year-old girl drowns, her body is tossed in the woods, a suspect is arrested, arraigned, indicted, tried. This is why lawyers are paid handsomely, why judges and juries are empanelled, why taxpayer dollars are spent.
In this moment, frankly, it is difficult to build an angry lather about Roger Clemens, whose federal perjury case begins in earnest this morning in Washington, with the start of jury selection. Forget how you may feel about Clemens, whether you were ever on the business end of one of his withering glares, whether you detest him for throwing a ball at Mike Piazza’s head and a bat at his body, whether you think he juiced, whether you care for his swagger and his petulance.
Did he do his share to stain baseball? If you believe the likes of Brian McNamee, then you probably think so — and you certainly know he wasn’t alone. Did he damage his legacy as one of the great pitchers in history? Maybe he did — or maybe he was simply doing what he felt was necessary to keep up with hitters who weren’t exactly relying on milk and spinach to get bigger, stronger and faster all across the ’90s.
Forget all of that for a second and ask yourself this:
Is it really in the interest of justice — justice as we know it, justice that is supposed to protect us from murderers and rapists and arsonists and scam artists — to discover, once and for all, if he lied to Congress? Is it really worth the hours, and the effort, and the dollars, to try to put Roger Clemens in jail for more than what would be a huge dose of shock value? Do his baseball transgressions — for which he’ll have to answer, and the results aren’t likely to be to his liking — really merit the scrutiny of a jury?
“What if arguably the greatest pitcher of the last half-century does jail time?” Bob Costas recently told the Washington Post. “That would reverberate for a while.”
Yes it would. Will that really make us feel better, if Clemens winds up doing time? Is there an actual victim? No. Justice serves nobody here, just an abstraction. And is that really the best way to occupy the system’s time?
Who is the good guy in all of this, McNamee? Maybe the other tabloid in town thinks so, since it’s used him in uber-cheesy online fitness videos at the same time it was telling his side of the Clemens saga, a duality that’s beyond dubious. But McNamee is no angel, and is at least one of many of co-conspirators who helped visit this steroid scourge upon baseball. Are we supposed to cheer because after so many years he decided to stop lying?
Is that really our standard for heroism now?
The judge in the case, Reggie Walton, had a busy day yesterday, pondering whether to rule out Clemens’ ex-teammates (a setback for the prosecution, which would also reduce the trial’s titillation factor by 80 percent) and whether to keep McNamee’s alleged past bad acts out (a smaller defeat for the defense). Opening arguments likely start next week.
I’m not sure what both sides will be chasing in Washington, but it won’t be justice. Justice is making someone answer for a dead 2-year-old girl. It’s not trying to catch a 48-year-old man in a fib. It’s just not.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com