Boston Herald Columnist Attends Aaron Hernandez Trial, Writes Embarrassing Thing

There is a certain type of city dweller—they're a certain age, of a certain mindset and outlook and demographic, and are almost always male—that defines himself by a stagy nostalgia for shitty things. Imagine Anthony Bourdain walking through today's horrid Times Square, trailed by cameras, talking loudly about how much he misses the old and equally horrid Times Square—the good old days, when the Hard Rock Cafe was a peep show with bodily fluids a quarter-inch deep on everything and the guys dressed as off-brand Elmos trying to strong-arm Dutch tourists into photos were homeless drug addicts. Imagine it and wince so hard that your chin leaves a bruise your chest.

This is not to say that it's impossible to be authentically emotional about crappy things—ask someone in their mid-thirties about the since-closed dives they used to drink in, or just hang around and wait for me to bring it up unbidden. But there is something especially unfortunate and uniquely embarrassing about feigned retroactive enthusiasm for things that obviously and undeniably super-sucked. It can seem sad to us, the way things we love pass on, to become things that other people will love. But not everything should live forever.

Someday, maybe, you will hear someone mourning the Feisty, Combative Tabloids and the gruff, no-nonsense writers—tradesmen, these guys, blue-collar types—who wrote salty, colorful columns therein. Remember, in this moment, that it is possible to abhor news media becoming a bunch of 27-year-old Harvard grads smugly well-actuallying each other on Twitter without missing people like the Boston Herald's Peter Gelzinis, who has written an extraordinarily bad column about his day spent watching Aaron Hernandez's fiancee testify at his murder trial.

Here are the first two paragraphs:

"To be honest, Shayanna Jenkins was not at all what I expected. From those icy stares Aaron Hernandez's fiancee has flashed in her previous appearances at the Fall River courthouse, I braced myself for Lil' Kim.

But what I got Friday from Shayanna's first appearance in the witness chair was a lot closer to Halle Berry."

And here are the last two:

"She appears to know she's trapped in a cesspool. It's too bad, because Shayanna might well have made some NFL stud a very nice trophy wife. Now the money will go to the lawyers.

And all she's left with is a thug."

Know that, in between, Gelzinis expresses surprise that Shayanna Jenkins did not "grunt" or curse under her breath in a way "that would force the judge to remind her she was in a court of law." He expresses the opinion that Jenkins "should have married someone like Julian Edelman or Malcolm Butler, instead of the thug who blah blah bleugh." It's not a long column, but all of it is like this—written in stilted tough-guy language, and from a point of view that's simultaneously painstakingly jaundiced and deliriously ignorant. There's something impressive about Gelzinis's ability to cram ten pounds of What The Fuck Are You Talking About Dude into a five pound column, but there's also something musty, sad, and finally inauthentic about it—it is a dumb person pandering to a readership that he clearly believes is even dumber, and doing so with the clumsiness of a seven-year-old clomping around in his father's work boots, babbling about coffee and the other things a seven-year-old believes adults talk about.

Anyway, it will not be a bad thing when the last person writing like Peter Gelzinis stops writing that way. May we all live to see it happen.