ATTICA! ATTICA! ATTICA!

It isn't always pretty, the work of a professional advice columnist. It requires me to cast a cool, appraising eye on the human condition, and sometimes what I see isn't very nice. Take the criminal justice system. I think we all know that the conditions under which convicted felons serve their time can be brutally harsh and repressive, and sometimes the cri du coeur that comes from such a person rends the air so painfully that I just can't turn away. (Also, I have a chronic back condition which makes it awkward for me to turn to the left, so cris du coeur that come at me from the right tend to get my attention.) It's just such a case that caught my eye this morning. Stock swindler Martha Stewart finds her house arrest "hideous," and complains that the electronic bracelet she's forced to wear on her ankle irritates the skin.

Gosh. Where to begin?

Let me sketch the outlines of Stewart's confinement, as I'm not sure her case made the papers.  Stewart is restricted to a cramped 153-acre estate in poverty-stricken Bedford, NY, where the median house value is $447,000 and median income is a bottom-scraping $100,053. This is according to City-data.com, which also notes that in 2001, the last year for which crime data are available, the mean streets of Bedford were wracked by murders numbering in the no digits. There are six structures on the property, which cost Stewart $16 million in 1990, and at least two of those have been reported to be "drafty." Stewart is forced to remain within the estate's old stone walls (only some of which, according to USA Today, have been "spruced up") for all but 48 hours a week. Which means, according to the crushing logic of penological math, that assuming Stewart's driver spends two hours a day shuttling her to and from her offices in Manhattan, and that she spends from 10 to 3 every weekday browbeating her underlings, she only has six hours left to get out and brutalize the local merchants on Saturday, and seven to catch a movie and some lunch in the village on Sunday.

Have we all gone nuts? Is she kidding? There are weeks when Mr. Irresponsible doesn't get out of his PJs at all, and this biddy is pitching a fit because she only has enough time in her average week of unspeakable privilege to, say, drive non-stop from New York to Las Vegas?* And a respected wire service -- or, in this case, the Associated Press -- actually prints it? As if it were news? 

Once again Mr. Irresponsible is forced to crib from James L. Brooks' "Broadcast News," a movie that had a good deal to say about keeping one's humanity in the workplace. "What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams?" asks Tom Grunick, the impossibly blessed anchorman. Aaron Altman, the correspondent who is drowning in his own decency, answers succinctly: "Keep it to yourself."  And apply a little Lubriderm to that place where the electronic bracelet chafes your ankle.

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*Mr. Irresponsible has done this, and doesn't recommend it.