The Sad Lessons of the “Affluenza” Teen

In considering the lamentable chronicle of the “affluenza” teen Ethan Couch—which was positioned to be this year’s final tabloid preoccupation until Bill Cosby was charged with sexual assault—it’s been hard to know where to let one’s sense of appalled fascination come to rest. Should it be with Ethan himself, who, in the late spring of 2013, two months past his sixteenth birthday, plowed the truck he was drunkenly driving off a residential road in Burleston, a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, and into a knot of people, killing four and injuring nine? Or with Fred Couch, Ethan’s father, a sheet-metal millionaire who raised his son to believe that only little people are required to obey rules, and who reportedly responded to a dispute with the administration at Ethan’s private school by suggesting that he would resolve matters by buying the institution?