This is an extremely distressing story: a woman faxes a suicide note to her mortgage servicer on the day the foreclosure sale is scheduled, and is dead by the time the police arrive. Distressing for anyone with what I take to be a normal sense of human decency, that is. To the local and now national media, it seems to be catnip. Carlene Balderrama's personal tragedy is in danger of becoming an indelible urban legend of the Great Predatory Foreclosure Crisis, uncomfortable facts be damned. The tenor of the reporting, of course, makes anyone who expresses any skepticism about the media's line on this sad event sound inhuman. I have been telling myself since I first saw this story that only a fool would try to steer a course through the rock of credulousness or the hard place of callousness. But I guess it's my job to be a fool...
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