|
|
JONBENET WHO?
BY PETER KURTH (published 08.23.06)
Oh, right – that JonBenet.
She’s coming back to me now, in spades. That blonde, dimpled,
6-year-old “beauty queen,” dressed and painted like a Vegas
hooker, who was found beaten and strangled in the basement of her
parents’ home in Boulder, Colorado,
on Christmas Day, 1996. JB’s sudden reemergence
as a news item has blown even last week’s shrieking issue,
“Terror in the Skies,” right out of the, uh, skies. Who cares
about a bunch of slobby tourists having to ditch their shampoo and Binaca
at the airport when we’ve finally got a suspect in (yet another)
“Crime of the Century” and, better still, a self-confessed
child molester behind bars? And the neat part is,
we get to see all that tacky video footage again: JonBenet decked out as a
cowgirl or a showgirl, tossing her boa, faking a striptease and grinning at
the camera.
What fun! And what journalist
worthy of the name would pass on a story like this? Lebanon
has a “cease fire,” after all, and there were only 3438
civilian deaths in Iraq
in July — a 9 percent increase from June, but so what? In Britain, John Prescott, the acting
head of government while Tony Blair is on vacation, has described George
Bush as “crap” and “just a cowboy with his Stetson
on,” but again, so what? Being called names is “the burden of
leadership,” says White House spokesman Tony Snow.
If you don’t believe
Snow, you can ask Anna Diggs Taylor, that black, female, liberal-pinko
judge in Michigan who’s
temporarily put the kibosh on Bush’s NSA wiretapping program and
therefore, ipso facto,
“supports the terrorists.” She’s probably lesbian, too, intent on destroying the traditional
family, although no one in the media said so last week. Commentators
preferred to note that Judge Taylor was appointed during the “failed
presidency” of Jimmy Carter, and was once married to a Congressman
“later convicted of 29 counts of operating a payroll kickback scheme
in his office.” Which ought to qualify her as a Republican, right?
Right, but so what?
We’ve got JonBenet to think about. Why shouldn’t the corporate media turn their conglomerate
back on every story of significance and revert to what they do best,
saturating the pages and airwaves with tasteless, tedious, specious,
endless and pointless blather about murdered white girls? In this case,
“wall-to-wall coverage” of a 10-year-old crime that never had
the slightest relevance to anyone but the victim, her family, her
killer(s), Colorado law enforcement and, I suppose, those residents of
Boulder who were alarmed enough to add another lock to their doors.
Well? Why blame the media? We
haven’t had any hurricanes this year, have we? Nobody’s
daughter disappeared in Aruba. And it appears that
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ new baby, the mysterious
“Suri,” isn’t a deformed, three-toed alien from space
after all, but a beautiful, healthy and “perfectly normal”
child, destined for a life in Scientology and, one day, a rather stupendous
financial inheritance. Let’s face it, from the point of view of media
scandal, the kind the public gobbles up, this summer’s been Double
Dullsville.
So why am I feeling a tad
uneasy, just a little bit sick to my stomach, about JonBenet’s media
resurrection and “the multi-million-dollar industry” The New York Times says has been
built around her death since 1996? Am I un-American or something? Aren’t
I a writer who’d like a bestseller of his own? Am I incapable of
sympathy for the Ramsey family, or even curiosity about the shattering
ramifications of JonBenet’s murder and the ever-present menace of
“quiet, slim, pasty-looking” Southern
drifters and schoolteachers like John Mark Karr? Why, Karr’s students in Thailand
were apparently so scared of his “strictness” that they
“wet their pants in their seats” rather than ask to be excused
to the bathroom!
Really, what is the matter with me? As far as
I’m concerned, the only winners in this scenario are JonBenet and her recently dead mother, the
much-maligned Patsy, now twirling their batons through all eternity and,
let’s hope, missing the rest. As I write this, Mr. Karr is on his way
from Bangkok back to Boulder,
escorted by God knows how many guards and reporters and with
“breaking news” updates every 10 minutes telling me just how
much longer it’ll be till he lands.
On Google’s news page,
I can select from more than 6000 articles published already if I want to
know more about him. Alas, I don’t. I had enough of JonBenet when her story first aired, and, for all I
know, the skeptics are right when they say that Karr has copped to her
murder only to escape those “filthy, overcrowded and notoriously
dangerous” prisons in Siam.
Maybe I should wait for Katie
Couric to explain it all for me when she takes over as anchor of the CBS
Evening News on September 5 — after they’ve finished fixing her
hair, changing her clothes, and lowering her voice ever so slightly, in
order to turn her from morning television’s unchallenged Princess of
Perk into a heavyweight newswoman with “gravitas” and more on
her mind than her fatherless children and her live colonoscopy. Now there’s some footage I never
want to see again.
|
