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JONBENET WHO?
BY PETER KURTH (published 08.23.06)
Oh, right. It’s all
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. Her 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 dressed 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 could possibly 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 so what? Being called names is
“the burden of leadership,” says White House spokesman Tony
Snow.
And if you don’t
believe Snow, just ask Anna Diggs Taylor, the
black, female, liberal-pinko judge in Michigan
who has temporarily put the kibosh on Bush’s unconstitutional NSA
wiretapping program, and therefore “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, the 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 yet this year, have we? Nobody’s
daughter disappeared in Aruba. Mel Gibson copped a
plea, depriving the pundits of a really fascinating trial. (Just imagine, “the activist judge” might have been
Jewish!) 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 just a
tad uneasy, a 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? Am I not
a writer who’d like a bestseller of his own? Am I incapable of
sympathy for the Ramsey family, or even curiosity about the earthshaking
ramifications of JonBenet’s murder and the ever-present menace of
“quiet, slim, pasty-looking,” twice-divorced Southern drifters
and schoolteachers like John Mark Karr, whose 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 pumped-up 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 back from Bangkok to Boulder,
escorted by God knows how many guards and reporters, 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. But I really don’t. I had more than 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’re 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 more on her mind than her
“live” colonoscopy. Now there’s
some footage I really never want to see again.
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