Ugly Kids Die Too

I don't remember where I was when I heard that JonBenet Ramsey had died. It was 1996, and as I recall I was pretty drunk that year. I feel guilty about this now, because I should certainly remember where I was when such an unfathomably important person was taken from us. I deduced that this little girl was so important because her murder was all I heard about for years afterwards. Every newspaper, TV newscast, radio talkshow and internet news site would fall all over the smallest, most minute detail of the investigation. Every news outlet in the world wanted to be the first to report that JonBenet had eaten seven Wheat Chex and half a slice of rye toast with the crust cut off (she was watching her weight for the next big pageant) that fateful morning. And then, out of nowhere, it stopped. The lurid accusations against the brother, the parents, the gardener, the butler (an odds on favorite as I recall) and anyone else who happened to have moseyed through the life of this heavily made up 6-year old, all ran into dead-ends. The murder of the moment would never be solved. The tabloids, the cut-rate news programs and the water-cooler Kojaks all over the country would have to move on to the next big mystery. Which I believe had something to do with how Bill Clinton's underpants ended up in Janet Reno's glove box. But I'm not sure because that was 1998, which found me fairly inebriated as well. The biggest effect the whole sordid JonBenet story had on me was that it turned me off of news in any of its forms for almost a decade. I still have not watched the evening news since that story broke. I just recently started getting a daily newspaper again. Old wounds had started to heal. Then it happened.

JonBenet's mother, Patsy Ramsey died of cancer. When I first ran across her picture on an internet news site, I thought to myself, "Man, that dead broad looks familiar. Who the hell is..." Then it hit me. Good Jesus help me, it's JonBenet's mother! And she's been buried with her umbrella of suspicion! This will invigorate the gossipwhores and set off a whole new flurry of JonBenet inspired pseudo-news. It's all starting again! We'll have to endure stories about the things JonBenet would be doing now had she not been so rudely stolen from us before her prime! Why, she'd be sixteen by now! She would have had her first boyfriend! She would be threatening to throw herself from the roof of the servants' quarters if daddy refused to buy her a Maserati before she even got her driver's license! As a budding model/beauty pageant contestant, she most surely would have bulimia and an addiction to amphetamines by now! She might even be doing her first stint in rehab, for the Lord's sake!

I laid low, and would only turn to the sections of the paper that I was sure would bear me no JonBenews. Like the Sports section, and...the Sports section. And, lo and behold, none came. There were box scores, and NASCAR standings, and stories about Bill Clinton's underpants ending up in Annika Sorenstam's glove box, but I did not run across one single story about JonBenet Ramsey in the Sports section. Which I counted as a miracle. Then I began to scan the other sections of the paper... carefully. Nothing on the front page. Nothing in the classifieds or job finder. Then, the real test. I turned to the most dangerous section of the paper. The section in which you could be subjected to interminable, cruel stories like the piece about the sounds that Ben and Jennifer make at their newborn demonchild to make it sleep, or Brad and Angelina's disgust when the help changes their satanspawn's diapers. That's right. The Life and Arts section. My hands shook as a separated the offending section from the rest of the paper. The front page had stories about how Madonna balances her home life with her onstage blasphemy and how sick Paris Hilton's hamster is. But nothing on the Ramseys. I turned the page. More crap about totally irrelevant, inane people whose talents for performing have completely over-inflated their sense of self-importance to the point that they actually believe people gave a good flying f*#k what they think about the state of world affairs. But nothing on the Ramseys. Liz Smith reporting on the state of Lindsay Lohan's virginity, Lance Bass and his empty closet, and more news on the world's most useless person, Paris Hilton. But, nothing on the Ramseys.

I was being paranoid, I decided. JonBenet is yesterday's news. Maybe the world had come to its collective senses. There were so many things wrong with America's obsession with the JonBenet story, I'm not sure I can get into all of them. Or that I should get into all of them. But I'll hit a couple of points. First of all, the sick bastard that came up with the idea to enter six-year old girls in beauty pageants should be castrated. Beauty pageants are what they are, and if you parade a child around in make-up and clothes that makes them look like they're twenty-four in a contest that awards the most attractive pre-pubescent, you may as well advertise it in "Pedophiles Quarterly." Is this the most loathsome and disgusting socially accepted practice going on in this country today? There are many contenders, but this has got to crack the list's top five.

After weeks turned into months into years of hearing about this story, it occurred to me that ugly, poor kids die all the time. And their families were probably just as devastated as the Ramseys most certainly were. We don't hear much about them, and for the most part, we shouldn't. They probably don't want you to know what their names are, and they certainly don't want drooling, rabid packs of bloodthirsty "journalists" hounding them to their dying day. But their stories are just as important as JonBenet Ramsey's. In some cases, more so. But they were in no way as interesting as the Ramseys. Is it decency that stops us from hounding the couple in our community that loses a child in this manner? Hell, no. Our disinterest in normal folks masquerades as decency. But at least it looks like decency. Something we never found it in ourselves to show the Ramseys by just leaving them the hell alone.

And now, this. Unless you've been hermetically sealed in a tupperware room with silly putty crammed in your ear-holes and a roll of duct-tape wrapped around the rest of your head, you know what I'm talking about. Even if you have been sealed in tupperware, you probably know what I'm talking about. Some mental case in Thailand confessed. John Mark Carr (these high-profile killers love the three name thing, don't they?) claimed that "I was with JonBenet when she died." That's an interesting confession. It's like a shoplifter saying, "The DVD's were in my pants when they were stolen." Now I'm hearing all kinds of crap about how this guy just confessed to stay out of a Thai prison, and that there's no physical evidence, and that his ex-wife is saying that she was with him when the murder was committed and blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you're back on the case, Kojak. Let's see if we can't wrap this thing up.