Wilson was primarily famous for two things: fucking anything he could catch, and funneling arms to the Afghani mujahedeen during the country’s war against the Soviet Union. Those of us unfortunate enough to be stuck in the room during Wilson’s speech were regaled by tales of how he ignored the law, bullied, end-ran, lied and cheated to get what he wanted, and I mean all this literally. Wilson was as proud of flaunting the law as he was of his lifelong pursuit of women with obvious esteem issues.

I desperately wanted, when the self-aggrandizement ended, to force my way to the microphone. Of course, by this point in time the recession was in full swing and it struck me that getting turfed wasn’t necessarily in my best interests. So I held fire. But here’s the comment I wanted to make:

Congressman Wilson, if I understand your remarks correctly, then I suppose we have you to blame for 9/11.

I neither advocate nor condone grave-dancing, but it is nonetheless true that there are bad human beings in the world. And the world is a better place when these people move on.

Maybe I’m going to Hell for saying so. But if I do, at least I’ll finally get a chance to talk to Charlie Wilson.

Mamasita! Mamasita! Psst! Psst! Psst!

Taunting, yet playful faces of men passed me by on uneven sidewalks, working diligently to make eye contact. I was lost, again, on a street in downtown San Jose, Costa Rica, walking quickly, head down. Only a few months in to my year-long stay as a business English teacher in the country, the unpredictability of the road and transportation systems continued to challenge even my most adventurous side. When I finally arrived at my destination, three hours into what should have been a 30-minute walk, I sat down and cried one of those long, cleansing cries. I felt dirty from a steady stream of what we North Americans might refer to as aggressive cat-calling or ogling. I was drenched in sweat and tears, and I was painfully conscious of my light skin, blue eyes. Worst of all, I was immersed in a kind of fear that most of my countrywomen never have to face here on the streets of America.

For two steady days, I analyzed it, over and over. Since I could not control them, I turned the focus on myself. Here’s how the conversation went:

Was it the way you were dressed?

Hmm. I don’t think so. I was wearing jeans, a high-cut dress shirt and shoes with no heel.

Were you making an inviting or flirtatious face?

Definitely not. I was scared and trying to act like I wasn’t.

Ahh, so they knew you were scared. That made it worse.

Yep, it’s my fault. Got to stop acting like a Gringa. Walk like a Tica.

How do Ticas walk?

Well it’s different, but I’m not sure how. I’ll have to study it more….

This is only one story. I have many others, more positive and redeeming stories about the privilege of sharing a year with some of the happiest people on earth, the Costa Ricans, or Ticos, as they call themselves. For every bad experience, like the one above, I have at least five good stories to tell of gracious families, patient bus drivers, selfless store clerks, and especially of the hard-working, intelligent students whom I came to love and respect.

But it’s human nature, a primal defense, for fearful experiences to insist on a place in the forefront of our recollections. So when I read the news of Laura Chinchilla becoming the first female president of Costa Rica, I was confronted by both joy and pain. And while I wished for the joy to be so much stronger than the pain, they were equally split. It’s wonderful that this landmark event ushers in an opportunity for Ticos and Ticas to see a woman in a position of power and leadership. But the pain persists because I understand the persistent ‘Psst’ that Ticas have tolerated. They’ve put up with it for so long, in fact, that they gave me funny looks when I mentioned it.

I pay attention to international news. I notice when women get elected into positions of authority. I celebrate to myself, maybe make a passing comment to co-workers or my students. Period. End of thought. But the more you know, the less you really know for sure.

I shut down my computer, as I do every day, but today my thoughts refuse to shut down along with it.

In the U.S. we’ve come to understand that, despite the best efforts of clever election posters and music videos, the skin color of our president still matters a great deal to a lot of people, and the same holds true for gender (just imagine if Hillary Clinton had won the election instead of Barack Obama). So please don’t read a passing headline concerning a country that most people couldn’t place on a map and assume it’s proof that women in Latin American countries are movin’ on up in the world. The fact is that they still face a climate where their worth is too often a function of sexual allure and family-making ability.

After replaying that little street incident in my head several times and coming up with no good answers, I did what I would often do when struggling with cultural differences; I talked to my students. We spoke regularly about language and behaviors in the context of their culture, U.S. culture and international business. When I related the incident and later used it as a classroom discussion topic, there were mixed reactions and nervous laughter. Some were embarrassed that their teacher felt uncomfortable for even one minute in the country they adored. They explained that it was a compliment. (This made me cringe, even though I knew it was coming.) And they pointed out that I kind of looked like a light-skinned Tica because I wear nice clothes and jewelry. They won’t say it, but Costa Ricans are like many internationals – they often think of Americans as overweight people in sneakers and sweatpants. So I received the cat-calling treatment usually reserved for Ticas. Go figure. Other students were silent for a moment, ashamed of the cultural reality and not knowing how it could be fixed (or even how to articulate their feelings on such complex subjects in their first language, let alone in their second).

That discussion paved the way to a safe place where we could openly talk about other tough subjects. Why were there job ads that openly advertised for people between the ages of 19 and 29? Why was it so hard for a woman to be hired into a professional position if she was over 35? Why did the mannequins in the clothing stores have triple-D sized breasts and a whole lot of ‘junk in the trunk’ (an American idiom they heard someone joking about in the office)? Could a woman really be effective as the president of the country? Was she in a lose/lose situation? Was she being elected just because she had the support of Oscar Arias? What if Chinchilla was unattractive? Would she have a chance at winning then?

And here is what we might have talked about today in class: Why does the most-read daily newspaper in the country announce Laura Chinchilla’s presidential victory on the cover and include at least three photos of pin-up girls on Page 3?

Slowly, a few of my students would find their voices. They knew what was happening. They felt trapped by the complexities of their own culture. They said they knew it wasn’t okay and that they were examples of men and women who didn’t believe or act that way. They were right.

So today I offer a bipartisan Salud! to Laura Chinchilla and Barack Obama for aspiring to positions of leadership despite their difficult minority status. I choose to believe still that these are important evolutionary moments in the progress of our world. There’s not a quick fix, and it certainly doesn’t mean we ignore the decisions they make – women and racial minorities make mistakes, too. But I’d like to send out an even bigger Salud! to my students, who remind me that it is still everyday folks talking about tough questions and serving as their own role models who will help us eliminate, eventually, the cat-calling, name-calling, blame-gaming and fear-mongering.

Leave it to the Ticos, a people free from a wealthy nation’s propensity for pontification, to remind us that life can be that simple even in its complexity.

Shelley Jack returned to the U.S. in August of 2009. She now works as a freelancer and adjunct professor specializing in digital marketing, her career path before the Costa Rican hiatus.

• Abusive GOP lawmaker
• Slips her something that distorts her perceptions
• Beats the hell out of her during allegedly consensual sex
• No safe word to make it stop

Damn. Sounds kinda like a metaphor for American political life, huh?

UPDATE: Woops – now it’s a felony assault charge….

In an article in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine, Women Who Want to Want, Daniel Bergner explored low libido in women. Men operating at the level of lowest common denominator find this condition puzzling, because to them, women are the repository of all things sexual. All women have to do, we assume, is look at themselves naked in the mirror to be turned on. Alas, body image is as capable of casting a pall over sex as any other factor.

The article chronicles the work of psychologist Lori Brotto, one of the world’s leading specialists in what is known as hypoactive (the opposite of hyperactive) sexual desire disorder in women. She’s in charge of creating a new definition of the condition for the American Psychiatric Association’s next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

What’s her suggestion for women who shy away from sex? To act, in so many words, “as if.” (Not the dismissive way teenage girls use the phrase, but as support groups traditionally have — that is, behave like you’re sober even when you want a drink.) In other words, proceed with sex even when unmotivated and see if you become aroused. Yes, that’s all she’s got. If that came from a man it would sound like the bloodcurdling “relax and enjoy it” response to women’s concerns about rape.

Sex is scarcely the only area where men and women have different priorities. The need for sex to produce something tangible, also known as children, might be another. In fact, when attempting to list what men and women like equally — besides the obvious such as, should said children manifest themselves, their happiness — all I came up with is:

1. Coffee. I couldn’t find a study that broke down consumption by sexes. But anecdotal evidence — in other words, my not entirely unprejudiced eye — makes me think women treasure coffee more highly, but men drink it in larger quantities. Let’s call it even.
2. Cell phones. I found a couple of old studies that suggest male usage slightly exceeds women’s. But anecdotal evidence doesn’t bear this out. That is, the streets of Manhattan are full of women (young women, anyway) speaking on cell phones. Again, for the sake of argument — even.

It’s at this point, we turn to our readers for help. True, you may be forced to resort to sweeping generalizations. But, for the sake of harmony between the sexes, kindly use the comments section below to list activities, objects, or qualities that you’ve observed men and women value in equal proportions.

Special effects in movies, when well done, are fun.  They help us escape from our lives to enjoy tales of superheroes, mutants or alternate realities.  We travel to faraway or mythical lands and see dragons, dwarfs and trolls, tree-creatures battling orcs, wizards and sorcerers battling.  Oh yeah, and stuff blowing up.  (Thank you Michael Bay)  None of this really exists, of course, but that’s part of what makes it a good escape for the viewer.

It’s kind of hard to imagine a major blockbuster that doesn’t involve some form of death, shock, torture, shooting or explosion.  War movies can bring perhaps the most accuracy to this genre and this is especially true of those that don’t sugar coat it.  Saving Private Ryan was very graphic but not in an over-the-top, gratuitous way.  It brought home the realities of war.  Most action movies, however, take violence to a completely unrealistic level.

Yes, there are gangs in real life, and there is some level of underworld in our major cities. But our movies would lead you to the conclusion that every street corner is a drug marketplace, every precinct is infested by corrupt cops, in every alley lurks an assassin, every bar is a spontaneous kung fu fight waiting to happen and every nightclub is a potential gang warfare site.  Around every corner a secret agent lays in wait for another secret agent. Domestic abuse is rampant and a serial killer lurks in your closet waiting to decapitate you.  Some zombie wants to eat your brains.

The real world does offer some of these adventures (the supernatural notwithstanding) but, again, the point of the story is to provide an escape for the viewer.  One thing to remember, though: violence always has a victim. Very few chainsaw murders are consensual.

Sex in the movies is also plentiful. It’s in our ads and our magazines, it’s on TV, it’s everywhere.  But there are rules. Flash a single breast or hint at a risque sex scene and your movie gets an R rating.  Show anything more and you’re stuck with an X rating – if you get a rating at all.  Movies with gratuitous nudity get R ratings, while others flirt with “the line” and get away with a PG13. In general, the idea is to offer various levels of nudity and sexuality for the sake of appealing to various levels of horny viewers (mostly men) and to make a buck in the process. It’s easy to view this brand of escapism as more positive than violence, mayhem and death.

Then there are more artistically inclined movies, usually independent, that ask us to think about real life.  In these stories, people who don’t have Hollywood-perfect bodies might get together and do the things that normal people do.  Some breastfeed in public.  Some have non-erotic showers.  Some change clothes.  Some kiss.  Some have sex.  They might show some skin but almost every human is nude at least once a day, right? Skin happens.

If these stories are told effectively we will relate to the characters as they tap into experiences that we all share.  They show reality, or some plausible fictionalized version of it.  Sometimes there are heated arguments and even violence, but they spare us the fx. No blood spatter analysis, nobody shot at point blank range, no body parts flying at us in 3D.

With this in mind, let’s think about the Moral Majority and its neo-puritan descendants.  Which movies seem to catch their attention?  What is it that gets under their skin and ruffles their feathers?

Yes, this is a rhetorical question.

While I respect the rights of people to choose what they see, let’s consider some numbers. Last year, depending on your source, between 15k and 20k Americans were murdered.  This adds up to about six people in 100,000.  Each of these murders, by definition, put an unnatural end to someone’s life.  Friends and family mourned, and in many cases incurred physical and emotional burdens that they will never shed.  The suck factor for homicide is 100%.

Last year approximately a quarter billion Americans had consensual sex.  (Okay, I’m making this statistic up but it can’t be far off.)  If the number is close, this comes to about 70,000 people in 100,000.  Each of these instances (by definition) involved two (or more) people coming together and enjoying the company of another for a time.  Whereas being a murder victim is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, many of these people will choose to have repeat episodes with the same person.  In general, then, it’s safe to assert that most of these victims of consensual sex leave better than they arrived.  The suck factor for sex is not zero but it’s a lot closer to zero than it is to 100%. (Obviously I emphasize “consensual” for a reason – non-consensual sex, sex with a victim, is not sex – it’s violence.)

Isn’t this odd?  Movies portray violence on an exaggerated, unrealistic scale. Violence has a very high suck factor. And nobody bats an eye.  Other movies depict natural sexuality (or maybe unrealistic, but harmless sexuality). And sex is an act that almost every adult in the country takes part in on a semi-regular basis (or they’d like to). The suck factor is very small. And this is what gets conservative panties in a bunch.

So to sum up: in art it’s fine to kill, maim and destroy but it’s not okay to portray a satisfying natural encounter or to take a picture of said encounter.

When you think about it, this bizarre dynamic extends well beyond the arts.  The Right has no problem advocating and rushing into real wars, wars that leave a lot of innocents dead along with the baddies we’re supposedly liberating them from. But sensuality, in all cases outside of married Christian sex, is considered bad (and even that isn’t to be depicted or talked about).  A major irony here is that when we consider all of the political sex scandals from the past few years Republicans seem to comprise a large majority of the perpetrators.  They profess to frown upon nudity, upon cleavage, upon homosexuality, upon sensuality of any type.  But behind closed doors this is exactly what everyone seems to seek.  Even some of the loudest proponents of the Defense of Marriage Act have been caught in hypocritical, compromising sexual situations.  Amusing, or perhaps tragic, is the fact that morality police like David Vitter and Larry Craig snuck behind the backs of their spouses for sexual fulfillment, betraying personal as well as public trusts.  Couples who simply acknowledge the realities if normal human sexuality, on the other hand, can explore their curiosities and desires with the full support, blessing and (optional) involvement of their life partners.

Damn, America has it backwards.

Europeans are a lot more comfortable with their bodies than Americans.  Their magazines feature topless women and there are far more topless beaches.  They have movies with unabashed sexuality (you even find live sex acts in respectable theatre presentations).  We always seem to portray Brits as stuffy but in this respect it is us that are the stuffy ones.

I imagine that with most S&R readers I’m preaching to the choir, but I’ll say it anyway.  Sex is natural and it’s healthy to explore. It should be celebrated instead of demonized.

Disclosure: I take artistic pictures of people in edgy sensual circumstances and participate in activities that those offended by this article would certainly frown upon.  I am tired of having the reactionary moral positions of others thrust upon my art, my life and my friends when all of those participating are benefiting from their involvement.  I really don’t mean to sound like a hippie when I say this but…. Make love, not war!

Those 267,574 people who voted “no” — which would approve the same-sex marriage law — were not dissuaded by an anti-gay coalition of conservatives and churches wielding more than $3 million, including more than $2 million from out-of-state donors, according to a report by the National Institute On Money In State Politics.

Much of the sparring over the referendum was funded on both sides by groups outside the state of Maine. Given that gay marriage has been a wedge issue for years, that’s hardly surprising. But in Maine?

Those who backed the gay marriage law ponied up 12 to 1 over donors to the anti-gay donors and had more money — $5 million. But they lost. The institute’s report, written by Tyler Evilsizer, says:

The measure pitted conservative groups and churches against gay-rights groups, a few wealthy donors, and more than 10,000 smaller donors from Maine and around the country. Question 1 attracted over $9 million, or 72 cents of every dollar raised around Maine’s seven ballot measures. [emphasis added]

But press attention, money, and political capital focused on a wedge issue to divide people of good conscience and faith and divert their attention from far more pressing matters. Maine needs more attention to the condition of its roads, bridges and airports than it does in the bedrooms of loving, consenting adults who wish to make a lifelong commitment.

The blunt end of the money hammer used in Maine against gays was primarily wielded by a group called Stand For Marriage Maine. Like all political communicators and niche interest groups these days, it has a website. But its site is notably deficient. It does not have links such as “About Us” or “Who We Are.” Such links usually provide a list of financial supporters, coalition partners, and the names and contact data for organization officers and staff. Stand For Marriage Maine does not provide such information on its website.

Wading through the organization’s press releases and media stories is needed to learn that Marc Mutty is chairman of Stand for Marriage Maine, that Scott K. Fish is communications director (releases provide a phone number) and that Bob Emrich is a member of the group’s executive committee.

That lack of clear, easy-to-find disclosure makes it difficult for those interested in the issue to find out more about the bona fides of donors and supporters who worked to repeal Maine’s gay-marriage law.

Why not explain “Who We Are”? Only conjecture is possible. It is, perhaps, easier to operate in ideological shadows. According to Mr. Evilsizer’s report, here are the principal sources of money that drove the effort to repeal gays’ right to marry in Maine. A few groups are well known outside Maine.

StandForMarriageMaine.com | $2,650,052
Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland | $553,608
Focus On The Family Maine Marriage Committee | $114,500
Family Research Council Action | $25,000
Maine Marriage PAC | $11,539
Maine Grassroots Coalition | $9,410
Marriage Matters in Maine | $2,678
Maine4Marriage | $230
Proponents’ total $3,367,018

Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, asked Maine ethics officials to investigate the organization. He said it was laundering money. His August letter

contained allegations religious organizations are hiding contributions to the Stand for Marriage Maine campaign. The letter reports how the National Organization for Marriage, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, the national office of the Knights of Columbus and Focus on the Family had contributors give the money to their organizations, and in turn gave the money to the Stand for Marriage Maine to hide the donors’ identity.

But a federal judge ruled on Oct. 29 that the “state can compel the National Organization for Marriage to disclose the identities of donors who contributed to its effort to repeal Maine’s gay-marriage law.” In that story, the Portland Press Herald said NOM — based in Washington, D.C. — had funneled $1.6 million to Stand For Marriage Maine. A resolution of the lawsuit was “months away,” the story said — well after the Nov. 3 referendum. Mr. Evilsizer’s report contains a breakdown of donors to Stand For Marriage Maine showing NOM’s $1,622,152 donation.

But his report notes that financial supporters of gay marriage in Maine “from Away” were also plentiful. Those who supported the gay-marriage law raised $5,678,579.

The Human Rights Campaign, which bills itself as “the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization,” donated $267,589 to the principal umbrella organization, No On 1 Protect Maine Equality. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force gave $139,056. Esmond Harmsworth, a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency in Boston and New York, gave $100,000. Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders of Boston gave $91,258.

The website of No On 1 Protect Maine Equality also has a “Who We Are” page that lists its coalition partners. Its “Contact Us” page list its physical address, mailing address, phone number and e-mail address. Its campaign manager is clearly identified as Jesse Connolly.

The gay marriage caravan now moves on, it seems, to New York state. Gov. David Patterson wants a same-sex marriage bill, passed twice in the state Assembly, on the floor of the Senate for debate on Tuesday.

And the money, both for and against, will likely move on as well.

The other day our friend MentalSwitch offered up a delightful little post entitled “Hello Nurse!” It featured a photo of an attractive model dressed as … well, hell, rather than me trying to describe the shot and failing miserably, why don’t you just click on over there and see for yourself. But before you do, please be forewarned that the photo is NOT SAFE FOR WORK!!!!

Ahem. Well, actually, its worksafeness (or unworksafeness thereof) became the topic of some discussion here. Initially the pic was posted without a cut, meaning that the image itself would appear on the front page of S&R. Later, after some complaint and brief deliberations, we moved it behind a cut with the dreaded “NSFW” tag, indicating that the content would most certainly get you fired if it were accidentally viewed by any decent, God-Fearing American^® co-worker. And since way too many of our readers work in places where others might be looking over their shoulders, this was a practical concern. As one colleague put it – and we’ll let that colleague name himself if he wants to – “if the wrong person had walked behind me with that image up on my screen, I could have been walked out the door that day, no appeal.”

Such is the reality for millions and millions and millions of people living here in the Land of the Free^®, the Home of the Brave^® and the Birthplace of the Religious Freedom^®.

As badly as it griped me to see such a fine, artistic photo hidden behind a cut like some tawdry porno you’d pay a Times Square carney a dollar to see (price adjusted for inflation), I also had no interest in seeing any of our intelligent, hard-working readers escorted out of their places of employment at gunpoint.

However, my colleague Dr. Slammy suggested that the all-too-standard NSFW tag – the Modern American Internet’s version of the Scarlet Letter – was a lingering stain on the credibility of the artist, and in due course I (apparently being ill of will and sharp of tongue) was enlisted to pen what you may take as an official Scholars & Rogues policy position.

Briefly stated, when you put an artist behind the Scarlet NSFW, you convey a general social verdict that shame should be attached to the work. It is not fit for general viewing; it is likely to be deemed offensive to some people; and those who choose to click the link, well, that’s between them and Jesus.

It does not matter whether such a judgment is reasonable. For instance, in the case of “Hello Nurse,” what really is there to be scadalized by? Let’s take a close look:

What is the supposed objection? The subject is of consenting age. No aberrant sexual acts are depicted. Hell, she’s not even partially naked. No vajayjay showing. No boobies. She’s not fondling herself (at the moment, anyway). There is an aspect of the erotic in her pose, of course, but let’s be clear here: whatever obscenity might arise from the communication of this image lies entirely within the mind of the viewer.

Goddammit, people, you can see more NSFWing imagery any goddamned night of the week on any goddamned channel on television during goddamned prime time. If this is NSFW, then the publishers of every fashion magazine available in America need to be hung in the public square right fucking now!!!

Oh, I’m sorry – is my invective NSFW?

It is true, as another of my unnamed colleagues pointed out, that good art seeks to provoke. MentalSwitch isn’t an especially in-your-face artist, but it is also true that his work routinely challenges convention in ways that are guaranteed to provoke, and it’s not hard to conclude who the targets of his critiques are. As he explains in the notes accompanying a portrait of “Lizzy”:

If all Christians were like this guy then the world would be a better place. On the other hand, if all Christians were like this guy we wouldn’t even recognize Christianity anymore….

Well played, that.

Welcome to 17th Century Salem, folks. Welcome to neo-Puritan America, a land where dismemberments and flying body parts and mushroom clouds and elected officials intentionally and strategically lying to their constituents are cool but a woman wearing four times more clothing than every teenaged girl around every swimming pool in the United States is NSFW. Because she looks suspiciously like she might enjoy sex in a non-missionary position. And sex is not to be imagined. Pictures that might make us think of sex are not to be condoned.

In neo-Puritan America, millions of people wake up every morning praying that the Lord will afford them an opportunity during the day to be offended. Hypocritical offense is next to godliness and the Constitution apparently has a clause about the right not to be exposed to anything you don’t like. Lawyers will be summoned. Human Resources policies will be invoked. Sinners will be terminated. And Hester Prynne will have a red NSFW branded on her twitchy, hellbound little ass, BY GOD!

In case the theme of my rant hasn’t yet made itself apparent, the Scarlet NSFW brands the wrong person. Those whose visions challenge are to be positioned behind the screen of shame, while those who are afraid of ideas have their narrow prejudices reinforced by official policies and unspoken self-righteous bullying.

We will know America has finally attained a measure of enlightenment when the reverse of those statements is true.

In the meantime, I mentioned something about a policy, so here it is. Since, as I noted above, we have no interest in damaging the careers of our readers, and since we’re smart enough to know the reality of many workplaces, we’ll be placing things that we believe might offend the average granny-panty neo-Puritan behind a cut. But when we do, understand that it is not the artist whom we are indicting. It’s the Scarlet Letter crowd.

In addition, don’t be surprised to see NSFW replaced by NSFP – Not Safe For Puritans. (My original idea, Not Safe For Repressive Puritan Asshat Jesus Nazis, was deemed a bit unwieldy.)

At Scholars & Rogues, we don’t shrink from challenges. We’re not kept up at night by the unconventional. And we are absolutely, positively not afraid of ideas.

And we will not quietly pander to those who are.

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford not only played fast and loose with the institution of marriage, but with email. However, help keeping affairs secret has arrived for not only politicians, but all of us. AshleyMadison.com just released apps for mobile phones and the Blackberry. Jeremy Caplan reports for Time that because they’re “loaded up from phones’ browsers, they leave no electronic trail.”

For those unfamiliar with it, AshleyMadison is a matchmaking service for married individuals. That’s right: It facilitates affairs. To summarize the statement of a woman Caplan quotes who consults in the online dating field, AshleyMadison is infidelity “rebranded” and made “monetizable.” Though Ashley Madison has signed up over one million users since going online in 2001, she seems concerned that it harms the online dating business for singles.

As has been noted, the Sanford case is unlike other Republican sex scandals. It’s devoid of sex with prostitutes (to which prominent Democrats, like Eliot Spitzer, are also prone), drooling over congressional pages, soliciting sex in a public rest room, or pursuing an aide’s wife. Sanford was simply a man who fell in love with another woman who wasn’t much younger than he.

As the spiritual counselor to the Sanfords and their circle, Warren Culbertson, said in a Huffington Post article:

. . . the only thing holding his friends’ marriage together right now is “their vow to God.”

“Because it’s not feelings — it’s not emotions. … For most Christians, at some point in your marriage, if you’re married long enough, you do it because that’s what we’re called to do — out of obedience instead of out of passion.”

You can almost hear the strains of a psaltery in the background. Apparently Sanford, despite his faith (not fundamentalist, actually, but Episcopal), was unable to adhere to a view of marriage as starkly medieval as Culbertson’s.

It’s not just religious principles, but romantic ideals about marriage — however strange bedfellows — that are stern taskmasters. Entering marriage, neither the man nor the woman typically understands each other’s sexuality. (Thus strengthening the case for gay marriage.)

Male needs are cyclic, like hunger or urination. Women, on the other hand, tend to be episodic. Not only don’t religion and romance acknowledge the problem this might pose, they make no provisions for when a partner (the aged aside) spurns sex entirely.

Causes most commonly cited include stress and fatigue. Compounding those, the partner suffering from one or both of those symptoms — at the risk of gender-typing, usually the wife — may resent the other for helping to cause them by not holding up his or her end of the chores or child-rearing.

Other reasons include — today especially — loss of self-respect if one loses job and, of course, weight gain. The husband blows up and turns off the wife or she packs on the pounds and no longer feels attractive.

Divorce may not be an alternative because resuming the solo life, especially with kids, isn’t feasible for most in today’s economy. Also, the person denied sex may still care deeply for his or her spouse.

Nevertheless, a life without physical intimacy is unthinkable for many. Is an affair the answer? Even if not sniffed out by the spouse, it may end the marriage. The unfaithful spouse may, a la Sanford, link up with the fabled “soul mate,” which seems to make abandoning one’s family understandable in the eyes of God. (Funny how those soul-mate sensations have a way of fading once the cheating spouse divorces and then marries his or her paramour.)

On the other hand, as hollow as married life becomes without intimacy, in lying and deception lay the path to true misery. Of course, like Sanford, the cheater can admit to the affair on the theory that confession is good for the soul. It’s just that any benefit that might accrue to the sinner comes at the expense of the one sinned against.

We invite our readers to respond to the following questions in the comments section:

• Is cheating a viable alternative to a sexless marriage?
• Do “emotional affairs” (which stop short of sex) help or make the situation worse?
• What’s the best way for the partner denied sex to deal with lack of physical intimacy in a marriage?

Thanks for passing this on, JS. Just thanks a lot.

Israel’s Ynet reported the story in an article sensationally titled Dodging IDF paid off big time. First, it pointed out that to take advantage of an exemption from mandatory military service, Ms. Refaeli married an acquaintance who she later divorced. Worse, she said:

I really wanted to serve in the IDF, but I don’t regret not enlisting, because it paid off big time. … That’s just the way it is, celebrities have other needs.

While she may not have served her country, at least did her part to confirm the dumb model stereotype. But, to be fair, like Americans who evaded the draft decades ago, Ms. Refaeli seems to have acted out of a combination of self-interest and opposition to war.

Why is it good to die for our country? … Why should 18-year-old kids have to die?

It might be an issue in Israel, where its militarized society is indisposed to try to understand the motives of those who don’t serve. In fact, if hindsight is 20/20, Ms. Refaeli comes off as prescient for avoiding possible complicity in the IDF’s latest barbarity (Gaza, of course).

To Americans, meanwhile, who don’t have to deal with the draft, it’s less of an issue. Besides, you can make a case that the role of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit cover model is the print equivalent of a USO tour.

Then where’s the controversy? One look at Ms. Refaeli’s cover picture and you might come to the same conclusion as commenter Pat A at Huffington Post:

God didn’t give her those breasts. God gave an engineer somewhere the ability to make a sac that holds a huge amount of silicone and then he helped some doctor learn how to put those babies on gullible women.

Because of her robust build, you could make a case that Ms. Refaeli’s breasts are natural. But the similar size of the breasts of most of the other models in the issue — laborious research reveals — defies credulity. Especially if you watch the TV show Project Runway, which, in large part, is about the challenge of making clothing that flatters young women whose starved bodies seem to have cannibalized the fat in their breast.

Still, the breasts in this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue don’t seem as inflated as those of last year’s cover model, Marisa Miller. Presumably, like the excesses of wealth, ostentatious bra cup sizes are now out of favor (except in pornography).

But silicone implants are not exactly breaking news. Why, you ask, make a big deal out of them now? In a February 9 Sports Illustrated story, Selena Roberts and David Epstein reported that baseball superstar Alex Rodriguez tested positive for anabolic steroids in 2003, the year he won both the home run title and MVP for the Texas Rangers.

See where I’m going with this? How can your biggest story of the year expose an athlete for using artificial supplements, while your biggest issue of the year features models who likely used artificial implants?

Looking at these women is the same as watching Major League Baseball players you suspect of doing steroids. They’ve all taken extreme measures which both give their bodies an unfair competitive edge and expose them to unhealthy substances.

Sports Illustrated needs to cancel its subscription to hypocrisy. If it decides trimness is of the essence, feature models with breasts proportional to their hips. If large breasts are deemed more important, use models with hips proportional to their breasts.

Sports Illustrated needs to understand that the swimsuit issue is not just starter pornography for young men (and a showcase for the swimsuit fashion industry). Young girls, too, are examining it for cues on what attracts boys. Does Sports Illustrated really want to be complicit in encouraging the use of implants?

In a pair of recent opinion pieces, Lind asserts that we shouldn’t let women and gays in the armed services because if we do, “men who want to prove they are real men will not join.”

Lind’s relative manliness doesn’t necessarily add to or subtract from his opinion’s validity, but unnamed sources who knew him when assure me that the closest he ever came to wearing a uniform was dressing his G.I. Joe doll in one.

Gays and Dolls

As one might expect a social conservative to do, Lind laces his positions with a number of intellectual subterfuges, not the least of which is filing gay men and women in the same pigeon hole. The go-to argument against women serving in the military is that they are, on average, smaller and weaker than their male counterparts and they can get pregnant, a consideration that doesn’t apply to gay men.

If you think that gay men are intrinsically less physically capable than their heterosexual counterparts, and you want to take a trip to the emergency room, I invite you to walk up to a homosexual member of the American Ballet Theater and call him a faggot. I doubt if there’s a segment of the population more physically prepared for direct placement into elite commando training than male dancers. (There are such things as heterosexual male dancers, by the way, and they generally don’t lack for the companionship of women who wouldn’t give either Lind or me the time of day).

But there’s more required of a fighter than physical toughness, according to Lind. “Throughout history,” he prates, “some armies have fought a lot harder than others. The specific reasons vary widely, but one way or another they all come down to human factors.” The most important human factor, Lind assures us, “is that men fight to prove they are real men.” Their membership in fighting organizations is a “badge of honor” that says, “We’re not sissies or pansies. We are men who fight, serving alongside other men who fight.” An infusion of sissies and pansies among the company of real men, Lind warns, could damage “military unit cohesion.”

Mr. Lind has a selective sense of military history and/or a blind notch in his Doppler gay-dar.

As a carrier skipper I served with said when President Bill Clinton enacted the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, “Sailors have been rubbing heinies since Sinbad reported to boot camp.” Soldiers have been sharing pup tents just as long.

The ancient Greeks believed that physical love between soldiers improved morale, bravery and overall battle efficiency. Plato, the philosophical father of the American political right, considered it utter stupidity to ban physical relationships between soldiers. “Wherever, therefore, it has been established that it is shameful to be involved in sexual relationships with men,” he wrote, “this is due to evil on the part of the rulers, and to cowardice in the part of the governed.”

In a song honoring the Lelantine War, Plato’s pupil Aristotle wrote that, “love…thrives side by side with courage.”

The Roman historian Plutarch noted that tribal ties were of little value “when dangers press, but a band cemented by friendship grounded upon love is never to be broken.”

Lind cautions that gay and straight men can’t mix in “very close quarters” without “serous friction.” I’ve got news for Lind: gay and straight men have been mixing in very close quarters in the American military without serious friction since forever, including those World War II John Wayne types that conservatives like Lind have such a school girl crush on.

They’re queer, Bill. They’re here, Bill. Now drop and give me fifty pushups (heh).

G.I. Jane

The notion of women serving in the military is hardly new either. Plato favored it. He wrote in Republic that women must be taught the “art of war, which they must practice like men.”

“Is she capable of sharing either wholly or partially in the actions of men, or not at all?” he asked. “And is the art of war one of those arts in which she can or can not share?” Then “let [women] share in the toils of war and the defense of their country… Only in the distribution of labors the lighter are to be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their duties are to be the same.”

Lind’s specific objection to letting women serve is that they might be allowed into “ground combat arms.” I’m not sure what he means by that. Women are and will be assigned to war zones in combat support capacities. So what? He may suppose that women inherently lack the “right stuff” for combat, but those Israeli Security Force babes who pull the trigger on those remote control machine guns along the Gaza Strip don’t appear to be lacking anything in the killer instinct department. If Lind is worried that women will elbow their way into Delta Force, he is, in Plato’s words, “plucking a fruit of unripe wisdom.” I don’t know of anyone who is seriously trying to make women into commandos, or of anyone who would take the notion seriously. Maybe Lind is confusing that movie where Demi Moore becomes a Navy SEAL with reality. Confusion about reality is, after all, a leading occupational hazard of conservatism.

I don’t claim that integrating women in the military has been a tribulation-free experience. In my day, the incidence of young single sailor girls getting themselves pregnant to get out of duties they didn’t care for was completely out of hand. We developed a pretty good solution though; all the single mommy strikers got discharged and sent home.

I’ve also known a fair number of female officers who benefitted from reverse discrimination, but not nearly as many as the number of male officers I knew who got where they got thanks to Uncle Admiral or Governor Grandpa or a godfather who had a village in the old country named after him. And never forget that whatever wartime leadership qualities George S. Patton possessed that allowed him to get away with his vainglorious shenanigans, he was also one of the richest dudes in the Army.

Lind’s bottom line isn’t that women and homosexuals serving in the military will impair America’s war making capability. He’s concerned about “cultural Marxism,” which is a code phrase narrow shouldered white male bigots intone when they sense that cultural Darwinism is about to bust them another pay grade or two down the social pyramid. By Lind’s criteria, emancipation was cultural Marxism, as was the ban on feeding Christians to lions.

There may be good arguments for barring women and gays from military service, but Lind doesn’t make them, and I haven’t heard any that make an ounce more sense than his do.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword . Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance, is on sale now. Also catch Scott Horton’s interview with Jeff at Antiwar Radio.

Tearful discussions about your insecurities or your feminist principles will not stop a man from looking at porn. That’s why the best advice for straight women is. … If you don’t want to be with someone who looks at porn. . . get a woman, get a dog, or get a blind guy. … telling women that the porn “problem” can be resolved through good communication, couples counseling, or a chat with your pastor is neither helpful nor realistic.

But Douthat writes:

This isn’t to say the distinction between hiring a prostitute and shelling out for online porn doesn’t matter. … But if you approach infidelity as a continuum of betrayal rather than an either/or proposition, then the Internet era has ratcheted the experience of pornography much closer to adultery than I suspect most porn users would like to admit. [Emphasis added.]

Read Douthat’s insightful article for why he believes that. Meanwhile, the argument can be dragged out ad infinitum. It’s possible to buy Savage’s viewpoint, but still be troubled by how much time and money are spent respectively with and for porn.

While one’s reflex is to claim that it’s up to the individual to decide, that’s kind of a cop-out. Our readers are asked to help decide with their comments whether a line should be drawn and at what point.

Specifically. . .
1. Do you agree with my distinction (that the more time and money porn incurs, the closer the viewer hews to infidelity)?
2. How much is too much: a. time spent b. money spent — viewing Internet porn?

by Michael Tracey

It isn’t just that there is an appetite for scandal, sex, sleaze, death narratives, it is also that feeding such appetites can be very profitable. The fact is that an essential problem with today’s media, one that has been gestating for many years, even decades, lies with the families and trust-funders that own media chains, and with the media moguls that, like great beasts, roam the landscape of a new grim cultural ecology, gobbling up this and that tasty morsel, a television station here, a newspaper there, forever seeking to sate their own insatiable appetite.

Somehow the Gold Isn’t All

The point is actually very simple, even obvious and even allowing for an understanding that the logic of Kapital is accumulation, a Vice for the Ages: they are greedy. If there were a large public appetite for Goethe in the original medieval German, they would feed it. There isn’t, and so they plunder the global treasure and rape the human spirit in ways that make the Vikings and the Visigoths look like UNICEF.

For them, it isn’t that the truth shall set you free, it’s the belief that wealth will make you happy, and as far as I can see, they can’t even get that right. To make this point I could point to a bevy of social theorists and clinicians, the armies of therapists, the mountains of anti-depressants, the addictions, to the sheer turmoil, if I read Dominic Dunne correctly, that seems to afflict the lives of the wealthy. I won’t; I will simply borrow this from Robert Service’s “Spell of the Yukon”:

“I wanted the gold, and I sought it,
I scribbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy – I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it -
Came out with a fortune last Fall -
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.”

The fact is that the lesson learned from the coverage of cases such as JonBenet is that we face not just a crisis of the media in general and journalism in particular, with its fearful flight from purpose, but a larger crisis of prevailing values. The problem isn’t complicated: in a market economy, and in a culture defined to an inordinate extent by economic calculation, other values are inevitably squeezed out, values that recognize a public interest, a public good that needs to be served and that is different from the aggregation of individual wants, indeed that suggests that what people want is not the same as what they need. Witness the way in which around the globe public service broadcasting organizations are being marginalized or, in some instances, systematically dismantled, to make way for a market-driven media culture, something which strikes me as akin to pulling down the Taj Mahal and replacing it with a shanty town.

The issues raised by rampant materialism and consumerism, and the sidelining of other “virtues,” does not only speak to a critique of American culture and media. The problem is global, if only because global media are also dominated by large corporations. If I look at my home country, the UK, there are many critics arguing that, in its once-celebrated culture of broadcasting, it has lost its way, unable to fulfill its public service remit, mired in sleaze and tat, no longer vigorous, vibrant and socially significant. And if it is a shadow of its former self, is that a failure from within or is it one more portent, one more shrill illustration that history has moved on, the market is dominant, feeding public appetites that suggest a larger cultural and spiritual deterioration, a culture full of what Richard Hoggart once called “corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions”?

I accept, however, that people like Hoggart and so many others (and I would include myself here) who regret what has happened are declared to be on the wrong side of history. Maybe so, but what I think we can say is that what’s being lost are some important values that, once gone, will be extremely difficult to retrieve: respect, responsibility, trustworthiness, caring, justice, fairness, civic virtue, citizenship. In other words, all the values and commitments that define a mature civilization and that provide the possibility of realizing the essential demand of liberal humanism, the achievement of the full and complete individual.

The Moronic Inferno

The absence of that fullness and completeness, the startling lack of mature judgment and cultivated taste, so prevalent in much popular culture, is very much suggested in the fact that by some bizarre alchemy of the times JonBenet became a celebrity and remains one – which begs yet again the question of why. How did a dead six year-old child become part of what Sean O’Hagan has called the “moronic inferno that is contemporary celebrity…”? As ever, the answer is both simple and complex: simple because it’s clear that people like and need celebrities; complex because of the complex intertwining of psychology, culture and personal biography that feed that need.

As I was writing this, on Sunday morning, December 9, 2007, an event was taking place in South Carolina that is a pitch perfect example of the odious cult of personality. Oprah (her name is in your Microsoft Word spellchecker dictionary, by the way) was on the stump for Barack Obama (and neither “Barack” nor “Obama” are in my spellchecker dictionary). The original intent had been to hold a rally in an indoor arena, seating 18,000 people. When it sold out in minutes, they decided to switch to an outdoor stadium with 80,000 seats. It also sold out.

Does anyone seriously believe that those in attendance are there for any other reason than to “see” Oprah, rather than to “listen” to Obama. (I understand that this has since changed, since Obama himself morphed into a politician-as-rock star.) Put this another way, there were then candidates for the Democratic party nomination with enormous experience, many ideas and thoughts about how to deal with the troubled times within which we live, including Christopher Dodd, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson, all of who were hard pressed to fill a high school gym. This is telling us something – as a culture we are about the “moronic” rather than the profound and important. And it is precisely here that the issue becomes worthy of unpackaging, because in a curious, even bizarre sense, Oprah and JonBenet and all those others are cut from the same cloth, and it is we who wield the scissors.

For example, can there be any more pathetic, sad, revealing comment about the state of the culture – and not just in the United States – than the following comment from David Samuels, in an article about the paparazzi who follow Britney Spears around (30 to 45 on any given night) in The Atlantic, April 2008:

“History’s best-publicized celebrity meltdown has helped fuel dozens of television shows, magazines and Internet sites, the combined value of whose Britney-related product easily exceeds $100 million a year, and helped make ‘Britney Spears’ the most popular search term on Yahoo once again in 2007, as it has been for six of the past seven years…”

Read the whole piece and you might, if you have any sense of decency, want to slit your wrists. (In kind of related, nauseous vein, try this: the journalist Tana Ganeva pointed out that in 2006, the British retail chain Tesco – think Target – launched the Peekaboo Pole Dancing Kit, designed to help young girls “unleash the sex kitten inside.” Amidst protests from parents, Tesco moved the product from the toy section, but shelved it elsewhere in their stores.)

Affluenza

As ever, the observation of the fact of celebrity culture is less important than the question, why, from within what psychological and cultural pathologies does the need for celebrity gestate, what sustains it to the point where it metastasizes into compulsive needs, and why is it that those needs seem to be particularly acute, if Samuels is correct (which I suspect he is) among women between the ages of 16 and 34? In two books Oliver James has argued that the problem is that we live in a troubled time of “Affluenza,” where the drives of neo-liberal economics, with its compulsive competitiveness, materialism, and individualism produce not happiness but emotional distress, anguish and insecurity. As Margaret Bunting writes:

“Drawing extensively on the work of American psychologist Tim Kasser, James argues that our recent increased wealth has come at the cost of the emotional well-being of a large proportion of the population; rates of distress among women in the UK almost doubled between 1982 and 2000. This is true of New Zealand and Australia as well as the UK and the US, in striking contrast with more egalitarian and collectivist countries such as Denmark or Germany. He tracks how ‘selfish capitalism’ generates insecurity and inflates comparisons; how a winner-takes-all competitiveness merely creates losers and a pandemic of low self-esteem, with its compensatory pathologies around celebrity and status. Remarkably, Erich Fromm, the Marxist psychoanalyst and Buddhist writer, foresaw much of this half a century ago and James quotes his prescient analysis of the ‘passive, empty, anxious, isolated person for whom life has no meaning’ and who compensates through “compulsive consumption,” mass consumer societies which despite their claims to kneel at the altar of sovereign individualism inevitably and ironically, cripple personal agency.”

Tim Kasser, in The High Price of Materialism, suggests that there is a “scientific explanation of how our contemporary culture of consumerism and materialism affects our everyday happiness and psychological health. Other writers have shown that once we have sufficient food, shelter, and clothing, further material gains do little to improve our well-being. Kasser goes beyond these findings to investigate how people’s materialistic desires relate to their well-being. He shows that people whose values center on the accumulation of wealth or material possessions face a greater risk of unhappiness, including anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and problems with intimacy – regardless of age, income, or culture.

What I am suggesting, then, is that one of the ways in which we deal with the pain of living in a hyper-consuming society, is by focusing in on those more famous than ourselves, whether they be dead or alive. The implication, however, is that in salivating over celebrity, something is being lost, and something is awry.

James is suggesting that “affluenza” and its attendant conditions is actually a mental illness, a darker version of Doris Lessing’s comment in her 2007 Nobel lecture, when she spoke movingly of a desperately poor woman she had seen in Africa who, despite the misery of circumstance, was reading Anna Karenina. She asks, rhetorically, “…do we think we are better than she is – we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities?”

The question is, what to do? For Lessing, the answer would lie in “the storyteller, the dream maker, the myth maker, that is our phoenix that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.” It is the conviction that great art, great literature, great culture can make us morally better by, as F. R. Leavis wrote, kindling “our own best self…” echoing Plato, who said that the muses gave us arts not for “mindless pleasure” but “as an aid to bringing our soul curcuit, when it has got out of tune, into harmony with itself.” The English poet, Ted Hughes wrote to one of his students that the “mentally sick” could be cured by being “put in contact with their real nature,” which for Hughes could be achieved through poetry. The point is simple: the obsession with celebrity is not some harmless whim, not to be taken seriously, it is window into a poisoned spirit.

Emblematic of this is the sight of a culture which is to an extraordinary extent driven by emotion, not reasoned thought. The sociologist Jose Ortega Y Gasset wrote, in the early part of the 20th century, that there was “a democracy of the emotions.” If he were writing today he would say that we are a democracy of emotions on steroids, as if Barry Bonds and Barbara Cartland had conjoined and spawned the populace of late modernity. It is not that emotion per se is not a deeply important part of what it is to be human, it is faux emotion, manipulated emotion, hysterical emotion that swamps reason, buries all thought beneath it like an enormous mudslide devouring a Guatemalan village.

The Great Renunciation

What I would like to argue here is this: what is suggested by the media coverage of the Ramsey story and others like it, this escalating dynamic that we have witnessed in the past two decades or so, is what I am going to call the Great Renunciation. What is being renounced, as a necessary part of the reorganization of global political economy, are ways of thinking about the purpose of the making of culture, most potently in broadcasting, that are informed by a concept of public interest and public good.

Those ways of thinking are, necessarily if mischievously, presented by the ideologues of the market as remnants from a time before. Remnants that are deemed to be not just anachronistic, but seen as toxins in a body politic that needs to ‘modernize,’ better to confront the challenges of global capital. It is as if the only way they can validate the present, their present, is to invalidate the past.

It is an ideological tendency brought to the fore by Ronald Reagan’s first Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Mark Fowler, who announced in 1981 that henceforth the public interest would be that in which the public was interested. Those people around the world and in the United States who argued that there were certain profound values that needed to be protected (and I include myself in that number, having spent the best part of two decades studying, writing and lecturing about public service broadcasting all over the planet) were treated as suffering from the affliction of either a rheumy-eyed nostalgia which was no longer relevant or a stubbornness that was, for the financial well-being of the company, dysfunctional. Either way, they had to go.

I can understand the latter argument better than the former. If there is an honest claim that what matters is the bottom line and the profit margin, while I may not agree with that at least I know what it means. The argument that cultural values as traditionally understood are not quite relevant or modern or useful to the society is something that mystifies me. What exactly is it that is no longer relevant? Creativity, diversity, quality, standards, serving a citizenry, balance, intelligence, curiosity, innovation, not pandering to a superficial mass taste, being optimistic that the audience can discover pleasures and understandings that they otherwise might not have known, independence from pressures that dilute and corrupt the process of the creative act, that erode journalistic standards, that diminish insights that the broadcaster can have when allowed to do so? Are these not relevant, are these passé, do we no longer need such things, such commitments?

There is running through the commentaries of the new modernism in cultural production a terrible conceit, an arrogance that avoids, because it has to, what Yeats called the “ancient questions’. It is for this reason that we must in the first instance fess up to the fact that the world has become, again, not just a dangerous place, but in those realms that strut their economic and populist significance, a vulgar reality. We need, indeed, to resurrect the very idea of vulgarity, loutishness, moral and intellectual impoverishment, to acknowledge the sourness and bile, resentment and fears of much of contemporary life. Let’s be honest, do any of us know very many happy and grounded people?

I remember only too well when David Mills and I were negotiating, with Channel Four and then ITV, budgets for our documentaries. The sense one had was that many of the people we were dealing with lived and breathed in terror. Their faces had the shadow of strain of a man who has just been told that he has cancer. It isn’t that they weren’t decent people, or that left to themselves their creativity would not pour forth. It’s just that they functioned in indecent circumstance. They were surrounded by circumstances in which to fail was anathema, where to take a risk was to court failure and where, ironically, the forces of competition made failure all that much more likely.

This is not how it should be. This is not healthy either for the individuals involved or the society they are supposed to serve.

What the ideologues of this new age of consumption have done, and will continue to do with ever greater relish, is to take the stuff of the vulgate and present it as if it were the equivalent of Rilke and Joyce, Greene and Hemingway, Picasso or Dali, the Beatles or Beethoven, Rowling or Tolkien, Hancock or Pynchon, Attenborough or Murrow, Tony Garnett or David Chase, Paddy Chayefsky or Dennis Potter. Well it isn’t, and the suggestion that it is, mouthed by apparently highly intelligent individuals, is simply stupid, so lacking in substance that there has to be an explanation.

And there is: self-interested cynicism, with an IV drip of greed. The emerging ‘culture’ of television is the twin of that other corporate culture in which preen the exquisite, perfectly formed grotesques of Enron and WorldCom, of Global Crossing and Arthur Andersen, the oil companies and their brethren elsewhere in the world of modern capital (I do not by the way subscribe to the chic, tad optimistic, notion of “late-capitalism”; It’s just beginning. I’m with Max Weber: “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness.” Weber went mad and looking around one can begin to see why – the madness, as well as the pessimism).

Basic Moral Values

I came to know and think about the culture of broadcasting through the writing of a biography of Hugh Greene, Director General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969. If there was one bone of contention which Greene gnawed away at it was the question of the relationship between the need for creative freedom and a wider social responsibility. He explored the theme brilliantly in a speech in Rome in 1965, in which he spoke of his concern about attempts at censorship of broadcasters

“which works by causing artists and writers not to take risks, not to undertake those adventures of the spirit which must be at the heart of every truly new creative work…historically, the greatest risks have attached to the maintenance of what is right and honourable and true. Truth for ever on the scaffold, wrong for ever on the throne…”

In the same speech, he continues:

“Relevance is the key – relevance to the audience, and to the tide of opinion in society. Outrage is wrong. Shock may be good. Provocation can be healthy and indeed socially imperative. These are issues to which the broadcaster must apply his conscience.”

In the first draft that Charles Curran had prepared for Greene, he had written, “shock may not be good.” Greene literally put a red line though ‘not.’ There was no brighter star in Greene’s firmament than the creative mind, in whatever genre. And there was no greater responsibility that he possessed than to try and find, nurture and protect that mind. And for this the need to be “truly independent” was crucial because without that one could not be truthful, accurate, impartial, creative, one could not court failure and therefore one could not take risks. Truth for him – which involved the truth of journalism as well as the truth of art – was like a constantly endangered species that one needed to breed and then protect, all the better to sustain what he called “basic moral values – truthfulness, justice, freedom, compassion, tolerance.”

I refer back to Greene for two reasons. Those values and commitments – which invoke the “ancient questions” – remain vitally important to the maintenance of a mature, vital, creative, humane (the thing that troubles me most about large amounts of culture today is its lack of common humanity), democratic society. The second reason is to point up how such reasoning has all but disappeared from the landscape of public discourse, which is obsessed with the material, the consumed, the pragmatic, “inward investment,” as if the making of culture was like asking Toyota to build a car plant in Toledo. The generation which now rules the roost seems decidedly uncomfortable in using such language – bad career move maybe, bit old fashioned, so yesterday.

At the heart of that debate about culture in general, and broadcasting in particular are two elemental questions: what actually do we mean by standards, “great” programs, television as an art form but also infused with other, even larger, social, democratic purposes; and if we can assume that whatever the definitional problems, we all do recognize that, as John Donne wrote, “no man can draw a line twixt day and night, tho’ light and dark are tolerably distinguishable,” then what exactly were the arrangements – institutional as well as philosophical – in which such moments of excellence happened?

And can those arrangements live on in a market led world?

Even as one types that last sentence the silliness of the proposition feels all too clear. Of course, there will be moments of great television, and even more of great radio, which seems to me to be a potentially more resilient medium partly because in economic terms it is less important than television. That, however, is not the point, since the real question – given the fact that even deserts have the occasional tree – is what will the overall landscape of television look like: will there be original, edgy long-form documentaries that explore issues of magnitude?; will there be dramas that are literate, that challenge and needle and provoke, that linger in the memory because they made you think?; will there be news worthy of the democratic project, providing for the political life of the society in ways that serve it well, that feeds the needs of the citizen, that pushes and jostles its way onto the stage of public discourse because to ignore it would be foolish and perverse?; will there be children’s programs that are worthy of the colossal importance of raising our children well, of seeing in them the future, rather than a market to be sold to?; will there be comedy that works because of the brilliance of the performer and the fineness of the writing, in no need of a laugh track to simulate humor?; will there be the quirkily original, the eccentric, the lateral thinking and creativity that springs, unbeckoned but welcomed and applauded, from the folds of imagination?; will there be those moments when we watch not alone, but as part of an integrated culture, drawn together through the mysterious alchemies of communication?; will there be refinement, range, diversity, integrity, professionalism, courage, the ability to make mistakes?Will we have a culture of which we can be proud, and about which we will feel no shame? And can we do this within the same universe of social practice as the market, all the while regulated with the lightness of a snowflake?

I hope so, and if we can then fears about what is unfolding will have gladly and delightfully proven to be unwarranted. But then I think of the beast, looming and lurking, threatening, ravenous, uncaring – at least of others – dangerous, America, Britain, the planet as a cultural Jurassic Park, governed by the canny intelligence of velociraptors. There is, then, only one way to deal with the beast: the whip! The lash!

Bend It Like Rousseau

I want to suggest, then, that the only meaningful question that one should ask about culture is what are, and what will be, the values that inform its practice. Indeed, utterly central to this debate is the conviction that at the heart of the very idea of, for example, public broadcasting, there are certain values which should guide the process of program making and the relationship with the audience which are to all intents and purposes abstract, but which are nonetheless important for that: excellence, standards, quality, truth, impartiality, intelligence and so on. And of course it is obvious, even trite, to observe that these are difficult and abstract and almost beyond language to capture, as if noting that were sufficient grounds for denying their significance. A metaphor: few people understand the physics of applying a specific kind of pressure to a spherical object which then arcs through the ether, but an awful lot of people nevertheless seem to find a kind of majestic beauty in David Beckham’s use of his right foot. Some things, let us be blunt, do not need to be explained, merely recognized and appreciated.

The reason why this question of values is, at least to my way of thinking, absolutely front and center to any debate about culture is that, because of its ubiquity and presumed sense of importance in people’s lives, any such discussion is actually a discussion of what values should prevail within the larger culture and society. It is surely vital to understand and accept that the definition of policies and values for the cultural industries is inevitably and necessarily suggestive of a definition of policies and values for the character of a whole society. They capture the sets of choices and preferences, which color all the imperatives, ambitions and institutions, which constitute, in the most literal sense, a social order. Two hundred years ago when Poland was going through one of its periods of political reform, the leadership called on Rousseau to advise them. As to the economic system, he observed:

“(The choice) to be adopted by Poland depends on the purposes she has in view in reforming her constitution. If your only wish is to become noisy, brilliant and fearsome, and to influence the other peoples of Europe, their example lies before you; devote yourselves to following it . . . Try to make money very necessary, in order to keep the people in a condition of great dependence; and with that end in view, encourage national luxury, and the luxury of spirit which is inseparable from it. In this way, you will create a scheming, ardent, avid, ambitious, servile and knavish people, like all the rest; one goes to the two extremes of opulence and misery, or license and slavery, with nothing in between. I know that men can only be made to act in terms of their own interests; but pecuniary interest is the worst, the basest and most corrupting of all, and even, as I confidently repeat and shall always maintain, the least and weakest in the eyes of those who really know the human heart. In all hearts there is naturally a reserve of grand passions, when greed for gold alone remains, it is because all the rest, which should have been stimulated and developed, have been enervated and stifled.”

There is another, guiding assumption behind the argument I am trying to make here. It is that the most profound values and conceptual commitments that constitute humanity at its best – might I suggest life and liberty, justice and truth, rights both civil and human, democracy, love – by definition have no materiality. There may be material expressions or metaphors – the scales of justice, the voting booth, the statute book, the kiss – but these are only, can only be, the necessary tangibility which allows us to realize, use, benefit from the language of our human imagination. So language is crucial – and I know that is stating the obvious – to our very ability to realize that which the mind has wrought.

It is then a reasonable argument to suggest that insofar as language born from the reflective mind and the play of informed, mature imagination is diminished, then so are those values and philosophical commitments. And there lies my essential concern with how this, and other cultures, are evolving and will continue to evolve: symbolically and concretely. It is a situation which suggests that in pursuing the necessary materiality of the market, where the only value is commodity value, we are inevitably marginalizing the mysterious possibilities of the mind and the heart that have formed the essential elements of that long march of the species to establish a civilized and caring world guided by a potent and powerful moral imagination, and a commitment to values that are none the less vital because they are non-material.

In fact, some of the most powerful visions of the purpose of, for example, broadcasting emerged within unusual and trying circumstances. Consider, for instance, the cultural histories of the occupations of Germany and Japan in the late 1940s and the formulation of Allied policy for broadcasting in the rebuilding of those societies. There one can see powerful testament to the idea of broadcasting as primarily a social rather than an economic process, as something with moral, cultural, intellectual and creative purpose and not just as a source of mild comment and moderate pleasure. The Charters of NHK in Japan and the ARD in Germany, dictated to a great extent by foreign military governments in Japan and Germany, were replete with the public service ideal. If broadcasting was to comment, it should do so with a flourish. If it was to amuse, it should do so with élan. If it was to educate, it should do so with real professionalism. It was simply understood by the American and Allied leadership that the life of the mind of a society was far too precious and important to be left to the vagaries of a commercial system.

It could be argued that such policies were creatures of the moment, as massive destruction demanded enormous reconstruction, of which communications would inevitably be part. But what was required was the restoration not just of highways, buildings, plants, but also of the shattered imaginative lives of whole populations. The architects of postwar Germany and Japan sensed correctly that healthy, diverse cultural institutions were a prerequisite to a functioning liberal democracy. Broadcasting was thus to be used as a key part of the cultural and social regeneration of those societies.

In that lies the real clue to the nature and purpose of great public broadcasting: that it makes best sense when it represents a national and moral optimism within a society, when it suggests – through the diversity and quality of its programs – that we can be better than we are: better served, better amused, better informed, and, thus, better citizens.

Next: Public Service

INDEX

by Michael Tracey

“Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

So on to the really interesting part: what has it all meant, what do I take away from this curious episode in my life, and from a decade-long involvement not just in the narrative around the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, but the cultural ecology out of which that narrative climbed?

Henry James once wrote that to be an American is a complex fate, a sentiment I’d like to amend by suggesting that to be alive is a complex fate, pulled asunder as we are by the competing forces of deep, unspoken Neolithic urges, the demands of the caring heart and struggles in usingdavid the Rational mind, all elements present in the World of JonBenet.

Three general issues suggest themselves: the first is what was revealed about the condition and nature of contemporary American culture; the second involves what might be called the mood of the public mind; and the third is the personal experience.

The Media vs. Justice

Perhaps the most serious issue which emerged, or was revealed, yet again was the relationship that now exists between two core institutions, the media and the judicial system. In fact, increasingly, and wrongly, these two elemental parts of this society as a democracy seem to be engaged in a danse macabre, where the law has become part of the entertainment industry, and where that industry is consistently fed and led by leaks from law enforcement. As I suggested in the opening sections of this essay, and in the email to David Mills, small but influential sections of law enforcement in Boulder willingly provided “information” from the investigation which had one clear purpose, to persuade the American people of that which the police department was utterly convinced, that John and Patsy Ramsey killed their daughter. That “information” was presented uncritically to a public only too willing to believe what they were being told. In effect, it seemed that what was illustrated here was that the very integrity of the rule of law is increasingly compromised by the role of ratings and circulation driven media.

The role of publicly constructed rumor and suggestion, publicly made falsehoods, through the mass media, the Internet and everyday chatter in people’s lives, raises a profound issue of law. The public verdict was of the Ramsey’s guilt. If one thinks of this in terms of the proper demands of the law, any case of guilt has to be demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt. Any conviction on less than proof beyond a reasonable doubt is constitutionally infirm under state statutes and the Constitution. At the heart of this lies the notion that guilt beyond a reasonable doubt cannot be premised on pure conjecture. The jury has to consider, as does any appellate court, whether the evidence, considered most favourably to the State, was such as to permit a rational conclusion by the jury that the accused was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Can the jury rationally choose the hypothesis that supports guilt rather than the hypothesis which is consistent with innocence?

The question which needs to be considered in this context is whether the media coverage of this or any other case is prejudicial and therefore harmful to the basic rights of the accused because of the precise way in which it nurtures, even advocates, pure conjecture that inhibits the ability to look at the evidence rationally. What was certainly being undermined was an ancient tenet of Anglo-Saxon law, one which is embedded in the Constitution’s 5th, 6th and 14th Amendments, the presumption of innocence or, as the Supreme Court has asserted, the assumption of innocence.

The burden of proof is on the prosecution to convince the court that the accused is guilty beyond reasonable doubt. This right to be presumed innocent is so important to democratic culture that many societies, not just the United States, have included it in legal codes and constitutional documents. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Article 11, recognizes the presumption of innocence, as does the Council of Europe’s Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. In many countries journalistic codes of ethics clearly state that journalists should clearly refrain from referring to suspects as if their guilt was clear and certain.

A very basic question then, one to which we will never know the answer, is whether or not the Ramseys, one or both, could have gotten a fair trial, given the clear and overwhelming evidence that the whole narrative around them was one of their being guilty. For the record, Bryan Morgan, John’s attorney, thinks that given the makeup of the population in Boulder (which has been declared by Forbes Magazine to be the smartest city in America because it has, per capita, more people above age 25 or over with at least a Bachelor’s degree – 52.9% – and this resting on the highly questionable premise that possessing a degree is a simile for being smart) and given voir dire, where potential jurors are questioned, they could have gotten a fair trial. I have to say, Bryan has more sunshine in his soul than I have.

In this context, also, there was an intriguing presentation in the winter of 1999 by the pollster Dave Sackett in a speech on “Key Trends in National and Colorado Public Opinion.” He suggested that: 1. truth is what people believe; 2. villains must be identified; 3. rhetoric is more important than fact; 4. the intensity of the focus is on detailing the problem, not the solution.

One of the arguments used by media lawyers to demand that information be released from the investigation, such as the ransom note and the autopsy report, was that there was a public “right to know.” It was, lawyers such as Denver based Tom Kelley who would claim, in the public interest.

The obvious question that emerges from that is, why? And what if one could reasonably argue that maintaining the integrity of the investigation served another equally compelling public interest, apprehending a vicious killer and therefore protecting public safety?

What seems perfectly clear is that the issue isn’t one of the public’s right to know but, all too often, the public’s right to ogle, at the expense of those who may or may not have been charged with a crime, or who simply may have a desire for their privacy to be protected. The premise seems to be that if the public’s interest in a story is understandable then it is by definition legitimate and therefore a valid media story. This begs, again, the question of: why? Obviously there are some stories that are both of interest to the public and which speak to obvious issues of the public good and interest. Corrupt politicians on the take would be such an example. Corrupt cops would be another. What public interest or good is served, however, when every detail of a serious issue such as child murder is made available in the public square in a manner almost guaranteed, and in the Ramsey case intended, to harm other rights that the individual properly has in a society in which the rule of law is deemed to prevail? In such moments, what drives the story and its consumption by a slack-jawed public is not their need for the knowledge to sustain democratic culture, but the desire for tittle~tattle and to sate a ravenous prurience.

Perhaps my own sense of the problems they would have had in obtaining a fair trial is based in considerable part on the feeling I increasingly had that this society was extremely concerned in establishing guilt, in punishing, in condemning, but yet it was not necessarily concerned with the possibility that the innocent could get caught up in the rush to justice. Indeed there is a not inconsiderable section of the population which is willing to accept that the death penalty should be maintained, even if the innocent are occasionally wrongfully executed – though one suspects that their views might be a tad different if they were the innocent being strapped to the gurney.

I also came to see that there was a small but influential group of what one might call professional accusers – I have in mind people such as Dominick Dunne, Mark Klass and John Walsh – three men made bitter and angry by the terrible experience of having a child murdered – and such programs as Cops, 911, True Stories of the Highway Patrol, Forensic Files, as well as the numerous other people and programs that give visible force and meaning to the society’s desire, need, to put bad people away. There is nothing in and of itself wrong with this even if, as I will suggest in a moment, it reflects impulses fed by deeper social and cultural pathologies.

Accusing, Damning, Condemning

As I first began to make some notes about what might become a book, in the summer of 2003, I noticed a new member of this band of those who would seek and render justice to those they deem – no, know – to be guilty and all beneath the glare of klieg lights. She was called Nancy Grace, and became a frequent pontificator on the Larry King Show. Eventually she would have her own shows on CNN and Court TV. She is, inevitably, a former prosecutor.

At that time she was particularly eager to tell us that a California woman, Lacy Peterson, was killed by her husband, Scott. There had been no trial, the evidence had not been laid out , but that didn’t matter one jot. The bastard’s guilty because Nancy says so.

A few months before, in 2002 she was equally sure that Richard Ricci, a handyman who had done work for a family in Utah, the Smarts, had kidnapped and probably murdered young Elizabeth Smart. The poor wretch, whose wife was adamant that he was asleep in her bed on the night of the disappearance, turned out to have an arrest warrant for him on an unrelated matter. He was arrested and imprisoned. While in prison he had a brain aneurysm and passed away. On March 12, 2003, Elizabeth Smart was found walking down a street in a Salt Lake City suburb in the company of a psychopathic drifter and self-proclaimed prophet, Brian David Mitchell, and his wife Brenda Barzee, with whom the whole while Elizabeth had been camping out in the hills near her home.

Nancy never said sorry, because she clearly had no more capacity to admit error than she has to offer forgiveness or the benefit of the doubt. Given these serious character flaws it should come as no surprise that she is in great demand for talk shows, has her own show on CNN and has a following of viewers, overwhelmingly women, who call in and before offering their question and comment say “I think you’re great Nancy,” at which point a faux smile crosses her face like a sunbeam on a granite cliff.

Honesty makes me confess to the fact that when I first saw her I had an immediate and visceral dislike. Her face is flinty, hard, drained of warmth. Her eyes are dead and cruel. She drips anger at God knows what, like a divorced soccer mom who lost custody, no kid or ball, but all of the attitude. She is the very embodiment, the Goddess Athene, of the resentment that seems to afflict so many lives, a disposition that demands: punish them and make ME feel safe; punish them and make ME feel better. I nevertheless had a sense that somehow she was a victim of something, that she was in pain, that some dynamite trail led to what Mailer once called a “stricken place.”

And there was. Her fiancé was murdered.

Dunne in particular interests me. He has never seen an accused who wasn’t guilty. There is the dandy dress, the ostentatious spectacles, the name dropping, the apparently perpetual lunch at the perpetually fancy hotel, the obsession with celebrity crime, about which he writes for Vanity Fair. In his 2001 book, Justice – Crimes, Trials and Punishments, he writes about the various celebrity trials he has covered, such as Claus von Bulow, OJ, the Menendez brothers and Michael Skakel. In a moment of either candor or idiocy, during his account of the Menendez trial, he writes: “In cases of high crime, I’ve never made any attempt to present a balanced picture. This was no exception.”

I had an interesting, and to me revealing, experience with Dunne on the Larry King Show. I can’t recall what it was that happened in the Ramsey case that led to the call to see if I could go on that night. Dunne had been booked for the whole hour, but was now to share the first couple of segments in a discussion about the murder. Early in the first segment King asked Dunne what he thought about the case. In that rather faltering style of his he said, “well you know Larry, I think that the brother might have done it.” Since there are two brothers, Burke, who was nine at the time of the killing, and John Andrew who was in his early twenties and was JonBenet’s half-brother from John Ramsey’s first marriage, King asked Dunne “which one?” “Burke,” Dunne replied, and then proceeded to ramble on about how this small boy had strangled and bludgeoned his sister, concocted a long and literate ransom note, got rid of much of the objects and materials used in the crime (including a stun gun), gone back to bed and fallen asleep.

If there was any truth to this then Burke would surely count as one of the more interesting psychopathic nine year-olds in history. The fact of the matter was that Dunne seemed to be the only person on the planet who did not know that the one person who had been cleared by the Boulder police as a suspect was Burke, on the not unreasonable grounds that given the nature of the crime no small boy could have done it.

As I listened to Dunne I became furious and let him know my contempt for this extraordinary combination of arrogance and ignorance. King, I think, was slightly embarrassed and did his best to defend Dunne. What stayed with me most, however, was the unspoken assumption that one had a perfect right to make such an accusation and the fact that he knew nothing of any value about the case was irrelevant. What was important was being in the spotlight of the Larry King show, and the adrenaline rush of accusing, damning, condemning whoever happened to have wandered into the cross-hairs, and if only he could do this enough then maybe some of the anger and anguish over his own life’s loss would be diminished. That innocence and the innocent would be trampled in the process was, well, just too damn bad.

Post-OJ America

In another sense when one looks at how the media dealt with the case over the years, from that Christmas of her death to the August of Karr’s arrest, one is reminded, not for the first time, that so much of what represents itself as “journalism” is actually a broth of fantasy, the trivial, the sleazy, the sexual. It isn’t that this is so new. Since the beginning of modern media, including the early newspapers that spoke to this new Republic, crime, scandal and sex have been staples. Today, however, there is so much, at the expense of much else, and it thrives not at the margins but in the heartland of the culture. It is this that is so troubling, and of which the Ramsey case has been so potent a symbol.

Lewis Carrol might have recognized the world in which the Ramseys found themselves: “I’ll be Judge, I’ll be Jury, said cunning old fury, I’ll try the whole case and I’ll condemn you to death.” In other words, the story constructed a surreal view of reality, but one that many people were only too willing to accept as if it were real. The Ramseys and those trying to defend them had to deal with a kind of “consensual hallucination,” to use Gibson’s phrase, constituted by what the famed sociologist C. Wright Mills called the cultural apparatus that “not only guides experience (but) often as well expropriates the very chance to have experience that can rightly be called ‘our own’…” galvanizing the extraordinary force of the irrational.

The context within which the case would be reported would be the America of post~O.J Simpson. It was a new media world in which the void left by his acquittal would be quickly filled by the Ramsey case. The Clinton sex scandal had further fueled a 24/7 voracious media monster. JonBenet’s murder happened just as this new media environment was being birthed. Adding to this was the deepening legitimization of the tabloid press in American journalism as they had shifted their attention away from the bizarre ~ Elvis seen paddling down the Colorado river ~ to real-life scandal, sleaze and human frailty, in which it seemed the nation was now drowning and for which the public had an impossible to slake thirst.

The Internet had also happened, with God knows how many Web sites dealing with the case and a culture of obsessive online interest in her death sprouting up with extraordinary speed. And driving it all was the fact that the images of JonBenet in the pageant videos, the sense of “that’s awful,” “tacky,” “exploitative,” the beauty, the youth, the violence, the sex, the wealth, the lifestyle and the fact that it happened on Christmas night made many giddy. One book editor, pointing out these characteristics of the case, told Sherry Keene Osborne, “I can’t tell you how excited we are.”

There was also a surfacing of a moral mood in the country that fed off a public hardened to cries of innocence, especially from parents. They felt duped by Susan Smith, who had for a time convinced everyone that her two sons had been abducted by a black man, only to eventually confess that she had taken them to a lake, fastened them in their seat belts in the back seat of her car, pushed it into the dark, cold waters and watched them slowly drown and all because she wanted to keep a boyfriend who didn’t want kids.

Millions of Americans also believed that Simpson had bought his “innocence” with his wealth and that in fact he was a killer. And the mood seemed also to feed off a delight in seeing the “better off’ brought down, as class resentment reared its head, as anger, fear and loathing became the defining emotional motifs of countless lives. It was a set of circumstances, a perfect storm, that would lead people to look at John and Patsy Ramsey and “see” killers.

The story that would be told over the coming months began, however, almost as a whisper. But even within that there was beginning to lurk the essential suggestion: here lie dark secrets, perversity of an almost unimaginable kind. Major stories work by taking on a life of their own, but, as with any life form, the essential elements are there from the moment of conception. What is remarkable is just how much and how quickly “information,” was being leaked from “sources close to the investigation.” It was, to be blunt, from the standpoint of contemporary media values, a great story.

After all, it’s just comedy…

In thinking about the nature of the media coverage I am reminded of the prescient comments of the English writer Richard Hoggart (who was also my boss for eight years) in his famously brilliant book, The Uses of Literacy, published in 1959, that moment when television had all but finished its conquest of public culture. He wrote of this

“newer mass art…This regular, increasing, and almost entirely unvaried diet of sensation without commitments is surely likely to help render its consumers less capable of responding openly and responsibly to life, is likely to induce an underlying sense of purposelessness in existence outside the limited range of a few immediate appetites. Souls which have had little opportunity to open will be kept hard-gripped, turned in upon themselves, looking out ‘with odd dark eyes like windows’ upon a world which is largely a phantasmagoria of passing shows and vicarious stimulations.”

Later in the book he writes:

“Most mass entertainments are in the end what D.H. Lawrence described as ‘anti-life.’ They are full of a corrupt brightness, of improper appeals and moral evasions. To recall instances: they tend towards a view of the world in which progress is conceived as seeking of material possessions, equality as a moral leveling, and freedom as the ground for endless irresponsible pleasure. These productions belong to a vicarious spectators’ world; they offer nothing which can really grip the brain or heart. They assist a gradual drying-up of the more positive, the fuller, the more cooperative kinds of enjoyment, in which one gains much by giving much .They have intolerable pretensions; and pander to the wish to have things both ways, to do as we want and accept no consequences.”

The experience also yelled, once more, that the case, and the public’s sense of it was much ado about sex, and particularly sex with children. This often invokes a dark brew of condemnation and fascination. Andrew O’Hagan has written:

“We could go a stage further, and suggest that our tabloid media have a paedophile element to their subconscious, a child-abusing energy at the heart of their own anger. The British tabloid newspapers demonstrate this every day, with their talk of ‘our tots’ and their enthusiastic ‘revelations’ about suspected child abusers and child murderers. You can’t read the British papers without feeling polluted, not only by the stories but by the degree to which the writers and editors of those stories appear to want them to be true, even before the evidence has proved it. Beyond this, a carnival of sensationalism vies with a deadly prurience, matched by a creepy populist appeal to the ‘common decency’ of the mob. You feel that the hacks are getting off on the horrors they ascribe, getting high on the pseudo-democratic vengeance their stories might excite.” [He quotes Margo Jefferson, who wrote an essay about Michael Jackson:] “‘Here’s an ugly fact,’ Jefferson writes. ‘The sexual abuse of children largely goes underreported. And even when it’s reported, it often goes unpunished. But here’s a sorry fact. We’re mesmerized by such crimes: they have become a form of mass culture entertainment, and a cover story for all kinds of fears.’”

O’Hagan is correct that conclusions about guilt made ahead of the available evidence are now a commonplace in popular culture and in fact have become the stuff of comedy. In the Los Angeles Times, Jay Leno’s former scriptwriter, Brad Dickson, points to the comedian’s habit of accusing people of being guilty. He writes, “…my job consisted largely of waiting for public figures to be accused of something vile, preferably illegal. Murder was No. 1 on our hit parade. Once a public figure was accused, we writers pounced like mountain lions on a lame goat. The jokes did not necessarily have to be good…but almost always assumed guilt… Much like a hangman, a ‘Tonight Show’ writer must recognize that as a well paid jury-pool-tainter, your charge is to not question guilt.”

He writes of how uncomfortable he was, for example, with the accusations Leno consistently made against Richard Jewell, who was for a while a suspect in the Atlanta Olympic bombing – Leno called him ‘Doofus Dick’ Jewell. Jewell was later exonerated by the FBI and indeed declared a hero for his actions that night. Dickson also writes: “The most potentially injurious jokes I wrote were about the parents of murdered JonBenet Ramsey. If not guilty they still had to endure a national late-night drubbing insinuating that they killed their own child. Although Leno has a reputation for presuming guilt the fastest and being the most relentless with mean jokes, almost all late-night hosts assume the accused are guilty. But does it matter? After all, it’s just comedy.”

Clearly it does matter, since it is now clear that more and more people, particularly the young, look to such shows for “information.” Why else would would be governors or presidential candidates declare their intention to run on the “Tonight Show.”

The Joy of Killing

One other possible, even likely, explanation for the popularity of the story of her death and others like it, the energy which feeds the news value, is that they ‘speak’ to a vital aspect of the human condition, an innate, morbid curiosity in death and mayhem, a compulsion of sorts that incites excitement and fear in exploring macabre topics such as death and horrible violence.

Mark Twain wrote in “Following the Equator,’ which was published in 1897: “The joy of killing! The joy of seeing killing done – these are the traits of the human race at large.” It is a disposition that has been described as “necrophiliac voyeurism.” There is nothing new here. In a review of Perry Curtis’ Jack the Ripper and the London Press, published in 2002, Richard Davenport-Hines writes: “When Tennyson and Jowett sat up late together, it was to talk of murders. The Victorians took a ghoulish pleasure in every phase of their more ghastly homicides; from the moment a corpse was found the hunt for morbid thrills was intense. After seven members of the Marshall family were hacked to death at Denham in 1870, ‘pleasure vans’ brought hordes of day-trippers from London to see the gore, and to purloin souvenirs. The Victorians were not dainty in their interest, and journalists were seldom squeamish in their reporting… executions generally fed a public appetite. Twenty thousand people went to watch William Palmer hang outside Stafford Gaol. Coventry Patmore’s rousing poem ‘A London Fête,’ describing ‘the wicked treat’ of a public hanging at Newgate, conveys the public’s ‘horrid thirst’ for gore.” One of the conclusions drawn by Curtis is that “Jack the Ripper” (whose name was almost certainly made up by a journalist at the Central News Agency) may not have been very good for the health of prostitutes but he was massively good for the health of newspaper circulation.

The obvious question I’m trying to engage is why do stories such as the death of JonBenet take hold of the collective imagination, and why stories that what one might properly define as more substantive, are so often marginalized? The answer is both simple and complex. Simple because there is an obvious public appetite, complex because of the mystery of why there are such appetites in the first place, ones that originate on the dark side of the human condition. In The Empire Strikes Back, young Luke Skywalker asks his Jedi master, Yoda, whether the dark side of the force is stronger than the good. Yoda replies with his Jedi wisdom and irony, “no, easier, quicker, more seductive.” Indeed.

Next: A Crisis of Prevailing Values

INDEX

by Michael Tracey

In the mid-1980s David Mills had tried to get a budget together to make a documentary based on my work on public broadcasting, making the case that market forces would prove disastrous for broadcasting as a means of serving the public interest. We would also argue that deregulation, along the lines of American television, would be deeply unfortunate, along with the more nuanced argument that there is, anyhow, no such thing as de-regulation – there is only regulation (ie someone making decisions about content) in the public interest or a private interest. Culture is never, finally, neutral.

David’s efforts came to nothing. We did however keep in touch. He was aware, vaguely, of how during 1997 I had been drawn into talking about the case in scores of interviews, across all media. It was, in fact, a good opportunity to make the point about the problems of journalistic practice in a market-driven environment that he and I had discussed many times.

In September 1997, I decided to write an op-ed piece for the Sunday edition of the local paper, the Daily Camera (cf. appendix.) The peg for the piece was the debate about the role of the paparazzi in the death of Princess Diana in Paris on August 31, 1997. I argued that the question of the tabloid and mainstream media obsession with Diana should come as no surprise to anyone, particularly anyone living in Boulder. We had had for nine months a pitch perfect example of exactly the same kind of obsession in the coverage of JonBenet and her parents. At the end of January, a month after her death, there were three hundred reporters in Boulder, covering the case. The rhetorical question that the piece asked was simple: how come we all know the Ramseys are guilty? The answer was obvious, as I have already stated: that was the only story being told.

Shortly after the op-ed appeared I got a phone call from Bryan Morgan. I didn’t know much about Bryan then (we have since become good friends) other than that he represented John Ramsey and that he was founding partner, with Hal Haddon, of one of the most powerful criminal defense law firms in the western states. My immediate reaction was to wonder if there was something in the article I had written that had raised his hackles. I couldn’t imagine what that could be since I think I can reasonably claim that it was one of the first times the possibility had been raised in the media that maybe the case wasn’t so tight and shut as everyone was assuming. He told me that he wanted to come and talk, and so we did, meeting in my small cramped office in the Norlin Library on the CU campus. I explained to him my position, a mini-version of the arguments I expanded upon in the Prologue, and added that I had no view as to the guilt or innocence of his clients, and that my main concern was with the nature of the media coverage, the role of the tabloids and the fact that, guilty or innocent, the Ramseys still had rights that were being trashed. It was an interesting conversation but when he left I assumed that was the end of it.

A couple of days later, however, Bryan called me again with a startling proposal. He told me that Patsy Ramsey wanted to come and talk to one of my classes. I must admit that I burst out laughing. The Ramseys were the most wanted couple in America, the ultimate “get” for all the major media figures like Barbara Walters, Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, but they had been totally hunkered down, on the advice of their attorneys, for whom defense law 101 is your clients don’t talk, and here she wanted to come and talk to a bunch of college kids. We agreed to meet next day for lunch.

As I put the phone down, I had an idea and called David. I found him in a bookshop in Scotland. I briefly explained the context and then with that temerity again showing its head said that we should make a documentary that would allow us to make the point that we had discussed all those years before by telling the story of how the story of JonBenet had been told. And I added, if I can get the Ramseys will you produce it. Barely thinking (something that there would be many moments he would regret) he said yes.

The First Time I Met John Ramsey

I met Bryan the next day at The James Irish Pub. With him was Pat Burke, Patsy’s attorney. They had come expecting to discuss how we could get Patsy into one of my classrooms, without drawing any media attention. I suggested that I had a better idea. I told them that I wanted to make a documentary about the media story of JonBenet’s death, but that to do that I had to put their clients on camera. In television terms you could no more make such a movie than you could stage Hamlet without the Prince. There was also a practical reason, in that no network was going to put up a budget if they were not interviewed.

As they heard my proposal, Bryan and Pat – both of whom are very high-end criminal defense attorneys whose talents you definitely never want to be in a position to need – looked at me as if I were a lunatic. When your clients are assumed by the whole world to be guilty of killing their daughter, when an indictment is obvious, when the whole of the world’s media would love to talk to them and is anyhow spewing forth extraordinary amounts of so-called “information,” the absolutely last thing you do is let them talk. However, as I was about to learn for the first (but not the last) time, the normal laws of moral physics do not exist in the universe that swirls around her death. They said that they would put my proposal to the Ramseys, clearly assuming that there was no way this was going to happen. They were wrong. Within about 24 hours Bryan called me again and said, much to even my amazement, “they’re interested.”

The first time I met John Ramsey was in the foyer of the Hyatt in Marietta, Georgia, in early December 1997. He had come to take Bryan Morgan and I to his house on Paces Ferry Road. David would be flying in later from filming in Bucharest. As we shook hands on first meeting, I couldn’t help but wonder whether I were shaking hands with a child killer. That whole weekend had a kind of out of body sense to it: trying to negotiate an interview, all the while looking at them, searching for a clue, something that would reveal an inner, ghastly persona capable of killing.

Nothing. Here was a life, it seemed of wealthy ordinariness, caught up in vicious extra-ordinariness. There were other little clues that weekend. We went to dinner at a private, elegant club on Peachtree, in Atlanta, where they were well known. The waiter greeted them warmly, not it seemed to me out of any obsequiousness, rather out of genuine affection. At one point in the evening David, who was sitting next to Patsy, asked how she coped with the pressure of being accused by the whole world of killing her child. She started to cry. Not out loud, rather out of what seemed like a private agony. David and I would both note that John seemed not to react, carrying on his conversation with me. Instead Bryan got up, moved around the table, put his arms around her, and led her from the dining room. From another table, a lady rose, followed them out, and suggested she take Patsy into the ladies powder room so that she could compose herself.

Later David and I discussed this incident and John Ramsey’s apparent aloofness to his wife’s distress. Could it be, as many had suggested, that he did indeed have ice in his veins, that he had the cold stone heart of man who could indeed kill his own child with blithe indifference? Or could it be that in the context of unimaginable pressure and accusation he had to hold his composure, for his sake, for Patsy, for the family? For if not him who could, would, should? I now see John Ramsey as man with almost surreal courage, the likes of which I have never, before or since, seen.

The following morning, Sunday, David and I sat down with the Ramseys at the dining table in their home to discuss the interview. Bryan sat quietly alongside one wall. We had a drawn up a list of conditions that we insisted on. Looking back there was nothing if not British hubris in this: here were two people who were possibly, one or both, facing the death penalty, who were being begged by their attorneys not to talk to us, who were in demand by every major news organization in America for “the interview,” and here we were saying we’ll do this but only if you accept our conditions. These were basically that we could ask any question we wanted, no exceptions; that they would have absolutely no editorial involvement, indeed that they would never see the programme before it was broadcast; and that if we found out anything damaging to their case we would use it. The only clause which Morgan asked to be included was that we would agree not to broadcast the documentary during the time that any grand jury – if it were empanelled – was sitting. ( This clause would cause much confusion and silliness, and in the end was revoked by the attorneys at our bidding.)

That we had put these conditions forward came largely from the fact that we knew that any attempt to get a commission out of the UK would be very much dependent on our convincing the commissioning editor that what we were proposing was a piece of independent investigative journalism and not – as we would inevitably be accused – a softball interview. We laid out these conditions to John and Patsy, and generally discussed our ideas as to what we had in mind: a story had been told about them and this crime, a story which we wanted to interrogate to see if another story could have been told. They listened , agreed, we stood up, facing each other across the table, shook hands and they signed the agreement. Bryan Morgan went to an even whiter shade of pale because of what had just happened.

The inevitable thought that came to mind, however, was why would two people, if they were the killers, allow two Brits to interview them with these terms. If they were guilty, and they were still agreeable to cooperating, in the form of a major interview, then we were clearly involved in something that married the bizarre with the surreal. It could be argued that they, or at least those, like Susan Stine, whose counsel they sought knew something of my own position because of the numerous media interviews I’d given over the previous months. That position, however, was never that that they were innocent or guilty, only that the media coverage was vastly overdone and deeply prejudicial to any legal rights they had under the Constitutional provision to be presumed innocent.

However, they could have no idea about Mills’ position on the case if only because he didn’t really have one. I also explained to them that David came out of a tradition of broadcast journalism, that of British public service broadcasting, that treasured its integrity and independence. His mentor, Ray Fitzwalter of Granada Television, was legendary for both his nurturing of brilliant investigative journalism and for his utter, incorruptible integrity ( pity the producer who put in padded expenses to Ray, or didn’t nail the story factually as well as conceptually.) The Ramseys would have been stupid beyond belief to imagine that Mills would allow himself to become – please forgive the pun – a patsy.

Left Hand, Right Hand

When I returned home after this meeting there were the inevitable questions of: well, what are they like, did they do it? To which my reply, utterly subjective, grounded in nothing more than a feeling, was “no way.” But I was always quick to add: but even if they did, that’s irrelevant to us.

Later, as we filmed, the same experience would confront others. Dan Glick and Sherry Keene-Osborne, who wrote for Newsweek, were working with us as associate producers and had done some wonderful, revisionist journalism about the case. Neither had met the Ramseys until we started to film the interview. Both came away with that same sense of “no-way.” Having said that, it is important to understand that Dan and Sherry were as open to evidence that pointed at the Ramseys as that which pointed away. Dan and I in fact used to keep what we would call our left hand, right hand column moments. In the left column would be evidence that pointed away, the right evidence that pointed at them, and in particular Patsy. There was also one memorable moment at dinner the first night of filming, in March 1998. Bryan Morgan, tears in his eyes, recalled the moment when he realized that John at least was not involved. It was when, at one point in 1997, he was describing how JonBenet had died and it became clear to him that John “hadn’t a clue.”

For me, though, one reaction in particular stood out. We had hired as our cameraman-director Patrick Turley. Patrick is wonderful at his craft. He was by this time semi-retired. He had won numerous awards, and when Stanley Kubrick had wanted someone to shoot the New York scenes of Eyes Wide Shut, he had asked Patrick to do it – Kubrick famously never traveled. Patrick could also be testy, something that reflected both his perfectionism and an edgy psychology. He was also deeply cynical in a manner that Brits have mastered. He had in his career seen and filmed it all, war, mayhem, corruption. That same first night of the interview he said, to no-one in particular, “ I can’t see it.”

Of course, none of this was, or could, be conclusive. To have “seen” in the Ramseys “innocence,” would have been as wrong-headed, as irrational and stupid, as to have “seen” in them “guilt.” Over the next several years and two more documentaries , however, Mills and I became convinced that they were innocent. Following the December Atlanta meeting there were weeks of intense negotiation, a back and forth between me and the attorneys, as David was back in the UK trying to get a budget together.

What became quite clear was that whatever the advice, John Ramsey wanted to talk, indeed needed desperately to talk. I remember one key meeting, on a Saturday in the law offices of Mike Bynum, John’s friend and business partner. Everyone was there, (with one key exception): David, Dan, Sherry, Bryan, Pat Burke, Hal Haddon and Lee Foreman, the other senior partner in the Morgan, Haddon law firm. I made the pitch as to why they should do it, basically arguing that we would be professional, that their clients needed to be heard and definitely wanted to be heard.

There was surprisingly little opposition, because John Ramsey, the one vote that counted, had decided that we should proceed, and had told his attorneys of his decision. The deal was done. David got a budget from the British network, Channel Four, and in March 1998 we arrived in Atlanta. It had started.

There was one strange, vivid moment that, looking back, suggested the real extent to which JonBenet would enter my life. I had set my alarm for 6:00 am on the morning I would fly out to Atlanta. I had a dream about her, and recall vividly her saying, “Time to wake up Professor Tracey.” I awoke, slightly startled because it really did feel real. It was 5:59 am.

In January, 1998 I wrote a longish note to David suggesting what seemed to me to be the essential themes we needed to confront:

“David/ here are a few initial thoughts on the programme. We will obviously need to think long and hard about how to proceed. The trump card which we have is the Ramseys. Their involvement is what will get the attention. The down side to that is that we will be accused of being part of their PR campaign. So we will need to stay focused on the heart of the matter, which in effect is to put the American media on trial, and in so doing put America itself in the dock because without an audience for what Teddy White called “the schlock storm” it wouldn’t exist.Background

On December 26th 1996 the body of JonBenet Ramsey was found in the basement of her home. Her skull had been fractured, she had been strangled and she may or may not have been sexually assaulted. She was six years old, her home was in Boulder, Colorado and her death was to become the latest example of an American pastime, private tragedy as public spectacle.

Almost immediately two things happened:

1. her death became a major news story, with remarkably extensive coverage on tv and radio and in newspapers. At one point in January there were three hundred journalists in Boulder covering the story. It became a fixture on local television news, on cable programmes and primetime network news magazines. Even the London Sunday Times was to carry it as the cover story for its magazine, which featured a photo of JonBenet and the line “The Kiddie-Porn Killing: How the murder of a six year-old beauty queen chilled America’s soul.” That in itself was interesting because what it represented was the way in which an essential interpretation of what had happened, that the case was an example of familial sexual abuse, had become so prevalent that it had crossed the Atlantic.

2. there was an immediate and widespread assumption, fueled by media coverage, which was itself partly fed by the Police Department, that the parents were guilty of killing the child. The flow of “information” went: police dept leaks info to media, including tabloids and local paper, which publishes it as ‘fact,” which reassures the public, which has already been reassured by Durgin’s statement ( this was the mayor’s statement on January 2, that the police were not scouring the streets of Boulder for a child killer, a comment she said, when we interviewed her for the first documentary, she very much regretted) and which is anyhow disposed to believe the spin because of its own sense of how these kinds of crime happen, and which is anyhow fascinated with the case, and which wants more, which leads to further leaks to the increasing numbers of journalists covering the case, and so on as a public “understanding” of what happened and who did it becomes a powerful and unquestioned orthodoxy.

There is an obvious connection between the two, since the overwhelming tone of the coverage has often implied, and sometimes overtly stated, that the parents were guilty. It is clear that this was a conclusion that was arrived at early on by the police. Their problem was that they were then unable to make the case so that an indictment could be brought. This is why they decided to use the media to create a climate of public opinion which would force the DA to bring the Ramsey’s to trial. In my first conversation with Bryan Morgan, John Ramsey’s attorney, he said that when the story of the case was eventually told the real hero who would emerge would be a figure in the DA’s office (I now know that Bryan had Pete Hofstrom in mind, a man who was widely regarded not just an excellent assistant district attorney but someone who was ethically unimpeachable, and who has maintained a studied silence on the case to this day.) He seemed to be suggesting that it was this person in particular who had been primarily responsible for resisting the pressure to go to trial. In the recent Louise Woodward case ( an English nanny working in New England who had been accused of killing a child) it became clear that many Brits were surprised, shocked even, by the role of the media in the case, for example the television appearance of the parents before the jury had arrived at a verdict. The reality is that there was nothing unusual in this in terms of the relationship between the US media and the judicial process. In the context of the Ramseys there is no-one in the whole of the United States who has not been repeatedly told that the parents did it. One real puzzle, however, which may be beyond the scope of a television programme is why there was such a ready and potent willingness among the public to accept such an interpretation given that there is little meaningful evidence to sustain such certainty.”

Looking back there is little that I would change.

Storming the Bastille of Words

The errors in the media story were especially egregious precisely because they were fundamentally unfair and utterly denied the Ramseys the most basic of rights, to be presumed innocent. In the end the system worked and there was no indictment, but it was all perilously close.

The point David and I have been trying to make through the documentaries was that the story of JonBenet’s murder was a perfect avatar for a brute and new reality about American journalism, one which is increasingly boorish, banal, corrupt and debased, and that more importantly its condition was metastasizing into the body politic, and in particular into the judicial process and the rights of the citizen under the Constitution. So the brute premise was that even those – perhaps especially those – who would eventually be found guilty of heinous crime had rights. This was, it seemed to me something which never came close to being granted to the Ramseys.

There is, I believe and hope, a certain reasonable purpose in spending a decade of one’s life focused on one child murder. I am, I recognize, grasping here for a certain justification of purpose. Why her, why this case? I’ve thought about this question many times, but only recently began to fathom what might be an answer, with the help of many hours of conversation with a wise and gentle man whom I’ll refer to here simply as DG. It was, in fact, those conversations that guided me to the thoughts that I expressed in the Prologue.

In the same year that JonBenet died there were 804 children below the age of twelve murdered in the United States. She was one. Yet her death took on iconic status. She became Marilyn, Elvis, the Diana of slaughtered children, as her name entered the inner sanctum of public memory and knowledge. About that six year old child, about her demise, a mountain of lies were told. And if we cannot tell the truth about a child’s death, what else can we, as a culture, lie about?

The right to know the truth about JonBenet’s death is no different than the right to know the truth about, say, war and security. Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and ideas of truth it was time to storm what he called the “Bastille of Words.” David Mills and I set out to storm that Bastille of Words about the Ramsey case using the power of television. One obvious aspect was that as a student of culture who has spent many years writing and talking about the deepening corruption of cultural and, in particular, journalistic values here was a pitch perfect example of the argument, and it was on my own door step. As I suggested in the Prologue, the nature of the coverage suggested that the country I had idealized as a boy was falling well short of those ideals.

I was also motivated by a profound sense that, not only was she an innocent about whose death the truth should out, a child who had not, in all likelihood been killed by her parents, but that the family were being bullied, by the media and a great swathe of the public, and in my world view there is a special place reserved on the inner ring of hell for the bully.

I’ve felt this way since childhood, perhaps because when your father dies when you are only four years old the world becomes a scary place, and you develop a fearful sense that it is peopled by those who will prey on the vulnerable and when you are four, and your dad has gone, who will protect you? Yourself, if you can. And with that comes a belief, at least it did with me, that when you see someone being bullied, you have a moral responsibility to help them.

I guess it was as simple as that: this was not the America of my boyhood dreaming; it didn’t make sense that they would do this; and I felt profoundly sorry for them.

Next: Daxis

INDEX

by Michael Tracey

Several incidents in particular focused my attention not on the murder but on how we seemed to be dealing with it as a culture. In March 1997 the CU branch of the Society of Professional Journalists organized a forum on cheque book journalism, particularly as it related to the Ramsey case. The panel consisted of two reporters from the National Enquirer, a reporter for the cable tabloid programme Hard Copy and Chuck Green of the Denver Post. Green, a strangely bitter, cynical man was known to be hyper-critical of the investigation, and of the role of the DA’s office in pursuing the case and in what Green took to be the protection of the Ramseys.

“…it’s not an important story, but it’s entertaining”

One of the many myths that would come to cling to the case like leeches on skin was that John Ramsey was plugged into a Boulder power and cultural elite, one which had circled the wagons to protect their own. It was not true but its mythic potency served a useful purpose of constructing the sense of guilt and responsibility which so many seemed to crave. The composition of the panel on a bleak, cold evening struck me as grotesque, but the room was packed with students ready to sit at the feet of these towering examples of the Fourth Estate. Here were paraded tales of unlimited expenses, traveling hither and thither across the country, picking away at the scabs of society. It was altogether an appalling experience, particularly given that while clearly many of the students in attendance were not taken in others had eyes that grew ever wider.

I was sitting on the front row, feeling angry and despondent at the proceedings. At one point I asked Green a question: “I know this is a big story because you, the media, made it a big story, but do you think it is an important story?” He paused for barely a moment and then uttered a comment that while certainly honest was as appalling as it was revealing: “no, it’s not an important story, but it’s entertaining…” There it was in all its grotesque shabbiness, a cynical truth that spoke volumes not just about Green, or the case, or the media but about the essential nature of the society at the end of the century. The torture and murder of a six year old child was now a form of entertainment. As I pondered the comment in all its horror and listened to the drivel that spewed from the mouths of the other panelists it seemed clear as could be that the Barbarians had indeed crossed the Tiber.

A couple of months later I was asked to talk to the monthly luncheon of the Boulder Democratic Party Women’s group. The other speaker was Mimi Wesson, a law professor at CU. My role was to comment on the media coverage, hers on the legal issues that the case had thrown up. At one point a lady of extended years stood up to ask a question. She wore a nice floral dress, and looked every bit the image of everyone’s favourite grandma. She then asked Mimi, in a voice as shrill as the early morning call of a shrike, “why don’t the cops just go in there and grab the Ramseys and take them down to the police station and get a confession out of them…” Applause swept round the room. Mimi responded bravely “err, because they have constitutional rights, we don’t live in a police state etc etc…”

What caught my attention however was not just the exchange but the fact that everyone’s grandma was literally frothing at the mouth. It was a terrible sight, troubling and frightening in what it meant for some of the most essential guiding principles of any civilized society – fairness, compassion, rationality, impartiality, the presumption of innocence, understanding based on evidence.

I came to think of these kinds of judgments as the problem of ‘the face,’ the extraordinary way in which people would look at the faces of John and Patsy Ramsey and see guilt. One e-mail posted on the internet from Theresa16@aol.com., said – and I reproduce it here exactly as she wrote it – “I think PATRICIA RAMSEY killed JonBenet. I must confess that each & every time I see patsy on television I get a COLD CHILL UP MY SPINE…patricia ramsey is EVIL…i am not trying to be cruel/nasty. but…WHY does patricia ramsey CONTINUOUSLY have that “GUILTY SMILE”???…”

Serious Juju and Lactate Fed Omniscience

There was another occasion when David and I were showing clips from the documentary at the Denver Press Club, a rather dowdy place with sodden hacks at the bar and a genial barman. At the end of the evening, after much discussion which revolved around the question of whether the Ramsey’s were complicit in their daughter’s death, a female journalist suddenly said “I think John Ramsey is a pedophile, he has a twitch.”

This was the sort of statement that all one can do in response is stare in blank amazement. But here we had a member of the fourth estate deciding, like some 19th century quack, that she could divine character from the physiology of appearance. And the assertion that there was a relationship between a twitch and pedophilia was up there with all those stereotypical child molesters who are fat and squat and slavering. The other slight problem with her analysis was that, after spending endless hours in an editing suite staring at John Ramsey’s face, I never did see a twitch. Her sight of this affliction seemed to suggest that the eye does indeed see what the heart desires, because it is quite clear that she wanted to see the pedophile in him. It came as no surprise when, in conversation, she hinted that there had been sexual abuse in her own life, not that this is sufficient excuse to accuse someone of abuse, willy-nilly.

I remember another occasion, one that I pick from innumerable possible examples, that was similar. I was being driven to Denver to do the Larry King programme. They had sent me a car, it was August and I was heading down I-36 in a Lincoln Town Car. The driver was Steve, a soft spoken man, as broad as he was tall, with a wispy beard and shaved head. He would not have looked out of place at a leather bar in the Village. In reality he was married with three children, whom he obviously adored, along with what he called “200 close relatives” in the Denver area, about whom he clearly cared. We chatted and he asked me about the King show and so it was that it emerged that we were to discuss the Ramsey case. He paused and then said “ what’s always puzzled me is why they look so guilty, especially her, Patsy looks guilty.” What I wondered, and not for the first time, does guilt look like? And why did such an obviously decent man utter such dangerous bigotry?

There is one other, powerful example worth recalling, of this tendency to hate but not know. It was the annual Christmas party of the SJMC, in 1998 – our documentary on the media coverage of the case had gone out on A&E in the Fall. Colleagues, friends and enemies, milling around, making small talk and trying to be pleasant. In several such conversations the Ramsey case emerged. In one I was talking to a well known, senior professor. She looked sharp, in the sense of flinty rather then be-suited, her skin was pale and taught. She suddenly muttered, “ I think they are despicable.” “Who?” I asked, somewhat dumbly. “The Ramseys.” “Why?” I asked somewhat stupidly. “Because they abused and killed their daughter.” I replied: “Tell me why you think that?” “Because,” said this senior professor, in a major research university “I’m a mother of two, I know…” I remember thinking, this mothering thing is serious juju, lactate fed omniscience. I also had an overwhelming desire for an extremely stiff drink as I contemplated this perfect coming together of vile bigotry and voodoo stupidity.

The Illusion of Knowledge

And yet I had heard something similar so many times in the weeks and months after the murder, a deep belief among so many people in the guilt of the Ramseys, a belief that could not possibly rest on anything of any substance since there clearly was absolutely nothing that was publicly known that could justify that belief. There was one thing, however, that could not be avoided, and that was the story which had been told by the media, a story drenched with theory, innuendo, allegation, rumour, a story that took as given the likely involvement of the parents. It was a situation that reminded one of similar statements by two very different people: Josh Billings’ comment that “ignorance ain’t so much a matter of not knowing, but knowing so many things wot ain’t so” and Daniel Boorstein’s that “the problem is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.” If ever there was a case were ignorance masqueraded as knowledge it is the public and the media and the presumed guilt of John and Patsy Ramsey.

Initially the media focus was on John, who was publicly and repeatedly called a child molester and a killer. Then the focus moved inexorably to Patsy. There would be those who would argue that Burke was involved, and even JonBenet’s half-brother John Andrew. The fact that there was video footage of him taking money from an ATM in Atlanta on Christmas night did not necessarily deter some from this theory. One especially nasty tactic adopted by the tabloids would be to get someone to goad him into a reaction, with a photographer ready to photo this “aggressive” young man, lending force to the idea that he could be a killer.
To this day, over a decade later, I still hear comments from even apparently sane and reasonable people, unaware of their ignorance as to the most basic facts, who say they just “assume,” that the mother “did it.” End of story. No reflection. No sense of the appalling injustice of making such judgments on the basis of a feeling. There was, and is, an almost religious fervor to those who believed, and believe, in the Ramsey’s guilt, the fervor in fact, of the true believer, and anyone who questioned that ‘truth’ became a heretic.

I understand that underlying much of this is the child herself. In some photos a natural beauty shines through. In others there was the coquettish child of the pageants. In fact it was clear that much of the issue of the apparent loathing of the Ramseys by strangers begins and in a sense ends with JonBenet herself, with her looks and with her name and most of all with the photos and videos of her in those pageants. There is certainly something about the pageant world that comes over as so kitsch, cheapened culture, “bread soaked in perfume” to use Robert Essler’s bitter comment. In a remarkable outburst on Larry King Live, Janet McReynolds (wife of Bill McReynolds, who played Santa at a number of Ramsey Christmas parties and who would become in some eyes a serious suspect) captured this quite brilliantly – some might say too, and disturbingly, brilliantly. She said:

“I feel that ….the media is (sic) saying to this collective community…in some way she deserved to die. That, at least, is a message that I am getting: She deserved to die, she was too beautiful. She deserved to die because she was from an affluent family. She deserved to die because she lived in an upscale community. She deserved to die because her family taught her gestures which might be interpreted as sexually suggestive. She deserved to die because she was in beauty pageants….. And to me, that is a crucifixion of an innocent victim.”

These are strong words. In the bizarre Alice in Wonderland aspect of the case it is worth mentioning that Janet McReynolds’ daughter and a friend had, twenty years earlier, been abducted and assaulted. The date was the 26th December. Janet also wrote a play, Hey Rube, years before about the torture and murder of a young girl whose body is found in a basement. Bill himself had a harp. On the wooden frame were written the names of dead children.

Janet McReynolds’ observation to King had, however, at least to me, a certain insight. There was a deep, pervasive feeling it seemed that no child should have been dressed as JonBenet was. No child should have worn mini-adult clothing, prancing and preening and singing. It was this more than anything that surely lay behind the rush to judgment about the parents, that fed the fires of speculation, that so readily and for so many led to the conclusion that this was all about sex, abuse and therefore death. The fact that there are enormous numbers of children, pretty babies one and all, engaged in pageants seemed irrelevant, even though it is not unreasonable to argue that if there was a relationship between the pageant business and child murder there would be a lot more dead babies in our land.

Over time I came to feel, in the words of Rene Girard in a different time and place, that public opinion had become “overexcited and ready to accept the most absurd rumours…” It did show, however, that the mesalliance between a few members of law enforcement and the media had worked a dark, mendacious magic, and that what happened in Boulder in the days and months and years that followed was perilously close to a conspiracy. A conspiracy to have executed – because if ever was a capital crime, a homicidal act of unusual viciousness, this was it– two people who were innocent.

It was a spectacle that one should never see in mature democracy, with respect for the rule of law and the rights of citizens to be presumed innocent. It was not only perilously close to conspiracy, malevolent and dark, it was all so very sleazy. Real sleaze, not the run of the mill, pathetic thieving of a few bucks here, a few more there; not the wasted curb crawler, the pimp on the corner, the hooker in his sight; the dime-bag drug addict. That’s not sleaze, that’s wreckage. True sleaze is the absence of a guiding morality, an approach to life that is not conditioned by an ethic, by any fundamental sense of right and wrong, an amoral place in which ends justify any means, even if that involves lying – repeatedly. Trotsky once said that “the end may justify the means, so long as there is something that justifies the end.” There wasn’t. For many of those in the media and law enforcement, who connived in the witch-hunt, the chickens would eventually come home to roost accompanied, in the immortal words of Hunter S. Thompson, by several enormous black condors.

The problem was and is that the assault on reason, the trashing of their rights and the shredding of their character almost worked, as evidenced by the overwhelming disbelief that it didn’t.

October 13, 1999; the Justice Center, Boulder Colorado

A short, paunchy man walks out to the lawn in front of the Center to make an announcement. District Attorney Alex Hunter, has been in office for decades but he knows that his reputation is basically in tatters, that the events of the previous 34 months, the hysteria, the mistakes, the mendacity, the conflicts had damaged him, and so many others, in a way that was utterly beyond redemption. Hunter is there to announce to the whole world the results of the months long investigation by a grand jury into the murder of JonBenet. Surrounded by a throng of journalists, gawkers, cops, microphones, cameras Hunter announces: “…we do not have sufficient evidence to justify filing charges against anyone who has been investigated at this time…”

One could sense in Boulder, across the state, across the whole nation and beyond bewilderment, fury, disbelief and, for a small few, unimaginable relief. At an undisclosed location in east Boulder, John and Patsy Ramsey, who had returned from Atlanta so that their arrest would be out of sight of their son, Burke, and their other family, were gathered with their attorneys, Bryan Morgan, who was representing John Ramsey, Pat Burke, for Patsy Ramsey and Hal Haddon, the eminence grise of the whole defence team. A few close friends were also there to share the agony. Patsy and John knelt in front of the television, holding hands. In her other hand Patsy clutched what had been JonBenet’s favourite toy, a small porcelain kitten. In deep agony she moaned that she knew she was going to prison. As they heard Hunter’s words they screamed and hugged each other. A great wave of relief washed over all those in the room. They knew that if there was no indictment now, there almost certainly never would be. They had expected the worst. Bryan Morgan left the room, went outside, sat on rock and wept. John Ramsey followed and placed a comforting arm around his shoulder.

In Colorado Springs, retired detective Lou Smit had been driving his truck as the announcement was about to be made. Smit had been hired by Alex Hunter to act as an investigator for the DA’s office back in the spring of 1997. He was hired because of his extraordinary reputation as a detective who had conducted 250 homicide investigations and had never lost a case in court. When he arrived in Boulder, in that spring of 1997, he had assumed, because he had been following the story in the media, that the Ramseys were probably involved, and that proving this would be a “slam dunk.” These many months later, as he pulled over to the side of the road to listen to Hunter’s statement, he knew more than anyone that the case may have been many things, but slam dunk it was not. Smit had come to author what became known as “the Intruder theory,” his utter conviction that a high-risk, deeply violent, sexually sadistic pedophile had entered the Ramsey home, taken JonBenet from her room, asphyxiated her as an act of torture, sexually assaulted her and finished her off with a blow to the head. He resigned from the case in September of 1999, just ahead of the conclusion of the grand jury, because he refused to go along with what he assumed would be the indictment and, in his eyes, the railroading of two innocent people.

As he waited, that Fall day, sitting in his truck by the side of his road, he was gripped with a deep fear that what he would hear was that the Ramseys had been indicted, the first step on their painful and inevitable walk to the gas chamber. As he heard Hunter’s words, that their would be no indictment, a crushing sense of relief washed over him and, like those others in Boulder gathered around the Ramseys, he started to sob. In all of their minds they knew that despite everything, despite the fact that their had been what was in effect a conspiracy by law enforcement to have the Ramseys convicted, despite public hysteria and a malevolent media, despite all that, a certain kind of justice had prevailed and a profound injustice avoided.

A Devastating Critique

Elsewhere, everywhere, in homes and offices across America, disbelief. Since the beginning of January 1997, when the media first began to really cover the case, the American pubic had lived within a narrative for which there could be only one ending: indictment, trial, conviction, execution – certainly of Patsy and possibly of John as an accomplice. That this wasn’t going to happen beggared belief because, of course, we all “knew” they were guilty.

It is vitally important to remember just how certain almost everyone was that there would indeed be a trial and conviction. The lawyers had already discussed with law enforcement the way in which the Ramseys would be handed over, and had arranged with a bank the monies that would be needed for any bail. That there wasn’t going to be a trial one suspects, though this has never been made clear, was because Hunter did not ask the grand jury to vote. Had he done so they may well have indicted, and Hunter was smart enough to know the difficulty he would have at trial. That he felt this way was almost certainly because he understood two things: he would be up against a superb defence team; and he knew the power of the case that Smit had developed, one which had the backing of America’s premier crime profiler, John Douglas and the extremely bright assistant DA Trip DeMuth. DeMeuth had been asked by his boss, Pete Hofstrom, to “defence” the case – that is, to look at the evidence in the way that the defence attorneys would. On 12 May 1998 he presented his report to the police and members of the DAs. I have read the report. He picked away at the investigation, its intellectual and conceptual flaws, its clear biases, the brute truths it had refused to face, like a buzzard devouring dead carrion. It is a devastating critique. The police case was inherently flawed and weak.

We can see this now. Then was a different story. On Saturday September 25 1999 David Mills and I had lunch with Bryan Morgan at Turley’s Restaurant in Boulder. I had originally suggested the Regal Harvest House but Bryan demurred at that saying that there were too many paparazzi there. This was only a short time before the grand jury would report its findings. Boulder was once more crawling with journalists and camera crews, and Bryan was in no mood to be caught on camera talking to the two of us. His mood was also sombre, his mind utterly convinced that the Ramseys were going to be indicted. His reasoning seemed strong, resting on the received truth that grand juries will always go with the prosecution – the clichéd phrase is that any prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. He felt that Alex Hunter, the DA, had lost control of events and that Michael Kane, an assistant DA who was leading the grand jury inquiry was determined to indict. I tried to argue, somewhat precociously since Bryan had vast legal experience, that the mistake he was making was two-fold. Hunter did not seem to me to be out of the loop – I knew this because of a request I had from him for some information about another suspect, a request which could only be interpreted to mean that he and his office were looking at other people as possible suspects, even as the grand jury was drawing to a close. The nature of the request, and its timing, made it clear to me that he was far from convinced that the Ramseys would, or should, be indicted. It also seemed clear to me that this was not like all the other cases which fed that conventional wisdom about the malleability of grand jurors. Morgan, though, thought differently. We had met to discuss our plans for a second documentary, that would investigate the investigation. For that we would need the cooperation of his clients. He told us that this would depend upon the results of the grand jury, that this would, however, be our last conversation until things were resolved and that he was now “going into trial mode.” We shook hands at the end of lunch with the clear sense that we would not be speaking with him for a long time, until in fact the trial was over.

In the first documentary that David and I made about the case, we drew heavily on the media accounts, the story that was told about the death, the alleged role of the family, particularly of JonBenet’s parents. David knew little about the case, but we had both long shared a growing concern as to how the media in general, and the news media in particular, were evolving as we both saw on the far horizon the growing, dark cloud of market forces.

We had first met after the publication of my biography of Sir Hugh Greene, Director General of the BBC from 1960 to 1969. Hugh was not just a great public service broadcaster, he was a great and brave man with a passionate belief in certain fundamental rights. I had met him when I wrote a chapter of my doctoral thesis about the manner in which he was forced to retire from the BBC – he was, to the government of the day too independent, a troublesome priest who had to go. When I got my doctorate in 1975 I had the temerity ( since I had at that time published hardly anything) to ask him if I could write his biography, to which he immediately said yes, an answer which would prove to be even more life-changing than entering the world of a murdered child in Boulder.

Next: Time to wake up Professor Tracey

INDEX

by Michael Tracey

SHE pass’d away like morning dew
Before the sun was high;
So brief her time, she scarcely knew
The meaning of a sigh.

As round the rose its soft perfume,
Sweet love around her floated;
Admired she grew–while mortal doom
Crept on, unfear’d, unnoted.

Love was her guardian Angel here,
But Love to Death resign’d her;
Tho’ Love was kind, why should we fear
But holy Death is kinder?

- Hartley Coleridge

On August 16 2006 MSNBC broke the story that an arrest had been made in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, a pretty 6 year old girl, winner of several beauty pageants, who had been garroted and bludgeoned to death on Christmas night 1996 in Boulder, Colorado. Through 1997 the case became the biggest story of any kind in the United States, until another princess died on August 31 in a Paris tunnel. The story was fueled by the wealth of her parents, the brutality of the assault, its savage cruelty, even if in the annals of mayhem and murder in the Republic, in the long list of slaughtered innocents, JonBenet’s death was not especially exceptional.

What really got the collective pulse beating feverishly were videos of JonBenet taking part in child pageants, dressed and acting in ways that many saw as a sexualized child prancing around in a suggestive manner, an alluring, pouting, posing Lolita, a pedophile’s dream. I understand that there was for many people something, shall we say, curious about the images but to go from that to the argument that she was being sexually abused by her parents, which would emerge as one of the strongest narratives in the media story was, to my way of thinking, a real stretch. That, however, she might have caught the eye of sexual sadist seems highly plausible, someone who would lust for her, not rest until he had her.

As the years passed and no arrest was made, and a grand jury in October 1999 failed to hand down an indictment, the story slowly slipped from the headlines and the public imagination, a chill set in, it became a cold case. When news emerged of the arrest in Bangkok, following an investigation involving the Boulder DA’s office, the FBI, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, British Intelligence, and the Royal Thai Police, within hours hundreds of reporters, camera crews, producers, not just from the United States but from all over the world, were flocking to Boulder. The case of JonBenet had gone from cold to hot in barely a heartbeat.

I happen to know something of this since I was the one who, for four years, had been receiving emails from the man arrested, and it was his confessions in this long exchange of emails and phone conversations that he was responsible for the death of JonBenet, that led to the intense, international investigation. I found myself in the middle of an extraordinary, even hysterical, media firestorm as well as a truly bizarre sequence of events. It was a curious place for a media scholar to be, and it felt at times like having a berth on the Titanic. It provided, however, a fascinating position to think through again some basic questions: how did it all come to be; what did the renewed explosion of interest say about the nature of contemporary media and the cultures that they serve; issues of ethics with which I was confronted; and the most profound question of all, “why are they all here?

“…the miscarriage of American civilization”

The story begins ten years earlier when I had an idea, to make a documentary about the way in which the media had dealt with the murder of JonBenet. I floated the idea with a friend of mine, David Mills, an extremely experienced, London based film maker. The reasons for wanting to do this were both simple and complex, but primarily birthed by those concerns and feelings I expressed in the Prologue. It seemed obvious to me that there was a serious problem with the manner of the coverage: it was both overdone and unfair. Overdone in that there was so much of it, unfair because from the get-go any presumption of innocence was denied JonBenet’s parents, John and Patsy Ramsey. It also troubled me greatly that so many in the public seemed so willing, so needing, to believe what they read and heard. In other words, the story was a profound and troubling metaphor for everything that was going wrong with American journalism and, in a sense, the larger culture. I was reminded of Freud’s comment about “the miscarriage of American civilization,” by which he meant the disconnect between the lofty 18th century ideals upon which the Republic had been founded, and the sorry condition he observed in the 20th century.

My initial fascination was with the manner in which the story of her death was told in the media, the sheer vastness and luridness of the coverage by mainstream and tabloid media alike. What became clear was that the story was a narrative within which were certain themes, suggestions, declamations, a nudge here, a wink there. “Clues” and “conclusions” were thrown about like confetti at an Irish wedding. The essential themes told, basically, one story, but it was rather like a pointillist painting, in which a picture is constructed from dots of pure color that one has to step back from and which viewed from a distance form into a recognizable shape, in this case a portrait of two child killers. The more I researched, the more I came to know, the more evidence I unearthed, the more people I spoke to, the more I studied child murder the more flawed that portrait appeared. There is no space here to render all the stories that were told and retold about the crime and the family but two or three will make the point.

Almost from the beginning, that is within hours and days of her body being found, by her father, in a dingy basement room, that narrative was being laid down. It was claimed, for example, that the house at 755 15th St, was basically a fortress, alarm on, windows and doors locked. Not true. The alarm was off, doors and windows open. The police knew this because it’s in the police report from the morning of December 26, but they whispered their untruths to reporters who, to borrow that by now familiar phrase, acted as stenographers as they began to lay down, totally uncritically, the conceptual groundwork that it was clear that John and or Patsy Ramsey had killed their daughter. As early as December 27th an assistant DA was telling the media, anonymously of course ( though it would emerge later that it was Bill Wise) that “something’s not right.” A few days later the mayor, Leslie Durgin, announced to the press and the public that parents need not fear for the well being of their children, that police were not scouring the streets of Boulder for a crazed child killer.

When I asked her, in an interview for our first documentary, who had told her this she said “the Chief,” that is the police chief, Tom Kolby. The comment may have been an unfortunate mixture of the stupid and the unprofessional, but the implication was obvious and overwhelming, the police were working off the assumption that it was someone in the house who killed JonBenet, which of course they were.

Another, key story emerged in March 1997 when it was reported that police found it curious that there were “no footprints in the snow,” around the house. The implication was obvious, and intended: no footprints, no intruder. The slight problem with this, as law enforcement knew and the crime scene photos from December 26 make clear, was that there was little or no snow around the house.

Another little gem: John Ramsey, it was reported, had flown his private jet back to Atlanta, with his family and JonBenet’s casket on board. So there it is, Ramsey is so calm, so not grieving, so in control, so mentally calm that he could fly a jet. Ergo, he was a sociopath who killed her.

The source was, as we were told by the reporter who first broke the “story,” a member of law enforcement who had always been “reliable.” Problem was, not true. Dan Glick, a stringer for Newsweek who worked with us on the first documentary, did something which we used to teach in Journalism 101, he checked the facts. In particular, he checked the FAA take off and landing log at JeffCo Airport and discovered that in fact the jet had been sent by the Chairman of Lockheed Martin, which had bought Ramsey’s company, Access Graphics, and that the pilot was a Lockheed pilot. When we interviewed the reporter who broke this story, who is as far as I can tell a really nice guy, and I asked him why, he asked me in return “maybe you can tell me it wasn’t his plane and he didn’t fly it.” The script line that followed that soundbite in the documentary was obvious and, to be honest, devastating, “…it wasn’t his plane and he didn’t fly it.”

For the documentary we drew on many sources, tabloids, television, newspapers, news magazines, interviews with the Ramseys, family and friends, attorneys and reporters. We would be accused of overemphasizing the role of the tabloids, to which we would respond that there was little if any clear water between them and the mainstream media. Perhaps the most profound example of this was in a piece in Vanity Fair by Annie Bardach, which had the distinction of being the first publication with the text of the ransom note, but was also riddled with error, half-truth and downright untruths.

She wrote: that the Ramsey’s behavior was “odd;” she quoted Linda Arndt, the first detective on the scene, as reporting that between 10.30 and noon John Ramsey left the house to pick up the family mail. Arndt had said this, but it would later to be shown to be incorrect; she reported that only a small child or a midget could have entered through the basement window. Not true, I’ve been through as have people larger than me; she said that near JonBenet’s body was her red “pageant nightgown. Not true, it was a Barbie nightgown. She reported that Hal Haddon, the senior Ramsey attorney, was a political ally of the District Attorney, Alex Hunter, when in fact they had never even met; she reported investigators saying that the ligatures around JonBenet’s neck and wrists were “very loose,” and were consistent with a staging. Not true, as we now know from the autopsy photos which show that the ligature was so tight it caused a deep gouge in the child’s neck; she reported the story that there were no signs of forced entry, and no footprints in the snow; she reported that JonBenet was a chronic bed wetter and that Patsy had taken JonBenet to her pediatrician 30 times. In fact, it was 27 over a four year period, some of those with the nanny. Dr. Francesco Bueff, the pediatrician, told us that there was nothing abnormal about this, that there were no signs of abuse and that she was not a chronic bed-wetter; Bardach also reported the story that John Ramsey flew a private jet back to Atlanta for the funeral. Not true.

Bardach’s piece was the very gold standard of the media errors, and yet it was certainly influential and was perhaps cited more than any other single piece as laying out the case that the Ramseys were involved in their child’s death.

Frothing at the Mouth

And then there was the big one, the story of all stories: this was all about sex, and JonBenet had been sexually abused at home. The evidence for this ~ which we searched long and hard to find ~ well, it doesn’t exist, but vast numbers of people simply assumed that it did for the simple reason that this is what they were being told, ad infinitum.

Then there were the things that weren’t said because they didn’t fit the police theory that Patsy had flown into a rage over JonBenet’s bed wetting, somehow smashed her head, staged the garroting, tied ligatures round her wrists and then wrote a two and a half page “ransom note.” It seemed to me a palpably silly idea, if only because there was nothing in her past to indicate any disposition to violence, let alone violence of this depravity. What was also missing from the public account was, for example, the clear indication that JonBenet was stun gunned; and the truth about the state of the house, the absence of the snow, the fact that he didn’t fly his jet and so on.

Crucially missing in the public case that was being made was the fact that DNA tests led the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to exclude, among others, John and Patsy Ramsey. This was known to the police by January 15th 1997, when the CBI lab completed the analysis of forensic samples provided by the Ramseys, along with a number of other people. This would be confirmed by further analysis in the early fall of 1999. For reasons best known to themselves the police chose not to share the first test results with the DA’s office until July 22, 1997 and, of course, kept the public blissfully unaware. The DNA was “foreign,” that is belonging to no known individual and was found in two drops of blood in the panties which, to say the least, needs explaining.

Mitch Morrissey, an aggressive member of the Denver DA’s office, who was one of a number of advisers to the Boulder DA, Alex Hunter, theorized, it would emerge later, that it belonged to someone in the Taiwanese factory where they had been manufactured, perhaps by sneezing as the panties were being made or wrapped in their packing. They even sought a supplementary budget from the County Commissioners to send a detective to the factory. The Commissioners declined the suggestion.

There was one other, telling moment involving the Commissioners. Bill Wise was speaking with them at a meeting and assumed that the microphone in front of him wasn’t live. He was heard to say that the person who killed JonBenet was “wealthy.” John Ramsey was wealthy, though not the billionaire that some claimed and while Wise’s gaff led to his removal from any involvement with the case, it nevertheless was shaving with the grain of prevailing belief about the case, the Ramseys did it.

There is so much more, but this will, I hope, give something of a sense of what was going on here: the establishment of a narrative that would convict the Ramseys in the public mind ~ a mind which seemed to want to believe in their guilt ~ and force the then DA, Alex Hunter, to indict, take it to trial, get them convicted and perp walk one or both to death row.

The laying down of that narrative seemed to happen in barely a moment as the whole world just “knew,” the child had been killed by her parents, that “bastard billionaire, John Ramsey,” and the “white trash with cash, Patsy Ramsey, oh God how I hate that woman.” These were the mantras, the banshee squeals around the case that echoed across not just the United States but the whole world. I lost count of the number of times I had people screaming at me, frothing at the mouth, when I even dared to question their certainty of parental guilt. What was really fascinating was that when I asked how come they were so certain, so knowing, the reply was often along the lines of either repeating the media stories but, more often, commenting that they “looked guilty,” or “ it’s a gut feeling.”

I have searched long and hard in the Constitution and in law manuals and have yet to find the proposition that, if accused of a crime, I have a right to be judged by a jury of my peers’ guts.

Monday – JonBenet, pt. 2: vile bigotry and voodoo stupidity

INDEX

How DARE you stand on that stage, on the shoulders of generations of women who have struggled and sacrificed to allow a woman to achieve what you have, and spit in their faces the way you have done over the past few weeks? For a serious candidate for vice president to turn in such a poor performance in interview after interview that the fact that you managed not to pee on the stage meant that you exceeded many people’s expectations is a crying shame. In the month since you were named as candidate for VP, you have embodied every single negative stereotype ever put forward as a “reason” why women are not fit to lead a nation. You have been shallow, superficial, disorganized, and clearly uninformed on a wide range of issues that the president MUST understand. That is absolutely disgraceful. You are no longer Miss Wasilla – this is not a beauty contest that you can win by chirping “World peace!” into a microphone and waiting for someone to show up with your tiara and sash – it is deadly serious. How do you propose to take over the presidency, should that be necessary, when it takes you weeks of preparation and drilling and rehearsal in seclusion to get through a 90 minute debate? You are so afraid of the press after your three disastrous interviews that you have decided to avoid them completely – don’t think that we can’t see through your attempt to spin the situation to cast yourself as a victim of the evil, mean, press corps. Do you seriously believe that that would be an option for you, should you ever become president? What will you do then?

How DARE you stand up there and criticize other nations’ lack of women’s rights, when you have systematically worked to strip women of their rights since you have had power of any sort? Your city led the fight in Alaska to charge women for the rape kits used to gather forensic evidence after a woman has been sexually assaulted. Your state leads the nation in number of forcible rapes per capita, but you’ve done nothing to stem the tide. You speak out against socialized health care – you don’t want the government involved in what you believe are private decisions – but you’re more than happy to take away a woman’s right to choose whether to continue an unwanted pregnancy, even if that pregnancy is the result of rape or incest.

How DARE you stand in front of us as a nation and claim that you are prepared to lead us in finding a way to improve education, when you have demonstrated over and over again your own lack of understanding of basic principles of science, history, and civics? Any high school freshman should be able to name at least one or two other Supreme Court cases. Finding ones you disagreed with might be a bit harder, although for me, Bush v. Gore, Plessy v. Ferguson, and District of Columbia v. Heller come to mind pretty quickly. One would hope that you would also disagree with the verdict of at least the second case in that list. How is it that you propose to lead our nation in its interactions with other countries, yet you can’t be bothered to do some studying to find out what the Bush Doctrine might be? You don’t seem to grasp the concept that if you do not understand what is causing climate change, you will not be able to do anything to stop it. Yes, the climate has warmed and cooled in the past without it being caused by human activity – but the difference is those climate changes happened over centuries and millennia — not decades. They also tended to be accompanied by mass extinctions. It seems to me that, even if you don’t believe that humans are to blame, it’s worth taking action to make absolutely sure that we’re not part of the problem. Your position in opposition to comprehensive sexual education is fatally flawed. As the gap between puberty and marriage widens for more and more young people, abstinence becomes more and more unlikely. Young people will have sex, and nothing that we say or do will ever stop that. Sex is a basic drive for humans. We can either accept this fact and make sure that these young people have comprehensive sex ed – including a thorough understanding of how to prevent pregnancy and disease – and access to condoms and other forms of birth control to prevent unwanted pregnancies and the spread of STIs, or we can continue to see young people’s options in life severely limited by disease and unplanned pregnancies. I have been unable to definitively substantiate reports that you are a young-earth creationist who believes that dinosaurs coexisted with humans, but if that is true, it is one more proof that you are unfit to lead this nation. Science and technology are the US’s only hope for maintaining its position in the global economy. We cannot move forward as a nation and maintain our position in the vanguard of science and technology behind a leader who rejects even the most basic scientific understanding in favor of myths and legends.

How DARE you claim to be part of a middle-class family? The AP reports that your family income is approximately $230,000 per year, with assets in excess of $1 million. That’s almost 4 times the average income in Alaska, and over 5 times the average income in the entire US. That’s approximately 3 times the net worth of Joe Biden. The folksy, aw-shucks routine is a calculated fake with which you hope to lie your way into national-level power – what other reason could there be for you refusing to release your financial information before the VP debate, other than your hope that no one would bother to fact-check your claim to be in the middle class? God help us if you actually succeed at this. You are nothing more than a conniving, grasping politician who favors style over substance. You talk of your status as an “outsider”, but your true colors showed tonight as you talked of your hopes of expanding the power you would wield as vice president, were the American people crazy enough to elect you. Dick Cheney has already had his crack at running the country into the ground by wielding powers to which he had absolutely no right, from a Constitutional standpoint. The LAST thing we want to do now is expand those powers further for the likes of you.

We’ve been lied to for eight years already. We’ve dealt with cronyism and abuse of power. We’ve watched the government stonewall inquiries into even its most blatantly illegal and unethical actions. (We’ve already seen evidence of how you’re more than happy to do these things as well, in your less than two years as Alaska governor. Why is it that you are no longer asking us to “hold you accountable” in your ethics inquiry? Why are your people now refusing to answer subpoenas so that the inquiry can proceed?) We’ve seen our homes and jobs and money stolen, and watched wealth concentrated in the hands of the rich while the poor and the middle class suffered. We’ve watched oil company profits shoot up, and no-bid contracts handed out unapologetically to companies with undeniable ties to the Bush/Cheney regime. We’ve watched scientists routinely manipulated or squelched if their findings were inconvenient to the administration’s political objectives. We’ve seen ally after ally throughout the world alienated. We’ve watched thousands of young men and women die in a preemptive war which the government lied to us to start, yet we’ve continued to fail to catch the people who were actually the ones that attacked us on 9/11. We’ve watched the economy tank, and the deficit skyrocket. You talk about “change”, but spout the same old policies we’ve seen over and over and over and over. You are nothing more than 4 more years of Bush.

And it’s time we said “Enough.”

As for you, the best thing you could do for the nation is to take your family, and go back to Wasilla. Spend time in that lovely house you own – the one by the lake. Or maybe in one of your vacation cottages. Relax. Maybe read a book. You can use your private plane to get there. But leave the rest of us alone. We’ve had enough of your type.

Sincerely,

Nan Rhyner

Nan Rhyner is an aspiring teacher, an animal lover, and a flaming liberal. Nan lives in the Midwest with far too many rescued dogs, cats, and guinea pigs, and an extremely tolerant roommate. She rants about politics in her spare time.

With the bailout of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the Reagan revolution has at last realized the robber barons’ dream: privatize the profits and socialize the debt. Nicely done, fellas.

— a letter to the editor of The New York Times from Candida Pugh of Oakland, Calif.; Sept. 10; emphasis added.

We now see the compensation wasn’t deserved. I don’t think taxpayers want their money to go to the C.E.O.’s of these very large institutions.

— Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., on the exit pay packages of Daniel H. Mudd of Fannie Mae and Richard F. Syron of Freddie Mac who, The Times’ Eric Dash reports, are eligible for as much as $24 million in severance, retirement benefits and deferred compensation; Sept. 10.

The report says that eight officials in the royalty program accepted gifts from energy companies whose value exceeded limits set by ethics rules — including golf, ski and paintball outings; meals and drinks; and tickets to a Toby Keith concert, a Houston Texans football game and a Colorado Rockies baseball game.

The investigation also concluded that several of the officials “frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives.”

— from a Times story by Charlie Savage on reports filed with Congress by Earl E. Devaney, the Interior Department’s inspector general, on “wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes”; Sept. 10.

Education is obviously not the issue Senator McCain spends the most time on. He’s been a quiet and consistent supporter of parents and educators who he thinks are making a difference.

— Lisa Graham Keegan, a McCain adviser and former Arizona education commissioner, explaining the brevity of presidential candidate John McCain’s education plan but suggesting that it should not be interpreted as a lack of commitment to education; Sept. 9.

I’m really frightened. I’ve been in blizzards and tornadoes, but never a hurricane. It’s frightening, but if the Lord’s going to take you, he’s going to find you wherever you are.

— Ginger Saracco of Galveston, Texas, after watching a storm surge from Hurricane Ike slam into a seawall; Sept. 12.

That project is moving right ahead. The money for that project was not diverted anywhere else. … So (for her) to say she said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks….’ I would say she said, ‘Thanks!’

— Tony Knowles, who served as governor of Alaska from 1994 to 2002; an Anchorage Daily News story by George Bryson says Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin “still supports spending $400 million to $600 million on ‘the other Bridge to Nowhere,’ the Knik Arm Crossing, which would provide residents in Palin’s hometown of Wasilla faster access to Anchorage” according to Gov. Knowles; Sept. 11.

[Gov. Sarah Palin] strikes me as a target-rich environment.

— Saturday Night Live writer James Downey; Sept. 12.

He was on the wrong side of the rope line. It is a decision that is hard to comprehend.

— Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, D-N.J., about former Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman’s visibility as Republican pitchman for Sen. John McCain; Sept. 9.

YouTube was being used by Islamist terrorist organizations to recruit and train followers via the Internet and to incite terrorist attacks around the world, including right here in the United States. I expect these stronger community guidelines to decrease the number of videos on YouTube produced by al-Qaeda and affiliated Islamist terrorist organizations.

— from a statement by Sen. Joseph Lieberman exhorting YouTube to ban videos that “incite” violence; YouTube agreed to ban some content in response; Sept. 12.

Your prayers reached where they were meant to reach. The truth prevailed.

— Jacob Zuma, president of the African National Congress, as his theme song, “Bring Me My Machine Gun” played, after a South African judge threw out “racketeering, corruption, money laundering and fraud [charges] related to a multibillion rand government arms deal in the late 1990s”; a New York Times story says “A court in Durban convicted Mr. Zuma’s business adviser of funneling about $170,000 to Mr. Zuma in exchange for help in winning contracts”; Sept. 12; emphasis added.

[I will not] respond to the garbage from the American empire.

— Tarek El Aissami, appointed Venezuela’s interior minister on Monday, responding to a report by The Times‘ Alexei Barrioneuvo that “[a] conspiracy to cover up the intended recipient of a suitcase filled with $800,000 in cash found in Argentina last year reached the highest levels of Venezuela’s government, with President Hugo Chávez ordering the head of his intelligence service to handle the situation” according to court testimony; Sept. 9.

These settlements are a major step forward in cleaning up an industry where false and misleading advertising practices have been all too rampant. It is unconscionable for lenders to entice students into loans that are not best for them.

— Andrew M. Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, on a settlement with seven student loan companies that outlined a code of conduct and required that “a total of $1.4 million [be placed] into a fund to help educate students and their families about financial aid,” reported The Times‘ Johnathan D. Glater; Sept. 9.

That statute is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the United State Constitution.

— from a ruling by the Virginia Supreme Court today striking down the commonwealth’s “anti-spam” law after reconsidering the conviction of Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, N.C., the first person tried under the law, convicted of sending tens of thousands of e-mails through America Online servers, and sentenced to nine years in prison; Sept. 12.

Q: With another anniversary of 9/11 upon us, how does the President feel about the failure to find Osama bin Laden?
MS. PERINO: President Bush has been working and directing thousands of men and women across our intelligence community to help us find Osama bin Laden, his deputies, and to disrupt plans to attack America again, wherever they might be plotted. He has not let up on that, and that fight and that hunt will continue to go on until he is brought to justice.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House briefing; Sept. 10.

The Republicans talk a lot about experience. When you’re the author, architect and enabler of eight years of devastating foreign policy mistakes, that’s not experience. It’s very bad judgment.

— Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., arguing that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., lacks the temperament and judgment to be president; Sen. Reid said, “Our dangerous world calls for leaders with sound judgment, not those with a temperament prone to recklessness. Our country deserves more than token shifts and lip service to change. We need to take decisive action to reverse eight years of foreign policy mistakes”; Sept. 12.

Now let me review some of the descriptive phrases that have been used by some of you that have made my own personal interfaces with the Press Corps difficult: “dictatorial and somewhat dense,” “a liar,” “a torturer” “does not get it.” In — In some cases I have never even met those that use those comments. Yet they felt qualified to make character judgments that are communicated to the world. My experience is not unique and we can find other such examples as the treatment of Secretary Brown during Katrina. In my opinion, this is the worst display of journalism imaginable by those of us that are bound by a strict value system of selfless service, honor, and integrity.

— from an address to the Military Reporters and Editors Forum Luncheon by Lieutenant General (Ret.) Ricardo S. Sanchez; Oct. 12, 2007.

Q: Is Osama bin Laden as important now as he was seven years ago?
MS. PERINO: I think that what we have tried to do is disrupt any area from becoming a safe haven where terrorists could plot and plan attacks. The leadership of al Qaeda has largely been replaced over the years, but they have more people that keep coming up through the ranks and are trained to plot and plan against us. I think — the President believes it’s important for us to hunt and track down and bring to justice Osama bin Laden. And it would be important for Americans, but it’s important for justice most of all.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House briefing; Sept. 10.

The rise of a free and self-governing Iraq will deny terrorists a base of operation, discredit their narrow ideology, and give momentum to reformers across the region. This will be a decisive blow to terrorism at the heart of its power, and a victory for the security of America and the civilized world.

— from an address by President Bush at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa.; May 24, 2004.

I’m sitting at Eros, a Greek diner on Seventh Avenue, loving my omelette as I seek shelter from the rain, when I see a busboy remove a container of dirty dishes — with a copy of my review in today’s paper on top. Get it while it’s hot, I guess.

— from the “On The Runway” blog of New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn; Sept. 9.

photo credits:

• Hurricane Ike hits Galveston: Associated Press
• Sen. Joseph Lieberman leaving stage: Damon Winter, The New York Times
• Sen. Lieberman mug: Alex Wong, Getty Images
• Steve Jobs: Daniel Acker, Bloomberg News
• Gap models: Marcio Madeira, Style.com

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.