A S K C A M I L L E
| Camille Paglia's online advice for the culturally disgruntled |
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Illustration by Zach Trenholm
Why we leer at JonBenet
Dear Camille,
What are your thoughts on the JonBenet Ramsey case? Are you as convinced
as I am that daddy did it, and that mommy and daddy are in cahoots to
cover it up? (Did you notice the way John Ramsey watched Patsy's face
during the CNN interview?) Or has everything become too murky thanks to
the ineptitude of the Boulder Police Department? I personally find the
continuing press coverage rather weird, largely because goofy pictures of
the dolled-up JonBenet, blown up and in color, are still splashed about.
Does that seems like latent pedophilia to you, too?
Digging in the Dirt in Seattle
Dear Digging,
Salon's overseas readers will doubtless be baffled by your allusions to the
Kiddy Porn Extravaganza that the American media have made of last Christmas
Eve's mysterious murder of 6-year-old, blonde JonBenet Ramsey in her
affluent family's Colorado home.
At this point, we have been so inundated with the hallucinatory images of
little JonBenet flirtatiously strutting her stuff as a rhinestone cowgirl or
feather-laden Ziegfeld Follies mannequin that they have lost their power to
shock. The week after the murder, a tabloid TV show debuted a full half-hour
of grainy, unedited JonBenet performance tapes, which I watched with
horrified incredulity. The pushy stage mothers of that fast-track
beauty-pageant scene seem to have witchily transmuted their daughters into
preening baby geishas.
In George Eliot's great novel "Middlemarch," young Dorothea Brooke, "brought
up in English and Swiss Puritanism," is stunned by the grandeur and decay of
19th-century Rome, where the "red drapery" of St. Peter's basilica
spreads itself "like a disease of the retina." In America, with its residual
Puritanism, the mass media operate as the lurid id from which erupt the
repressions of establishment ideology.
The seductive, obsessively repeated girlie shots of JonBenet seem to have
taken over the nation's television screens like Eliot's "disease of the
retina." The hysteria over day-care child abuse that peaked in America in the
early 1990s transmogrified first into fascist surveillance of professional
photographers for suspected pedophilia and then into a shrill political
crusade to crack down on Internet "indecency," lest it contaminate the family
home and infant brain.
It's no surprise that Adrian Lyne's new film version of "Lolita" (which
unfortunately, if we believe the first European reviews, sounds mediocre) is
having a hard time finding American distributors. The
Rousseauist/Wordsworthian view of the pure, saintly child is a national cult
in America, which gushes over pet cherubs in order to avoid dealing with the
blatant aggressions of its own bloody past.
The prostitution and martyrdom of JonBenet Ramsey has become a strange
meditation device for American sentimentalists who can't let go of the
pre-Freudian idea of childhood as a sexless paradise garden befouled by
serpent adults. I've been struck by press reluctance to consider JonBenet's
older brother as a potential player in the family
melodrama. Clearly, all kinds of savage psychic energies were loose in that
"Twilight Zone" of a house, where the thwarted beauty-queen mother had
swallowed up her proxy (the idolized daughter) and perhaps goaded the
marginalized males into covert revenge.
That the now strangely drowsy Mrs. Ramsey wrote that hilariously stilted and
convoluted ransom note is conceivable. That the arrogant Mr. Ramsey,
flaunting his wealth and privilege, cut the balls off the Boulder police
department is obvious. While I feel very sorry
for poor JonBenet, I still find quite piquant the whole Profanation of Happy
Christmas scenario here, where the unctuous cultural rhetoric of Silent
Night, Holy Night got blown up by Babylonian trash and flash. All that
telltale, unmarked, virgin snow around the Ramsey home! It just goes to show
that downtown Manhattan hasn't cornered the market on decadence. NEXT PAGE | Hands off Mother Teresa |
