The extreme media obsession continues in what should be a minor, local story–the Jonbenet Ramsey murder. The details of that coverage are far more interesting than the facts of the underlying case. This case is simple and fairly uninteresting: it was either a botched kidnapping, the act of an obsessed child molester (whether John Karr or someone else), or an impulse crime by secretly violent parents who then covere up their act with a ransom note and some good lawyering.
Professor John Kincaid notes how the case and its coverage reveal not-too-thinly-veiled feelings of ambivalence rooted in simultaneous attraction and repulsion. This tension reveals itself in the media and audience’s reaction to Jonbenet, the odd world of child beauty pageants, and the acts of her killer:
The case does many things for us, of course. It makes us feel both titillated and virtuous; it makes us feel smart. Most centrally, it makes flattering distinctions between good parents (us) and bad parents (the Ramseys). Even if the Ramseys didn’t kill their daughter, they exposed her to lascivious eyes in beauty contests, which is about as bad. Notice how much press is directed to abusing the Ramseys, to suggesting that (unlike us) their relationship to their child was unhealthy, vicious, exploitative. This whining at beauty contest parents generally is a favorite pastime of ours, as if such pageants were freakish, rather than a version of a central parenting activity: parading kids, sexualizing them, putting them on display.
This must be some perennial western favorite: the ritual condemnation of something as a means of exploring it. The pattern ranges from the whole concept of tragedy and Gothic novels to Orientalist art. I agree with Kincaid that this is partly what is going on and that this macabre fascination cloaked as condemnation serves as a means of self-praise among the audience.
But I also think this is something more simple: the ability of the (largely white and female) audience to relate to the alleged killers and the victim. In cases like Jonbenet’s and Laci Peterson’s, the soccer moms get to see a criminal and a victim that looks much like themselves. They can people they know in either role. In contrast, the predominantly minority, low IQ, and dirt-poor criminals and victims on an episode of Cops are entirely uninteresting. Such people are as far away psychologically as the dozens of civilians murdered each day in Iraq or in some genocide in Africa. By contrast, in Scott Peterson, every American housewife sees her own husband and wonders if he too could become so monstrous. Probably not. Unlike the legions of dysfunctional, low IQ, and disproportionately minority criminals in jail, this kind of unusual story or an otherwise normal person who snaps is exotic enough to make the national news.
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That’s a good point, Chris. But I wonder if there may be an even simpler explanation–something like “Great White Defendant Bites Dog”. Sure the crime may feel more prurient because the soccer moms have a subconscious “there but for the grace of God…” reaction, but I’d guess that the sheer novelty of these outwardly attractive (and white) families acting like the criminals featured on Cops could explain a sizable portion of the obsession.
I don’t disagree with that. The novelty factor is there. But it also fuels this rather old fashioned and statistically refutable concept that we have of crime, the same concept in our criminal law: that crimes are the free choices of moral agents capable of self control who give into either an explicable passion or outright greed/anger/etc.
The reality of nearly animalistic people engaging in animalistic violence, violence just out of boredome or habit, is probably anathema to most normal people who, thankfully, do not spend much time around these folks. Just watch a whole weekend COPS marathon if you don’t believe me. These people are nothing like the literate and more or less docile surbananites who buy and read *People*.
One word for you, Sheik Roach:
Hezbollah!
Can’t you afford a decent shave and some Lasik, Sheik? You look like you run a comic store, at best?
Where’s the bling, Habibi?!?
Chris,
I take it you are saying that the notion that the root cause of crime is the same no matter who is committing it is “statistically refutable.” I’d be curious to know what “crime” you are talking about and to see the statistics to which you’re referring. Maybe I’ve too readily bought into the “old-fashioned” notion that crime is a function of human nature (perhaps base human nature but human nonetheless) and that rich or poor, black or white, doesn’t really change the motivation for crime.
Are you suggesting that some people are less capable of controlling themselves than others? If so, what are you suggesting is the cause for that? And what does that mean in political and societal terms, i.e., what do we do about it? I must confess, and maybe this is the “idealist” in me speaking, that the idea that some people are less capable of being law-abiding citizens than others makes me a bit nervous. It seems to me our entire system is predicated on the notion that all people are capable of, for the most part, governing themselves, which makes it just and equitable for the state to punish them when they don’t.
I also take issue with the idea that the People-reading suburbanites watching Cops are all that different from the folks who appear on that show. Those suburbanites may control their base human nature in a way that runs up against the criminal system less often than the people on Cops, but I’ll bet you ten-to-one that if you scratched the surface of 99% of these suburbanites you’d uncover the same types of deviant attitudes and behaviors (well-masked I’m sure) that end up getting people on Cops. In short, all our sinners. None is righteous. And each one of us is capable of terrible things, but for the grace of God. And we’re deluding ourselves if we think that we and our friends who lead comfortable suburban lives are really all that different from the criminal on death row. I don’t think this is liberal hersey speaking; I think it’s 2000 years of Christian orthodoxy.
Sheik Roach wrote:
Can’t you afford a decent shave and some Lasik, Sheik? You look like you run a comic store, at best?
Where’s the bling, Habibi?!?
Sheik Roach, I do not shave because I am a devout Muslim. I live the text of the Koran. I spend my time fighting the infidels and the Zionists and do not have time to shave. Further, only you, a fat American, would spend your money on Lasik. Perhaps you should not live so vain a life.
I may look like I run a comic store, but it is you, American, who are a joke.
How is that for bling? You want more?
“Are you suggesting that some people are less capable of controlling themselves than others? If so, what are you suggesting is the cause for that? And what does that mean in political and societal terms, i.e., what do we do about it?”
Yes.
Lots of things, IQ, culture, early childhood experiences, greater incidence of “sociopathic personality disorder.”
Not sure. Maybe not sweep it under the rug and pretend that normal middle class white people are not, generally speaking, model citizens.
I’m in complete agreement that it is unwise to ignore the fact of who, on the whole, is committing violent crime and ending up in jail. Such information can be useful in helping prevent and solve crimes. In other words, I recognize that profiling is a useful police tool. Again, however, oustide of the police context, I’m left with the question of what any of this means on a practical, political basis. For myself, I don’t think it means much; I don’t think there’s a political or constitutional fix to the problem that certain groups within our society commit a disproportionately high percentage of crime, other than making sure that we punish (and do not reward) behavior that harms society.
Also, even assuming you’re right that the presupposition of rationality and the capacity to govern oneself are legal fictions, they’re necessary legal fictions in our system, aren’t they? And isn’t there danger in spreading around the idea that these are just fictions which we don’t really believe in or that we believe only apply to some people and not others?
I just think the divergence of reality and the reported and official reality of television, the news, and our “talking heads” is getting wider. That the most extreme divergence is on race issues. We have terrorism dramas where the terrroirsts are Russian nationalists, crime dramas where most of the evildoers are regular white people, etc. Meanwhile, real terrorists are mostly Arab Muslims and most real criminals are poor minorities.
I suppose it’s just too depressing to look on that too long. But perhaps when the NY Times describes the perpetrator of a crime we don’t have to hear he was young, with black hair, and a red sweatshirt and not hear that he was black or whatever. And perhaps for every Duke Lacrosse case in national headlines we could learn of the dozens of black-on-white rapes that happen each day.
I think we need to found our public policies and personal decisions on the basis of sound knowledge, not myths.