Are you as sick as I am of the 24/7 “JonBenet non-story” coverage? Then it is a good time to scratch this surface and see what squirms underneath. There is a fantastic piece at Slate today. Here is a taste:
This story allows us to fulminate against trivial problems while ignoring huge problems close to home, meanwhile wallowing in self-righteous porn babble: We are able to use the half-clothed bodies of children as centerfolds while professing shock that anyone would so display them.
For kids really do not fare very well in our culture: Millions of children are, in fact, abused in unspeakable ways. Five hundred thousand kids every year are classified as “throwaways” (children whose parents or guardians will not let them live at home, as distinguished from “runaways”). As many as 800,000 are beaten horribly. Even more are subject to emotional abuse and neglect. How much attention do they get? Instead, we focus our attention, almost all of it, on stranger-danger: things like abductions, of which there are between 100 and 200 annually. Our carefully controlled outrage is generated for our own purposes, certainly not to protect the children.
Then we get to an all important fact that our society wants swept right under the rug:
And when kids are indeed abused, who is doing it? Mom and Dad and Uncle Ted and Aunt May. As little as 2 percent of child abuse is committed by strangers. Again, why are we exercised over JonBenet?
We know who the boogeyman is, he is us when we are talking about women and children. Most women are attacked by those they know, not strangers. Their muderers are most often their own husbands or boyfriends but this doesn’t play well enough to the media who needs us in fear constantly. People are more easily swayed when they are afraid which is why corporations and our government wants us afraid. They are the ones trying to manipulate us, whether it is to by a new product or a government wanting more power and understanding that fear will be the mechanism by which people will hand it over to them.
Now that corporations own the media and there is little regulation as to how much they can own, a few of them are giving citizens the vast majority of what they ingest. Those same corporations give heartily to the Republican Party and their K Street representatives want more all the time. Right now Rove and the Administration want something, they want Iraq, Israel’s dismal failure and Bush’s fall from grace buried until the November elections and the JonBenet non-story is just the ticket. They are putting a mentally disturbed man front and center in an investigation that was full of holes from the get-go. My hunch is that the news organizations already know how weak the case is but push it loudly and we must begin to ask why.
There is every reason to believe that the corporate-owned media and their lobbyists want things from the government and right now there is something this Administration wants from them. If there is a deal made in hell being played out right now, it’s best to be on the lookout for it and to me this situation is not passing the smell test.
