What complete crap
It probably shouldn't surprise us that JonBenet, like Roderick Usher's sister, won't stay buried. It's the return of the repressed all over again, here before us, strutting its stuff and doing its cultural work because we so badly need it. Where else can we find forbidden material served up to us in ways we can both enjoy and disown? . . . .Yeah, and if O.J. suddenly confessed out of the blue, I guess we would need to examine the deep cultural reasons why that was news and "we" were giving it "so much prominence."
Makes one wonder if we aren't giving Karr's background and confession so much prominence because they feed our deep personal needs and not the needs of justice. Just why is it we need to hear, once again, about JonBenet and the beauty pageants, the murder and the bad parents, about the little body unveiled? . . . .
We need to face down that fantasy and not pretend we can exorcise it on the likes of John Mark Karr or the supposed ills of American journalism. The fault lies not in such things but in us. JonBenet will not rest until our need for her finds an outlet less necrophilic. - James R. Kincaid, Slate, August 21, 2006
There's nothing wrong, "necrophillic" or even very surprising about people's interest in dramatic unsolved crimes. Unsolved crimes are interesting. Anyone who paid attention to the JonBenet case as it unfolded or later knows that it contained innumerable fascinating details.
Anytime some armchair sociologist throws in a phrase like "doing its cultural work," what it really means is "don't look for any kind of analytic rigor here." To paraphrase the great social critic Basil Fawlty, I learnt classical sociology, not the strange dialect he seems to have picked up.
posted at 1:06 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home