Rantless Thursday

Note to Steph: why should I go on a rant about the Jon Benet Ramsey case? Why should I care? Thousands of little children are murdered each year. The majority of them are not white and garner no attention from the Press, national OR local. So, a blue-eyed, blond haired dress-up doll was brutally victimized by someone (we still can't be sure even with a professed confession). So what? It's not the murder that is so heinous as it is the manner in which she was being raised by her parents. Do you remember the photo stills that made her to look as if she was giving a come-hither pose? Do you remember the pageant videotapes in which she flirted with the camera as if she were ten years older (which still would have left her a minor)? Do you remember the parents who wouldn't allow police access to certain parts of their lives, documents and interviews while claiming the whole time that they were innocent? What did they have to hide? What was so shameful that they couldn't speak to the police in order to help find her killer? It's not her death that I find despicable. It's the manner in which she was led to it by parents who cared more for the glamour she brought them than the light she carried within. This was not a financially strapped family hoping to enrich an otherwise bleak future with her possible success in the modeling field. This was a family obsessed with caste, not cash. This was a pair of parents who looked outward to others within their social class and decided for their child what she would do and become. Jon Benet was a Barbie in every sense of the word, dressed and made up and told who she was at all times by the very people she trusted to take care of her and allow her to grow up as an individual. I think of her and Paris Hilton comes to mind: vapid, vaccuous and inured to the realities of the everyday world by money and manipulation.
Perhaps, they have found her killer. In my mind, though, that does not exonerate her parents one whit. They lied to the police, they refused to cooperate with the police, they hired lawyers to shield them from the police and they accused the police of targeting them (which all police do in this situation, because most often it is a family member or family friend who did the deed). They used this little girl for their ends. They made her up to look like a tart, then basked in the glow of her lolita-esque success. They claimed there was nothing wrong with what they did, that beauty pageants were good, clean, wholesome fun for little girls. They would not "see" what she looked like as she pranced around on stage and made suggestive dance moves that adult males were watching. They were creating a Madonna/Whore. Innocent, yet seductive. Chaste, but naughty. And all for the almighty dollar. All for the vicarious thrill. All to kick sand in the faces of the Joneses. All because they could not do it themselves.
That's the tragedy of this. Not that she was murdered, not that she never had a chance to grow up. But that this happened to her, because the very people she should have been able to trust with her life chose to use her in an absolutely indefensible and disgusting way to fulfill some neglible void in their neglible lives and it incited someone else to kill her.
And that's why I won't write a rant, Steph. Because it would (in my mind) just add more attention to a family that deserves none. Jon Benet was not a real girl like the ones we see running to school every day. She was a plastic figurine her parents bent into a new shape every day as it suited them. They did not give birth to a real child. They ordered one from Mattel. And they incited lust within the bodies of grown men by dressing her up as a prom queen and coquette every chance they had. So, fuck them.
By the by, they've made quite a bundle from their interviews with the press and the books they authorized to be written, yes?
Oh, and I know the mother died recently. But I don't care. The fact that she died doesn't make up for what she did to her child before then.
So, no rant today from me, Steph. Sorry.