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Today's
Stories
November 7, 2003
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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November
8, 2003
Raising JonBenet
A
Review of "Cowboy's Sweetheart" by Walter Davis
By ADAM ENGEL
We all remember the baby face that launched a
thousand hard-ons (at least) the Winter of 1996-1997. She dressed
like Mae West and moved like Josephine Baker and she was only
six years old. Those who remember the commotion caused when the
twelve-year-old Brook Shields bared her hypothetical boobs in
"Pretty Baby" can only imagine what might have come
between THIS twelve-year-old and her Calvins. They can only imagine
because JonBenet Ramsey never reached the ripe old age of twelve.
She barely lived past six.
In "Cowboy's Sweetheart," the
play accompanied by two essays in the book,"An
Evening with JonBenet Ramsey," Walter Davis imagines
what might have been had JonBenet survived the bloody Christmas
of 1996 when she was brutally murdered and, according to evidence
documented in one of the book's essays, "There Is Another
Court," sexually assaulted.
I give Davis credit for approaching this
issue most wouldn't dare touch with a ten foot pole. I remember
when the stories first came out about this little girl murdered
by some pedophile freak and since it wasn't "world news,"
I felt bad for the girl and left it at that. Then they, the "media"
showered us with photos and video clips. Not just JonBenet, but
all these kids decked out like little Rockettes and I thought,
"Zowie! Get these freaks away from me! Who on earth would
do that to their kid?" And it wasn't a question of who the
murderer was. Until a suspect comes to trial it could be anybody.
Maybe even YOU, or ME, or the same guy who killed O.J.'s wife,
Nicole, (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). No, that's not the issue.
The issue Davis deals with in "An Evening with JonBenet
Ramsey" is how (or why) a society that calls itself a society
can tolerate such arrant "peddling of philia," that
is, the selling of it's very, very young for vicarious fame and
not-so-vicarious profit.
Davis Handles this issue masterfully,
not by grave-digging (the mainstream media's M.O.), but mind-exploring.
For those of us without the Messianic Touch, the resurrection
of the dead can only be done in fiction. The heroine of Davis'
play, Jolie Brady, lives the life JonBenet could not. Instead
of dealing with details and conjectures about one particular
murder case, we have a dramatist's rendering of the general.
That is, what such a well-publicized tragedy means to an entire
culture. One thinks of E.L. Doctorow's "Daniel;" Mary
Shelley's "Monster," and J.D. Salinger's Glass family
saga as similar examples of celebrated innocents, abused and
publicly humiliated, who found in adulthood a "voice"
with which to articulate their sorrows and accuse the perpetrators
of the worst of crimes: neglect, abuse, indifference to the sufferings
of the helpless.
Davis allows Jolie Brady to "grow
up," if only in fantasy, if only, as events suggest, in
the interminable nano-second between life and death, which Ambrose
Bierce examined so effectively in "An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge." The dying mind's projection of the life it
might have lived. And it's not pretty. How can it be pretty?
It is the life of one who knew no other love but that of an audience
cheering her for playing the strumpet in costumes that would
make even Madonna blush.
What kind of girl, adolescent, woman
can we expect her to become after spending her most impressionable
years under such weird "adulation?" Davis examines
the degradation of Jolie at the source: her parents, Mitzi and
Jonathan Brady.
Jonathan, a wealthy, fifty-year-old business
man has recently lost Rachel, his teen-age daughter from a previous
marriage, to a fatal accident. Experiencing his first real tragedy
in life, he spends sleepless nights writing sentimental poems
to his dead daughter and seeking solace not from Mitzi, but from
six year old Jolie. What begins as an unhealthy role reversal
-- the father crying in the arms of his child -- "matures"
as Jolie's body matures, until Jonathan is seeking a lot more
than solace from his little nymphet. It is apparent that he sleeps
with her and that he does not sleep with the aging, overweight
Mitzi.
Mitzi is a prototypical "tennis
mom," driving her daughter relentlessly, with the aid of
her own mother, Pauline, to perform magic at these child beauty
contests. That is, to win, win, win. By any means necessary.
"You want to be Miss America someday
it begins here Missy," comments "Grandma" Pauline
during a particularly grueling, humiliating rehearsal.
Mitzi herself was a beauty queen as a
young woman, though not so very, very young. She's frustrated
with the six-year-old Jolie's inability to move the way she has
to move--and we the audience know how she has to move--though
it doesn't quite "click" with little Jolie, whose child's
imagination doesn't stretch far enough to understand the significance
of waving her tiny butt and feather costume to entice and arouse
a mature audience
Mitzi is infuriated that Jolie still
wets the bed at six years of age. Hence, she further humiliates
her by forcing her to wear diapers to bed.
Finally, Mitzi is jealous of Jonathan's
dead daughter, Ruth, with whom she can not compete due to Ruth's
considerable advantage of being dead, and the inordinate and
unnatural affection Jonathan, unable to bear the loss of his
teenage princess, transfers to Jolie who, unlike the forty year
old Mitzi, is only going to get better with age, to blossom as
Mitzi herself withers.
Finally there is Jolie, tragedy in feathers
and heels, who is presented to us, (by the same actress; the
stage directions strictly forbids the appearance of a child in
any part of the play) at ages 6, 9, 12, 15, 30, 35 and 45 years
of age.
I knew this woman. That is, I knew women
like her, who shared similar histories of loveless mothers, jealous
of father's attention and pushing their daughters relentlessly
to relive their own failed lives in an attempt to correct them,
fulfill the dreams the mothers themselves failed to attain. Fathers
who were a bit too affectionate, whose embraces were a little
too close, at first, who became more and more ardent in their
"love" as "Baby" blossomed into "Daddy's
Sweetheart." These women, like Jolie, used sex as a weapon,
a probe with which they analyzed the world where adult relationships
were impossible, for every relationship was a re-enactment of
the primal horrors they were forced to repeat in an endless loop
until self awareness or death set them free.
Of the women I knew who suffered the
same or similar experiences as Jolie, maturing from child to
nymphet to woman until finally escaping to college and the world
in which were frozen in a seemingly endless loop of repeating
their childhood horrors 24/7, asleep or awake, only one found
freedom, like Jolie. She was a voracious reader, like Jolie,
obsessed with words, like Jolie, reading compulsively, like Jolie,
as if trying to discover truth in the word, like Jolie, relentlessly
introspective, like Jolie, and ultimately freed herself, like
Jolie, by seeing her situation with the objectivity of an "other,"
like Jolie, then embracing it, like Jolie, until she was able
separate her present from her past, like Jolie, and throw the
crimes inflicted on her back at the perpetrators, the victimizers,
like Jolie, which, again like Jolie, happened to be her parents.
It was an heroic struggle, like Jolie's,
but my friend won, as did Jolie, and was able to reclaim her
life as her own.
So adept is Davis at portraying the psychology
of Jolie and those like her--and I believe there are many--that
I could often "project" or "guess" some of
Jolie's words and actions before she expressed them, for I had
known such a woman.
For instance, the adult Jolie was married,
then shortly divorced. Davis shows us a glimpse of what life
was like between her and her former husband, Josh, a college
professor, and I felt I knew Josh. I felt I was Josh. When Josh
and Jolie converse about issues of intimacy and touch, of Josh's
inability to fully understand Jolie, I recalled my own relationship.
Josh, though well intentioned, could not truly connect with Jolie,
just as I could not connect with my friend, for hers, like Jolie's
was a personal struggle with the past, a hero's (heroine's) journey
toward a personal freedom that could only be attained through
"settling the affairs" of her own the past.
Jolie Brady does indeed "settle
her affairs." Like all good ghosts (and literary creations)
who have been able to transcend the circumstances of their haunting,
the endless loop in which they are doomed to repeat the scenes
of life's torment, Jolie abandons the past to her victimizers,
her killers. It is they, not she, who must suffer the crimes
that they, not she, will never escape. Jolie reclaims the present
for her self, while transferring the horrors of her past to the
present and future of the parents who victimized and betrayed
her. It is Mitzi and Jonathan who must now dance the dance of
the "endless loop" with the ugly phantoms of their
own creation.
Thus, Jolie knows peace.
Adam Engel
can be reached at bartleby.samsa@verizon.net
Free, White and Six
Years Old:
an
Interview with Walter Davis
ADAM ENGEL:
My first reaction, in 1996, to the JonBenet thing was "yuck.
Freakazoid Americana. I don't need this perverse shit in my life
etc." Sending little girls to do an adult exhibitionist's
job was just too weird for me. It wasn't a "major"
news event, so I just flushed it out of my mind. What inspired
you to tackle this issue?
WALTER DAVIS:
The first time I saw a video of JonBenet Ramsey performing I
found myself sobbing in an uncontrollable crying. "How could
anyone do that to the child?" I asked . Her image and that
question wouldn't leave me. Six years later, the book is the
result.
ENGEL:
As I said above, the whole idea of five and six year olds strutting
their non-existent "stuff" in beauty pageants freaks
me out. It's gross. Aren't there any feminist or child protection
groups fighting this sort of thing?
DAVIS:
Not to my knowledge. Patsy Ramsey sexed up JonBenet act with
revealing costumes and got an eighteen-year-old, a veteran of
"adult" beauty pageants, to coach JonBenet on how to
sex it up. The mass media then played it up voyeuristically.
I was struck that no feminists or child advocacy groups investigated
this issue. What the media were saying, in effect, is "it's
your child, your property, you're free to use it to fulfill your
psychological needs, your fantasies of stardom or celebrity or
whatever." Patsy put the spin of her own psyche on a general
belief that far too many parents share. She'd been a beauty queen
herself and would now reinvest her narcissistic needs in her
child. Joe X does it by making his son win at all costs in youth
football. Etc. Painfully, I've found that far too many people
I've talked to and corresponded with are willing to see almost
everything pernicious about the Ramsey case, but want to deny
that there's anything wrong with child beauty pageants. By the
way, there are 6 times as many child beauty pageants held annually
now than there were the year JonBenet Ramsey died. The epidemic
grows.
ENGEL:
From what I understand, you're taking some heat for writing this
book, especially the play, "Cowboy's Sweetheart." I
checked out a website called Webbsleuths, but it turned out to
be a bunch of feral yahoos who apparently hadn't read the book.
Nevertheless, they had some pretty nasty things to say about
Walter Davis.
DAVIS:
Actually, www.webbsleuths.com,
is a pro Ramsey chat group. (Not to be confused with websleuths,
an intelligent forum.) What they've done is taken excerpts from
some portions of the play that appeared in an online journal
and quoted them out of context to claim that the play is "porn"
and, incidentally, that I should be investigated by the FBI.
The woman calling herself Jameson, who runs this group, has waged
a series of campaigns against those she (and those behind her)
label anti-Ramsey. I understand from sources that she's caused
several people a lot of trouble. But that's secondary. I'm interested
in how this uninformed attack on the play as porn will play out
in a media eager for sound-bites. And so let me take this opportunity
to state explicitly what will be obvious to anyone who reads
the work: it isn't "porn," but a serious and informed
study of the psychosexual identity of a very complex woman. The
real porn, of course, is what the Ramseys did in sexualizing
their child.
ENGEL:
What would lead a reader to classify the work as "porn?"
DAVIS:
Jameson used quotes cited out of context to claim the work was
pornographic. The quotes are graphic, but in order to oppose
pornography. What I try to do in the play is create a complex
adult woman who is wrestling with the conflicts of her "psychosexual
identity" and their connection with the sexual abuse she
suffered as a child and later. The attempt is to help audiences
see the consequences of sexual abuse. In context, I also think
it becomes clear that she is a beautiful and courageous woman:
not a victim but a genuinely tragic agent. Pornography is what
is done to a child when she is sexualized the way JonBenet Ramsey
was. To be theoretical: pornography is an attempt through representation
to excite illicit sexual drives. This is the kind of thing one
does when one teaches little girls to parade around in beauty
pageants and act as "sexy" as they can be taught to
act.
ENGEL:
Well, why can't people see this? I mean, when the whole Ramsey
thing came out, one of the things that struck me right away was
the sight of little girls strutting around like extras in a sexed-up
Busby Berkeley extravaganza.
DAVIS:
My guess is because it strikes too close to home! It's too obvious.
That is one of the ways ideology operates. The obvious is what
must be denied! But that's another story. Though also a current
one re. CBS chickening out on the Reagan movie. Apparently we
can't have a representation that would suggest anything but sainthood
about one of the most mean-spirited human beings whose ever held
that office.
Non-pornographic representations of sexuality
(Lawrence, Joyce, etc) are serious and of necessity graphic representations
of the conflicts that define this central area of human existence
so that we can understand it. Because that is what I do, I should
not be surprised that the true pornographers accuse me of pornography.
ENGEL:
And they're trying to censor you as they tried to censor Joyce
and Lawrence.
DAVIS:
Well that may be too grandiose, but it is nice to be even a minor
chord in such eloquent company. What's significant here for me
is again the need to understand the violence done to children.
I've found that some people who hate the Ramseys and have great
compassion for JonBenet still resist my work because they want
to preserve a pristine memory of her. For them idealization is
the only form mourning can take. All I can say to them, and in
a spirit of shared compassion, is that my play is an act of love.
For her and for all the other violated. Love for all of us takes
many forms. Mine takes the form of psychological honesty. To
love is to suffer with those we love and to internalize their
suffering, not to preserve memories that falsify it or protect
ourselves from it. Some readers will be shocked by my main character.
And so I can only say, openly and honestly, that I love her and
hope you will come to love her. For me she is the most honest,
courageous, and beautiful woman I've ever imagined. She lives
out the "ethical imperative" that is the only true
existential possibility for those who've been sexually abused:
"I was wounded to the core in my sexuality--it was taken
from me--and I will reclaim it or perish in the process."
Like all silly writers, I hope readers will come to share my
love for her--or at least to see that there is nothing pornographic
about her. She comes from a place of great psychological trauma--and
the honesty that a direct confrontation with trauma brings. Which
is, incidentally, my view of the nature and purpose of drama.
ENGEL:
Jameson wrote on the Webbsleuths site, "You have misrepresented
her life, her story. You didn't do the research. For that I hope
Lin Wood takes you to task." Who is Lin Wood? A relative
of the Ramseys?
DAVIS:
Lin Wood is one of the most high profile lawyers in country.
He's on Larry King frequently. His brainchild is the aggressive
PR campaign the Ramseys have run, especially by suing any book
or publication that presents views that fail to gain their imprimatur.
Wood has had considerable success at this, his biggest one coming
in an out of court settlement of a suit he brought against St.
Martins Press and Steve Thomas. Steve Thomas, the head investigating
detective on the JonBenet Ramsey case, after a three year investigation
from which he obtained from the FBI crime lab the conclusion
that there was sufficient evidence for a probable cause indictment
of Patsy for the murder, wrote a book which included that warranted
conclusion. Wood sued. St. Martins didn't want to risk a large
judgment and so they caved and settled. I've been told on good
authority that Wood's basic strategy is to find out a publisher's
insurance provision and then sue for a lesser amount so that
a settlement becomes desirable. Of course, he then goes on TV
and claims the settlement has vindicated his clients and "proves"
their innocence. Wood is also, by the way, the lawyer for Gary
Condit. Wood is also the master of the Larry King media sound-byte.
And the next step in the "logic" begun in the O.J.
case. Now the game is get out in the media and intimidate investigators,
prosecutors, etc. in order to assure that your client will never
be indicted. Jameson, by the way, prides herself on her connection
to Wood. In a sense, she's his Agnew. And so I can anticipate
another attack that will be waged on me. In fact, Wood promised
the following in an email correspondence we had after I sent
him the long footnote in the book that describes his activities.
In his inimitable and singularly revealing words: " publish
your accusatory book and I will bankrupt you with a suit... I
will buy another Jaguar and thoroughbred race horse with the
proceeds from another legal victory for the Ramseys." Nice
to know his true motives. His current power is another matter.
I had to publish my book myself at my own expense because publishers
are now afraid to handle negative things on the Ramseys for fear
of being sued. In the spirit of Ashcroft, Wood is a clear enemy
of and danger to The First Amendment. He had no right to attack
Thomas' book, which was totally within the bounds of freedom
of speech. By the way, Wood has made a lot of money off JonBenet
Ramsey and will continue to do so. As he said recently on Larry
King Live, "If the Ramseys had gotten me as their lawyer
in the beginning they'd own all the tabloids by now."
ENGEL:
Meaning he might have gotten them even more money?
DAVIS:
Indeed. The Ramseys continue to make money on this. Lin Wood
told Larry King that he "cuts them in on the profits."
(There's something illogical yet grandiose about this statement
from Wood. I'm also told it is of questionable legality.) But
profiting off JonBenet is a team Ramsey cottage industry. When
the Ramseys wrote their book they said all money "after
legal expenses" would go to a Foundation named after JonBenet
Ramsey. As a result the Foundation, now defunct, received a pittance.
I saw the Tax return from one year and the amount was under fifty
dollars. The Ramseys, however, continue to turn a tidy profit
off their own child's death.
ENGEL:
Well, I hate to bring this up, but what about you? Aren't there
people who might claim that by writing and selling this book
you're also making money off the case?
DAVIS:
I want to hasten to point out here that I'm not making a penny
off this book. If you turn to the page just after the table of
contents you'll see that I've established The Davis Trust for
Aid in the Prevention and Treatment of Child Sexual Abuse. All
money due to me from the sale of An Evening With JonBenet Ramsey
and from any productions of the play, "Cowboy's Sweetheart"
will be donated to this Trust. Funds from the trust will be given
to organizations who work on behalf of sexually abused children.
I am placing a copy of the legal
papers establishing the Trust on my website.
ENGEL:
I would think the Ramseys would want to keep a low profile. They
seemed to have gotten a lucky break in that the case didn't go
to trial, but there's no statute of limitations for murder.
DAVIS:
Patsy Ramsey wants to be a celebrity. She was once a beauty queen
and in the limelight herself. JonBenet Ramsey was the meal ticket
of her narcissism.
ENGEL:
So it's kind of like O.J. Simpson playing golf while waiting
for the "real killers" to show up.
DAVIS:
Well the Ramseys were welcomed into Atlanta society when they
moved there and bought a huge house while crying poor. I don't
have any information on their golf scores.
ENGEL:
On the other hand, regardless of the pageants and what might
be considered their exploitation of JonBenet, the Ramseys must
be assumed to be innocent unless proven guilty. They haven't
been prosecuted for child abuse or murder. You might be causing
them a lot of pain by publishing this book.
DAVIS:
Of course one is always concerned with appropriate compassion.
But the primary object of our compassion must be JonBenet Ramsey.
As Walter Benjamin said, "the dead remain in danger."
That they'll be sacrificed to our desire to forget anything that
causes us pain. The suffering of her parents is, perhaps, a thing
between them and their maker. The biblical text in the New Testament
is clear: Jesus is opposed to the abuse of children. In fact,
it is one of the few topics on which that compassionate man expressed
unqualified wrath. That is what those who have compassion for
the Ramseys should help them attend to. But real compassion must
be for her and for what can be her legacy: that we finally look
at the abuse of children and take all the appropriate actions.
ENGEL:
There was definitely a racial factor in the O.J. case. White
society and media lynching yet another black man. Given the real
massive discrimination against black people by "the law"
I find this understandable. But what's the deal with the Ramseys?
After all, O.J. ultimately got his property taken away by a civil
court and lives like an "untouchable," which is a kind
of prison in itself. Why are the Ramseys still celebrities and
still making money protesting the "wrongs" done to
them?
DAVIS:
What gives people pain they banish from their consciousness.
That, if nothing else, we should preserve from Freud's legacy.
ENGEL:
So people would rather believe there's a murderous sex fiend
"out there" who might possibly harm their own children
than the possibility that a mother would do this to her own child?
DAVIS:
Exactly. Projection, displacement, denial. People don't want
to look into the ways they may be psychologically abusing their
own children. They don't want to see the family as the contradictions
of capitalism run amok. And of course the don't want to believe
that the sexual abuse of children in their home by parents and
relatives is a national epidemic. By the way, the Ramseys deny
that JonBenet was sexually abused, but at least six major forensic
scientists have examined the autopsy and concluded that she was
abused as she was dying, in the days immediately preceding her
death, and for an indeterminate time prior to that. But then
the pageants go on. Because just like little boys, in capitalism
little girls have to learn about competition_and be taught that
they have only one thing they can compete with.
ENGEL:
You're saying that the "unthinkable" is not only thinkable,
it's doable and often done?
DAVIS: Statistics from the Department
of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services and
presented in all the standard books on this topic such as E.
Sue Blume's Secret Survivors and R.L Howard's Journey Together
show that 1 out 3 girls and 1 out of 5 boys are molested in their
childhood and that a preponderance of cases involve a family
member. Sexual abuse is a part of American family life. But as
always "we" try to project it outside_in the pedophile
out there, hiding somewhere near the weapons of mass destruction
ENGEL:
Thus the attempt to portray you as a pornographer. Kill the messenger.
DAVIS:
Yes. And signs are it is going to get nastier. If possible I'd
like to add a sort of request to Counterpunch readers. I'd like
to hear from those who read the work and those who might be in
a position to advise or support me should Lin Wood wage another
attack on the First Amendment. My email is davis.65@osu.edu
. I'm going to keep hearing from crazies who will threaten me
in various ways. It would be good to hear from those who take
other views. And I can assure you that if it falls to me to defend
the First Amendment I will be proud to do so. There won't be
any out of court settlements. Also, of course, I'd like to wake
up the Theatres. They all remain afraid or reluctant to produce
this work. Given the dreck that masquerades as serious theatre
today, "Cowboy's Sweetheart" deserves a chance to show
audiences what the real thing is. And as the book of which it
is a part shows, sometimes Literature is the only way we can
attain a correct, in depth understanding of the psychological
and emotional truth of historical events. That truth, I should
add, is a tragic one.
ENGEL:
Speaking of literature, how would you answer those who claim
your play is just 'fiction' and therefore "irrelevant"
or "illegitimate?"
DAVIS:
What can one say finally? Take that, Toni Morrison and Richard
Wright and William Faulkner, etc. As the book shows, in some
case "fiction"--i.e., artistic probing into the psyche
-is the only way we can get to the inner truth of an event.
Walter Davis, Professor Emeritus in the
English Department at The Ohio State University, is the author
of a number of books on literature and modern culture, including
Inwardness and Existence (U of Wisconsin P, 1989), Get the Guests,
Psychoanalysis, Modern Drama and the Audience (U of Wisconsin
P, 1994), Deracination:
Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative (SUNY P,
2001) and The Holocaust Memorial: A Play about Hiroshima (1st
Books Library, 2000). He can be reached at davis.65@osu.edu.
Adam Engel can
be reached at bartleby.samsa@verizon.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce
Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler
/ Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets'
Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
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