By Jay D. Homnick on 8.21.06 @ 12:06AM
The story of John Mark Karr and his confession in the case of Jon Benet Ramsey is a strange one indeed.
The story of John Mark Karr and his confession in the case of
Jon Benet Ramsey is a strange one indeed. When I first heard the
breathless bulletins surrounding the arrest in Thailand, I was
reminded of two fictional accounts. One was an award-winning short
story in an Alfred Hitchcock collection about a man who planned a
murder a year in advance. All through that year he marched into the
police station to confess to every murder reported in the press.
After the cops had become inured to his serial false confessions he
was able to commit the actual killing, walk into the station the
next day and admit guilt, then be laughingly escorted back to his
home.
The other story is from a book by Donald E. Westlake, the master
of the comic crime novel. In one book from his famous Dortmunder
series, Dortmunder asks his sidekick, Kelp, if a mutual friend of
theirs had managed to make his way back from Brazil after running
out of money there. Yes, Kelp replied, he had confessed to a murder
and been given a free flight home as a presumed extradition. This
fellow Karr certainly has all the earmarks of either a grotesque
fantasist or a guy who needs to hitch a ride home from Asia. His
estranged ex-wife, although shunning the camera, continues to alibi
him for the time of Jon Benet's strangling.
If indeed he is unmasked as a pretender, as seems more likely
with each passing hour, one wonders at the sort of mind that casts
a wistful eye over the reports of grisly crime, feeling only a
twinge of regret: "I coulda been a contender." We would dearly love
to embrace the premise that this is the product of such warping in
the human spirit that nothing can be extrapolated therefrom as a
reflection upon the state of our society. Yet the sense that this
represents the deviant extreme of a broader phenomenon
persists.
Look at your Jerry Springer and Maury Povich guests, who compete
with each other to alternately acknowledge, deny, and accuse
themselves and each other of ever more bizarre behavior. The prize
of fame, even in its ugly-stepchild guise of notoriety, is an
intoxicant that corrodes the structure of judgment while it blurs
the lens of self-preservation. Having one's antics divert the
attention of a mass audience for the most fleeting of moments is
achievement enough to justify a lifetime of disorderly conduct.
Is this a tragic byproduct of urbanization and alienation, of
the loneliness of life in the big city? Fate seems to doom the
modern citizen to the status of a mere cipher, a body living inside
a shadow, a face in the crowd, as if everyone was suddenly renamed
John Smith and sent out to buy a vanity license plate. How to carve
out a niche for oneself in a wall of anonymity?
Or perhaps this goes beyond that to a growing admiration for the
freedom that evil appears to represent. In a world that imposes new
sets of rules at each level of success, the rascal -- not only O.
Henry's gentle grifter but even Thomas Harris' ghoulish sadist,
Hannibal Lecter -- offers the allure of a life unimpeded by
conscience or stricture. The weakest among us are led to a horrific
form of emulation whereby an essentially decent person is led into
adopting corrupt behaviors to define himself outside the mainstream
and its straitjacket demands.
The health of our community requires that we reassert the
striving for greatness as the central theme of human ambition.
Neither money nor pleasure nor power shall hold sway over the
spirit of Man, but only the constant urge and surge toward
maximizing the potential of mind, heart and soul. Not so very long
ago every American youngster pulsed with the dream of being another
Washington or Lincoln, in the clear understanding that fame takes
its meaning from its context. We cannot long survive if those
heroes are supplanted by Bundy and Dahmer.
The tale of Jon Benet Ramsey, if not quite sealed by this
peculiar event, must remain a horrid memory of the human being at
its most degraded and vicious level. It is a story of real people
and their pain, one that should be protected from manipulations of
both the cynical and pathetic varieties. If circumstances brought a
macabre fame to the event, that is regrettable but tolerable;
trying to piggyback on this phenomenon is most assuredly not.
Let us redouble our effort to teach our youth to aspire for
greatness first and fame only as its second act. Pride must come
from building and growing, never from dismantling and destroying.
Poor Jon Benet deserves to rest in peace, and her surviving father
is entitled to his private mourning. If we must fantasize about
being somewhere we were not, let it be at a heroic place on the
battlefield, protecting those that live.
topics:
Earmarks
