Sherry Chandler

I have great pity for JonBenet Ramsey. She was exploited during the brief years of her life. She was brutally murdered. (How can such a small child have a twelve-inch skull fracture?) And she has been exploited in death for longer than she lived. It’s the United States at its ugliest.

It begins to look even uglier when you consider the racist nature of this frenzy and all such frenzies over beautiful white girls in sexual danger.

As Juan Cole points out this morning in his post JonBenet Ramsey and Abeer al-Janabi :

The case of Abeer al-Janabi, the little fourteen-year old Iraqi girl who was allegedly raped and killed after being stalked by a US serviceman would never be given the wall to wall coverage treatment.

That is frankly because the victim was not a blonde, blue-eyed American, but a black-eyed, brunette Iraqi. Both victims were pretty little girls. Both were killed by sick predators. But whereas endless speculation about the Ramsey case, to the exclusion of important real news stories, is thought incumbent in cabalnewsland, Abeer al-Janabi’s death is not treated obsessively in the same way. In the hyperlinked story above, CNN even calls the little girl a “woman” at first mention, because the US military indictment did so. Only later in the article is it revealed that she was a little girl. The very pedophiliac nature of the crime is more or less overed up in the case of al-Janabi, even as looped video of Ramsay as too grown up is endlessly inflicted on us.

Members of our army raped and murdered this 14-year-old “woman” and killed her entire family to cover it up. What our army does it does in our names. George W. Bush would have us believe our army is there to protect the Iraqi people, not to prey on them. Where’s the furor and the outrage?

Here’s another take on Beautiful Dead Girls.

From Chris Colin’s article “Just Be” in Yoga Journal:

…following six straight hours of work, and preceding six more, I devote 30 nonrefundable minutes to Judge Judy. For but a moment—the length of a Ziploc bag commercial—I wonder if this is the best way to spend my work break. Then the 30-second spot is over and Judy is back.

The abiding and self-congratulatory myth regarding Americans and relaxation is that we’ve got too much on our plates to partake. But as a culture, clearly we have underdeveloped ideas about nothingness. While we’re indeed busy, we’re not too busy, not by a long shot, not by at least four hours of TV a day, according to Nielsen reports, plus Web surfing, excursions to the mall, and so on. We have, strangely enough, enormous reserves of ostensible leisure time. That we choose to use so little of it to actively combat the various ravages of stress suggests a relationship to downtime that wants rethinking.
…

“The majority of Americans are doing what I call default relaxation activities, which yield lower levels of process benefits,” says [Juliet Schor (author of Overworked America)], who’s also a professor of sociology at Boston College. Process benefits are the pastimes correlated with higher levels of human satisfaction. “Watching TV and shopping, for example, are shown to have low process benefits,” Schor says. Mathur, the meditation teacher, says, “In modern society, when we say we’re tired, we usually mean our mind is tired.” Often, though, we fail to listen up and give it a rest. Instead, we hunker down on the couch with the remote in hand. “With TV, you’re adding input rather than clearing out or cleansing. In a way, your mind is going to be even more tired when you’re done.”

Liz Newby-Fraser, academic dean at the California Institute for Human Science, explains this in physiological terms. “Watching two hours of television is not relaxation. With TV, there are stimuli that activate the sympathetic nervous system, rather than the parasympathetic, which is associated with real rest.”

…If our default relaxation activities do us little good, and a more thoughtful mind-body awareness makes us more effective, why do we still choose Survivor over meditation or yoga or just a few minutes of real quiet? One line of thinking suggests that we can’t bear to face the cluttered barrenness of our hollow, online, box-store, early-21st-century lives; we don’t dare glimpse the abyss. Schor, for her part, sees it more simply: Television’s easy. “Meditation requires a skill,” she says. “TV requires none”.