Annoy.com Exhibition: JonBenet Ramsey

With the regurgitated
hollow
of
greedy promises
and sycophantic evil,
the lickspittle hounds of perversity package
our collective grief,
and with depraved, whore-like lust,
sell it
back to us
for nothing less than our
battered souls,
politics,and thirty pieces
of tarnished silver.

JonBenet Ramsey. 2001 Type C Print. 36" x 48"

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So the Ramsey's Sue
Jonbenet and Judeo-Christianity

NOISE

Before long, there was nary a media outlet in the country that did not associate JonBenet in some way, as a beauty queen. That she was white and born of wealthy parents was additional ammunition for the media onslaught to follow. Like an uncontrollable virus, the hoards cut and pasted every detail they could find. JonBenet specials, inside scoops, latest updates, interviews with friends, neighbors, maids, aunts, cousins….exclusive interviews, exclusive photos, exclusive obituary. The almost comical, but depressing accusations by tabloids of tabloids. Web sites, parasitic, sprung up like warts, feeding on one another and perpetuating each other's relevance... beauty queen JonBenet, not really child, not really real, not really everyday… and we the gullible and the beguiled bought it hook, line and sinker, while our six year old daughters still wonder why it's okay to murder and rape those less fortunate…perhaps black, perhaps poor, perhaps ugly. [...]

[...] The commercialization of JonBenet leaves us numb enough to avoid examining the possibility that the taut and unyielding strictures of our Judeo Christian nucleus are erupting in pus-like rage, causing us to kill and fuck our petrified and abused children. But we don't want to go there. We'd rather hear that JonBenet was a Beauty Queen. A bizarre world to exploit and explore. Should little girls wear lipstick and make-up? How do we avoid the desperately necessary exploration of the remaining vestiges of patriarchic misogyny at it's most blatant and disturbing - the assigning of value to the empty objectification of sexuality - paraded around like cattle before the slaughter? The subconscious provocation of child sexuality. The stuff that Jesse Helms and Dan Coats soil their pristine sheets over in their Internet wet dreams. Oh the wonderful lessons our children are learning.

Clinton Fein, The Gruesome Marketing of JonBenet, Annoy.com, February 1, 1997

You know, America has just been hurt so deeply with the -- this -- the tragic things that have happened. The young woman who drove her children into the water, and we don't know what happened with the O.J. Simpson -- and I mean, America is suffering because have lost faith in the American family. We are a Christian, God-fearing family. We love our children. We would do anything for our children.

JonBenet Ramsey's mother, Patsy Ramsey, CNN Transcript, Aired January 1, 1997 - 4:34 p.m. ET

It’s like you had a hundred different facts in a party game.

Jane Pauley in an interview with Lawrence Schiller, author of a book on the JonBenet Ramsey case, on NBC's Dateline. <

"We're tapped out..you've got to say, 'Where's this business going? I got (sic) no more sections to add to this paper.' To be competitive, you've got to be 24-hour news."

Then NBC News president Andy Lack (currently NBC President and Chief Operating Officer) in a February 1999 interview with USA Today, discussing the birth of MSNBC.