Of course, you’re dead, so you obviously don’t care. So really, this is more a pitting of whatever viral meme-fueled conspiracy of yellow journalism that keeps your whored-up prepubescent head staring at me from every available media outlet. But there’s no single head to that hydra on which I can effectively focus my ire. I could pit your killer, of course; they surely deserve it more than you. But no one knows for sure who they are. So I’m left with no real alternative but to pit you.
Because I hate you. I didn’t want to, honestly. I know intellectually that none of this is really your fault. But it’s been like TEN FUCKING YEARS now, and you need to GO THE FUCK AWAY. I don’t watch television; I don’t read the tabloids or the celebrity magazines. And yet I cannot, CANNOT escape your zoned-out cowlike gaze, your big ‘80s hair, your eerily waxy, prematurely embalmed physiognomy. I know jack shit about the child beauty pageant circuit, yet somehow I know that you were a participant. I know nothing about Boulder, Colorado, except that you and your parents lived there.* I know that your body was found in the basement of your parents’ home, a victim of strangulation and possible sexual assault, and that there was a ransom note for 118,000 dollars. There is no earthly reason why I should know any of this stuff. You are poisoning my mind through cultural osmosis, and I have to ask you to stop now.
I never knew you when you were alive; there’s no reason why I should care that you’re dead, except for the common bond of empathy that binds humanity together. And here’s the thing; you’re tainting that for me now. You’re making me hate you, and despise appeals to my sympathy, and actively loathe the mere sight of little white girls in general. I don’t want that. I don’t want to reach the point where my first instinctive reaction upon hearing of a murder, is: “Good! Somebody else’s death made the news besides JonBenet Fucking Ramsey!”
I wince internally every time I see a photo of you, which happens way too fucking often. I have deceased relatives, family members whom I dearly loved, who have passed away within the last decade, and I probably still don’t look at pictures of them as often as I see yours purely by accident. And why? WHY must I look at your head, JonBenet Ramsey? I don’t go constantly pasting up pictures of my long-dead kin so that total strangers can gawk at them. So why is it that people evidently think I want to look at you, when I never knew you when you were alive? What am I supposed to feel about that? Sorrow? Pity? Well I’m sorry, but it appears that my shriveled excuse for a soul doesn’t contain an entire decade’s-worth of those emotions to slather over some dead kid who I never knew in the first place.
You are fucking sad. Not sad in a “gosh, it’s a shame such a cute little girl had to die” way; not anymore. That was maybe the case for a couple days, a whole decade ago. Now you’re sad in a whole other way, a “what the fuck is wrong with my species?” kind of way. Because I don’t believe for a second that anyone genuinely cares about the actual tragedy of your death anymore. I don’t know for certain what’s really going on, but actual human compassion isn’t a part of it. What sort of warped collective emotional mindset would allow this one pointless unsolved crime, out of how many nameless thousands, to turn into such a hellish self-perpetuating industry?
At least with Princess Diana there was some sort of tenuous justification for the relentless tabloid frenzy over her demise; she was only married to the heir of the fucking British Empire! And yet within the past year even she has, at long last, started to fade off the magazine covers, gracefully lie down, and be decently fucking dead. So how is it that you, JonBenet, virtual nonentity that you were in life, have managed to carve out this massive entertainment empire in death? It can’t be just the ‘unsolved murder’ aspect. How many murders have gone unsolved over the past decade? Offhand I don’t know the number either, JonBenet, but I’ll take a wild guess: more than just yours.
You know as well as I that, had you lived, no one would have ever heard of you. God, how I wish that were true, JonBenet. I truly wish you’d had that opportunity to grow up in comfortable anonymity; I wish you were in junior high now, or whatever grade you’d be in. I wish you’d had your chance to stick it to your parents by going Goth or whatever. But more than any of this, I wish that I had never, ever heard of you. Frankly at this point, if you’d been run over by a truck or killed in such a manner as to attract no media attention, I’d be okay with that too.
God damn you. What the fuck do you want from me? I don’t want to hate you, but I do anyway; I really can’t seem to help myself anymore. I hate you. I hate you so much. I hate you with the white-hot fire of a thousand suns. I hate you, and I never want to see your goddamned Revlon-caked face again; so unsolved mystery or not, I need you to leave now. Seriously, you hideous little tramped-out Tammy Faye-haired revenant, will you please. Just. Fucking. LEAVE. NOW?
Actually, I also know that Boulder was the setting for the TV show* Mork and Mindy.** But that’s beside the point of the rant.
