An Absentee Ballot of JonBenet Ramsey Part Two by JR McCarthy

Using the memory of JonBenet Ramsey as a jumping-off point for a screed against child abuse, and using her memory as an occasion to rail against the diabolical objectification of women and girls in our society would be both redundant and counter-productive. I believe we will discover - at the end of this day, if this day ever ends - that just as such objectification surely played a role in the murder of this six-year- old girl, the incessant rehashing of our revulsion against it has, in part, kept the crime unsolved. It is enough to say that between midnight and dawn on the day after Christmas, 1996, a citizen of the United States by the name of JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in her home, and no one yet has answered for the crime.

Using the memory of JonBenet Ramsey as a jumping-off point for a
screed against child abuse, and using her memory as an occasion to
rail against the diabolical objectification of women and girls in our
society would be both redundant and counter-productive. I believe we
will discover - at the end of this day, if this day ever ends - that just as
such objectification surely played a role in the murder of this six-year-
old girl, the incessant rehashing of our revulsion against it has, in part,
kept the crime unsolved. It is enough to say that between midnight
and dawn on the day after Christmas, 1996, a citizen of the United
States by the name of JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in her home,
and no one yet has answered for the crime.

August 16th is the eighteenth anniversary of JonBenet Ramsey's birth.
She was bludgeoned and strangled to death twelve and half years ago
in Boulder County, Colorado, which is twenty-five miles from the great
city of Denver. In Denver, on August 24th, the Democrats will gather to
acknowledge Barack Obama as their candidate for President.
Inasmuch as Obama's candidacy is a fait accompli, and the essential
business of a political convention is thus already accomplished, I
recently expressed my sincere opinion that Barack Obama ought to
spend both his time and his allegedly considerable resources looking
into JonBenet Ramsey's as-yet unsolved murder. I went so far as to
offer him a $2300.00 contribution if such efforts were to bring the guilty
party to justice.

I flatter myself that what I write here is both read and remembered, but
I begin this installment with a summary of the last one ? I declare, with
my "part two" that this installment is a sequel to the last one - because
I may be merely flattering myself, and because on this occasion, I want
to be crystal clear in my meaning. To the extent of my poor ability, I
have, in the past, incorporated humor into my pieces in order to make
them both palatable and memorable. It would please me deeply if
what I am writing now is the most utterly humorless work ever to come
from me. I have been, at other times, a good deal more eccentric and
unrealistic in both my premises and my proposals, but I have never
been more serious than I am now.

If Senator Obama takes me up on my proposition, he will catch holy
hell, from every office seeker on the planet, for setting a ominous
precedent. In order to take me up on my proposition, Senator Obama
will have to barge into the inner workings of the District Attorney's
Office of Boulder County, Colorado. He will have to appear to jump up
and down on the Tenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
He will surely upset and offend some hard-working people of good
will, and he will create the kind of havoc more likely to impede justice
than to serve it. Unless his efforts are completely successful, he will
give Senator John McCain an opportunity to accuse him of arrogant
presumptuousness, as McCain so accused Obama when Obama
made his recent sweep through the Middle East and Europe.

I make my immodest proposal acutely aware that Senator Obama
would risk replete humiliation if he took up the challenge.
Furthermore, although justice would surely be served if JonBenet's
murder was solved, I grieve but to guess how many unsolved murders
of children have transpired in the interim between crime and
punishment: what - at the end of this day, if this day ever ends -
would it mean, this drop of justice in the ocean of infamy?

I say, without a trace of irony, that it would impress the hell out of me. I
say, without a smirk on my face, that I, too, want to believe that we are
on the precipice of some seismic shift in our political and social
sensibility. I want to imagine that politicians of the future will be
obliged, after the ground-breaking 2008 presidential election, to offer
us resolution instead of rhetoric, and demonstrations of their own
crack efficiency instead of aspersions against the records and
characters of their opponents. I want to say to the candidate and to
the incumbent, whether s/he wishes to get the job or keep it, with no
audible trace in my voice of the nasty, the cynical, or the jaded: "Tell
me something I don't know."

Tell me something I don't know, such as how to bring the troops home
from Iraq and Afghanistan without demoralizing our friends and
emboldening our enemies. Tell me something I don't know, such as
how gasoline prices can ever come down while the third largest
petroleum-producing nation imports seventy percent of the petroleum it
uses. Tell me something I don't know, such as exactly how long it will
be before I can get a fair price or pay a fair price for a sound house in
a decent community. Tell me something I don't know, such as how a
nation of immigrants will neither betray its history nor suborn contempt
for its laws when it articulates its immigration policy.

Tell me something I don't know, such as how anyone was truly safe
that night in 1996 if JonBenet Ramsey was not.

The monster or monsters who abused and killed the little girl in
Colorado have yet to be identified. Their accessories after the fact are
the usual suspects, and still at liberty in the land. Be on the look-out
for:

- Astonishing Incompetence, (John Ramsey and his friend, one Fleet
White, were encouraged by Detective Linda Arndt to search the
16,500 square foot house, six hours after the first call to the police,
unaccompanied by any law enforcement official . Ramsey found the
body, moved it from the location in the basement where it was allegedly
found to the kitchen area, and removed tape from the mouth of the
victim before a single detective could assess the situation.)

- Political Posturing, (The blundering in the Ramsey investigation
became political fodder between Colorado Governor Roy Romer, who
was regarded as sympathetic to the Ramsey family, and Colorado
Governor Bill Owens, ( who was openly contemptuous of them.)

- Noblesse Oblige, (It was four months after the death of JonBenet
before the lawyers that John and Patsy Ramsey secured within forty-
eight hours of the crime consented to allow them to be interviewed
separately by the Boulder County Police.)

- and Argumentum Ad Verecundiam, [Argument in Respect of
Authority]. (Trace DNA evidence that cannot be linked to the Ramsey
family may prove that other people were involved in the murder, but it
does not prove that the Ramseys were not, and does not in fact clear
them of all guilt. Such evidence is currently being touted as a
justification for both clearing the Ramseys and apologizing to John
Ramsey for casting suspicion upon him in the first place.)

I don't want to know any public servant or presidential aspirant who
cannot identify these culprits on sight, and I am looking for such as
can refute their claims and expose their obfuscation to the world.

Here is my own humble attempt to tell you something you don't know:

As reported by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,
this is the combined number of unresolved cases of missing children in
just five of the fifty states ? Colorado, Minnesota, ( which hosts the
Republican Convention in September) Obama's home state of Illinois,
McCain's home state of Arizona, and Georgia, where JonBenet
Ramsey is buried: 254

As estimated by CENTERFORPOLITICS.ORG, and Larry Sabato's
Crystal Ball '08, this is the number of candidates of both major parties?
both incumbents and challengers ? currently contending for seats in
Congress, in Gubernatorial elections, and , of course, for The White
House: 254



- J.R. McCarthy

JR McCarthy is a published author and also a staff writer for ArtistsILove.com