The Pretty Teenager

I hate sounding like a broken record, but I hate this phenomenon more, so I guess I'll take one more swing at it.

I don't have any statistics about how many young people go missing in America every month, but I'll bet it's a shitload. And, more than that, I'll bet that young people in this country who go missing hail from every single socioeconomic, ethnic, geographical, cultural realm in this diverse nation.

Which ones, though, invariably end up on the national news programs?

Good looking white ones.

It doesn't matter what age they are, either. They can be infants. As long, though, as they're Caucasian and photogenic, you can bet that "The Today Show" is going to hang onto them like a dog with a bone and not let go for as long as they possibly can. I could cite dozens of examples, but I just can't-- it's just too disgusting and too macabre to sort through. You know, though.

If they're eighteen, and white and attractive, that's media gold. When Sarah Townsend, of Burlington County, New Jersey, went missing, the nation sat up and took notice.

Why? I'll let you decide.

After making national news, and after an extensive search for the girl who was believed to have run away, Sarah Townsend's body was found in a pond and, accordingly to toxicology reports, there was a "significant" amount of cocaine in her bloodstream. A suicide note was found in her abandoned car.

This post is not about the immense tragedy of the loss of her life, it is not a post about teen suicide, it is not a post about the unimaginable pain and suffering her family must be enduring, this is a post about the shameful, reprehensible and revolting media practice of paying inordinate amounts of attention to white, attractive missing persons and/or crime victims as compared to the rest of the population.

The article I read in "The Philadelphia Inquirer", written by staff writer James Osborne, about this case even goes so far as to refer to Townsend as "the pretty teenager". So much for journalistic objectivity. James, your use of the word "pretty" to describe Townsend is offensive and irrelevant, and your editor who allowed that go to print is an asshole.

I thank God that I never went missing as a child, because I sure as shit would only have found press on the back of a milk carton.

Whatever Happened to Just Being Sad?

News moves at a blistering pace these days.

Soundbytes. Blips. Thumbs moving at incredible speeds on teensie QWERTYs. Tweets. Updates. Messages. Blip. Bling! Glang. Streaming tickers on the HD flatscreens in front of the elliptical machines at the gym. NPR. FOX. Everything in between, and everything beyond.

We're practically gagging on information and spin and doctrine and palaver. No, we are gagging. And, yet, we are anything but gagged. All of us, spewing and spouting, our mouths hundreds of paces in front of our minds-- left in the neuron dust. Bye-bye, brain. Won't be needing you very much today.

Googling "Gabrielle Giffords" at 4:35pm on Monday afternoon yields 76,900,000 hits. Approximately. Unbelievable. Incomprehensible. What is all of that? Is it information? Is it what we need to know, or want to, or dare to? What it is, I don't know. Now, after I hit "Publish," it'll be 76,900,001 (approximately) and I am disgusted with myself, almost to the point of wretching, for contributing to this profane noise, this internet abuse of a woman in a medically-induced coma, abuse of the corpses and memories of the victims of this appalling tragedy, this obscenity.

Hi. Here I am, another lout, contributing to the bloody mess. What a punk.

I swore up and down that I wouldn't. Of course I did. After all, it is just my style to eschew and reject what "everyone else" is talking about, as if I am some sort of badass, counter-culture barometer. Please-- what a fucking, very unfunny, very transparent joke. I promised myself I would write about something silly, maybe about different uses for bras (put one in the freezer overnight and then set it on the coffee table, fill it with candy. Haha-- what a comic genius) or some commentary about-- I don't know, inane food products or the way people look at you after you exit the restroom at work. I thought, "Yeah, well, that's what my readers want or need right now-- some levity to distract them from saturating over this deplorable situation." Like I'm going to come save you from the New York Times. Like I'm Chevy Chase, falling over a ladder.

Please.

I guess I realized that I ought to stop horseshitting myself, and you, and accept that there was, in fact, something about all of this that I wanted to say. It hit me while I was listening to Terry Gross interview some schlocko journalist about the very loose gun laws in Arizona, and, "would stricter gun laws have maybe prevented this tragedy?" She asked him questions about concealed weapons, and whether or not the Glock semiautomatic handgun would have been outlawed under this provision, or that, and how this "alleged shooter" in this incident did purchase his gun legally, but didn't have a concealed weapons permit and under what circumstances could a police officer (if one had been at this event) have stopped the suspect and frisked him after seeing that he had a concealed weapon, and I got so fucking furious I wanted to scream:

TERRY: IT IS CALLED A "CONCEALED WEAPON" FOR A FUCKING REASON, THAT REASON BEING THAT IT IS CONCEALED ON YOUR PERSON AND OUT-OF-VIEW OF OTHERS, LIKE, SAY, A POLICE OFFICER, EVEN A NON-EXISTENT, FICTICIOUS, HYPOTHETICAL POLICE OFFICER WHO WAS NOT EVEN AT THE SAFEWAY WHERE ALL OF THESE PEOPLE WERE SHOT.

Then she pissed me off even more by asking, "Well, what about unconcealed weapons? What sort of questions would a police officer ask someone who had an unconcealed weapon?" This stumped her guest.

"Well, I don't know, maybe they wouldn't ask anything."

I was very upset by this point. How ridiculous was this conversation? I just couldn't take it anymore.

Was it the fault of the store that sold the gun?

Was it the fault of the second Walmart that sold the ammunition?

Was it the fault of the parents for not notifying authorities of bizarre behavior?

Was it the fault of mental health practitioners for not notifying the state or the criminal justice system?

Was it the fault of the court that threw out the arrest for drug paraphernalia?

Was it the fault of lax mental health reporting duties?

Was it the fault of law enforcement for not adequately stationing officers at the scene for VIP protection detail?

Was it the fault of the Secret Service and/or the FBI that does not provide routine protection details state-level politicians?

Was it the fault of Sarah Palin and her stupid fucking little target symbols on that map that I can't stand to hear another word about on Facebook or anywhere else?

Was it the fault of the vitriolic state of political debate in this country?

Oh. My God. Oh, my God.

Please.

We are so thirsty for answers, to insatiably horny over assigning blame, so unstoppably greedy when it comes to our relentless, pounding search for scapegoats and reasons and division or healing that any reason, any dignity, any sense of proportion or pause is just thrown right out the window. Mr. President, a moment of silence is a good start, but it's hardly sufficient. Maybe you should have ordered a day. Or a week. Could you, sir, have ordered us some time to just be sad?

What the hell ever happened to just being sad?

Beautiful White Children Are Missing

20somethings amuse me, and I guess, as a twenty-nine-year-old, I can still say that and sound self-aware without sounding crusty. I often balk at the things they say and do-- the vapidity, the insipidity, the shameless vanity and unapologetic trendiness, the egomaniacal self-engorgement.

The overwhelming propensity to treat "The Daily Show" as an actual news source.

Oh, is this what being "counterculture" has become? Lame!

Then again, if you want lame, come join me, my snoozing wife, and the dogs on the couch for a round of "The Today Show." If you only got your news from "The Today Show," you would be convinced that the most pressing issues of import in our world are Tiger Woods' pink-seeking missiledick and Joe Biden proclaiming healthcare to be a "big fucking deal."

Which, by the way, it is.

Also, if all you watched for news was "The Today Show," you would be unalterably convinced that only beautiful white children go missing in America.

While I don't have real, hard-n-fast statistics to back up my claim (I don't need them-- this isn't a scholarly article-- I was never very good at writing those anyway-- far too much passion, you know) I can tell you that my anecdotal observance of "The Today Show" missing child content is overwhelmingly tilted towards photogenic white children. Just this morning, they announced that a girl named "Kayleah" was missing. Now, I admit that this is probably racist of me, but, when I saw the spelling of the name on the screen, I said to my wife, "Oh my God, are they finally profiling a missing black girl?"

My wife, of course, was asleep, her head thrown back on the sofa cushion and her mouth unceremoniously open, trying to catch another few minutes of pre-commute sleep. Needless to say, she didn't respond.

Then, a moment or two later, they showed a picture of the missing girl. White.

Living as I do just a couple of short minutes away from Philadelphia, I know that black children go missing-- because I sometimes watch the local news. The local news cannot possibly get away with singlemindedly promoting and publicizing the plight of grief-stricken Caucasian families whose children have been plucked from their grasp. In Philly-- black kids get abducted all the time: by perverts hanging around playgrounds and schools, by their parents or relatives, by their Baby Daddies, by criminals and by miscreants and by ne'er-do-wells, by, well, kidnappers. Sometimes they're returned safely. Sometimes, they're returned in bodybags.

Somehow, neither event seems to warrant the national spotlight.

There's an old news maxim: "If it bleeds, it leads." I suppose a mantra for the new age of news about abductees, and even murder victims could be: "If it's white, it sees the light."

When I had my old blog, I wrote a post that slammed the "New York Daily News" for repeatedly profiling the murders of young, attractive, white women. One was a former model, slashed to death on the subway, an inglorious end for anyone, one was found tossed in a dumpster like, well, like yesterday's "New York Daily News." One was stuffed between a mattress and a wall, killed by a jealous boyfriend. In the text of these articles, there was almost always some reference to the victim's physical beauty. The references were never in quotation marks, the comments of a family friend or a relative, but they were embedded within the text of the article, presented by the reporter as just another fact-- no different than the location of the crime or the description of the murder weapon. Words like "attractive," "beautiful," "very pretty" were all used liberally. And, after reading the fourth or fifth story like this, I started to think, "do ugly people get murdered in New York City?" and, if they do, do the reporters write:

"Silvio Carnacci, a foul-smelling, unshaven 54-year-old Italian immigrant with three real teeth and one hair-covered mole on his forehead was found dead in his apartment yesterday morning by two patrolmen from the 9th Precinct answering a distress call. One of the officers was 6'2" and handsome in a classic way with a Romanesque nose and broad shoulders, his partner, however, had chin acne and a slight limp."

Sometimes I think back to the night when Barack Obama got elected President of this country. At that time, my wife and I lived in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, and people were blaring their car horns all goddamn night, even banging on kitchen pots and pans with spoons in the middle of the street. I think maybe some of those people were heralding Obama's election as the beginning of the end of racism in America.

I don't know. I still only see pictures of missing white children on TV.

This Sucks

I try to keep up with crime stories that come out of my native Philadelphia, but it isn't easy.

We have a colorful variety of criminal miscreants that populate neighborhoods with quaint sounding names, like "Strawberry Mansion" and "Nicetown." Trust me-- the only strawberries you'll find in Strawberry Mansion aren't fit to eat and Nicetown is a misnomer at best.

Even I, who avidly follows stories of misdeeds by Philadelphia's more violent residents in the local rags was unfamiliar with the name Richard Casey until I stumbled upon an article concerning his sentencing for crimes he was found guilty of committing from November of 2006 to January of 2007.

The headline of the article caught my eye which, as any greenhorn, wet-behind-the-ears, rookie, non-Columbia-University-affiliated journalist will tell you is the point.

TOE-SUCKING FIEND GETS 57-114 YEARS

And I thought to myself, "Wow. When they say Philly's getting tough on crime, I guess they mean it."

Of course, we all know that headlines don't tell the whole story. Otherwise they'd be called Whole Story Lines, which isn't very catchy.

Richard Casey didn't just suck on peoples' toes. He attacked women at gunpoint as they walked alone on streets in their own neighborhoods, robbed them, sexually assaulted and/or raped them, and then, in the midst of these horrific and scary crimes, ordered them to remove their shoes so he could lick the bottoms of their feet and suckle on their toes a bit, before fleeing into the night.

Now the sentence seems to make a little more sense, doesn't it?

This is, of course, what's wrong with the media today. They have even dubbed him "Richard "The Foot Fetish Bandit" Casey." I mean, how ridiculous is that? As far as I know, sucking on somebody else's toes isn't even a felony-- it certainly isn't when you're two consenting adults and you're doing it in bed while hanging from a harness with a pear shoved in your ass and a studded choke-collar wrapped around your genitals.

So I hear.

It just seems to me that the the fact that this fruity sonofabitch likes to insert toes and feet into his oral cavity is the most insignificant, inconsequential part of his crime spree. Helllloooooo? These women were fucking raped at gunpoint! Maybe that's why he's getting locked away until he dies. Maybe that's the bigger issue here. But this is what the media does, time and time again, take a story and focus in on some otherwise minor, titillating detail that has no relevance whatsoever and make the entire story about that. Tiger Woods crashed his car at 2am into a fire hydrant.

Yes, but his wife got him out using a golf club! Or she hit him with a golf club! Or there was a golf club somehow invloved!

Of course there was, motherfuckers! He's the golf Jesus of America! You use whatever happens to be lying around, don't you? If he was the porn Jesus of America, his wife would have used a 3 foot dildo shaped like a pickle to break the car window.

God.

Getting back to "The Toe-Sucking Fiend," I can't imagine the emotional and physical pain and horror this maniac's victims went through. I can only presume that, when you've got a gun stuck in your face, you're thinking that every passing second could be your last on earth. I can only pretend to know the vulnerability and the shame of being robbed of all the possessions you carry with you everywhere you go-- your ID, your phone, your money, your family pictures that you stuff into your wallet. I can only think that as you're being molested by some crazy bastard in a back alley that you feel you will never, ever be the same person you were before, that you will never be able to know safe, comfortable intimacy with your spouse or your partner ever again.

Now we have to insult and demean these women by issuing "news" articles calling the animal who robbed them, raped them, and threatened their very lives a "toe-sucker?"

He's just another goddamn criminal. Just another piece of shit, thankfully cleaned off our Philadelphia streets.

Newsbites

This is, unfortunately, going to be a very quick and short post, because I am due at my sister's apartment soon. I am to bring coffee and breakfast for both of us. This is the price we uncles pay for wanting to see our cute, new nephews. Remember that.

While I'm not generally in favor of restrictions on the media, I do think it should be illegal for any television news organization to report on a story that features a video clip shorter than three seconds-- five when played in slow-motion.

My wife and I this morning suffered through a four-minute interview piece (and two 10 second teasers) about the baby carriage falling under the train (and miraculously, no one got hurt!) and the clip was played, honest-to-God, approximately twelve to fourteen times. I wish I could say exactly how many times it was aired, but it was a little difficult to keep track. It was played while the mom was talking, because we can't possibly be asked to look at a static image of some non-airbrushed, non-celebrity talking for fifteen seconds without being shown grainy video of her running after her child's carriage twice in seven seconds. And we certainly can't listen to Matt & Meredith banter about it together after the interview's conclusion without seeing the video again.

Twice.

The long and short of it is: news organizations, if you can even call them that, should be banned from reporting these non-stories that would never have made the news in the first place if they weren't caught on video tape to begin with. If they can't use the video clips responsibly (i.e., maybe showing it once, for Christ's sake) then they shouldn't be permitted to report on them at all.

And, for the love of God-- no more cars-driving-into-peoples-houses stories either, please. And no more bungee-cord jumps gone awry, or "routine traffic stops" gone awry, no more wild animals attacking people, no more celebrity nip-slips, no more children falling down wells, no more dogs falling down wells, no more children catching baseballs and throwing them back onto the field, and no more fucking Hfucking1 Nmotherhump1.

Please.

No more.