I totally, absolutely believe that kids should never talk to strangers, but when you're completely lost in the wilderness, seemingly abandoned by your boy scout troop, having not eaten anything or drank anything for four freaking days, I think exceptions should be made. Call me crazy.
Have you heard about this? Brennan Hawking, a boy scout, got lost while hiking with his troupe. Got lost for four days. Didn't eat anything. Didn't drink anything. And they found him, alive and well.
Great story. Marvellous story. Almost makes me want to become a Mormon, given that that's the kid's religion. (And he hails from the impossibly idyllic sounding town of Bountiful, Utah.)
Maybe I've got a weird sense of humor, and maybe I tend to find humor where it's not supposed to be found, but some of the comments from his parents just struck me as, well, funny.
One thing they said was that Brennan was born premature, so he's therefore a bit socially immature.
Wait a second. Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't 'being born premature' mean that you're born at, like, six or seven or eight months, instead of the normal nine? And, if that's the case, given that the kid is now eleven, hasn't he had enough time to get over it? I those first three or four months of life are tough, but get over it. And wait another second -- why should being him being born premature mean that he's socially awkward? I mean, shit -- he had a head start on the world, if anything. The kid had two, three more months than the rest of us to scope out the land, check out the chicks, get that whole 'pissing' and 'shitting' thing down to a science.
(Oh, wait. I just realized: maybe being born premature means that you also look a little young, forever, and, come to think of it, he did look a little small for an eleven year old. So I've just gone and mocked a kid who probably has image problems already. Damn, I can be a cruel and heartless bastard sometime. But it was an accident, I swear!)
The parents also told the kid to never talk to strangers, and to always stay on the trail. When a horse or an SUV came by looking for the kid, he didn't flag them down or beg for a Slurpee or hop on the horse like the Lone Ranger looking for action. Instead, he hid from the homies looking to save his ass, and then resumed rambling down the trail where they were off in the distance.
Wow. I mean, you would think the 'never talk to strangers' rule could be bypassed on this special occasion. But maybe the kid's brain shortcircuited -- 'stay on the trail' would have meant 'talking to strangers', and he wasn't supposed to do that, so he had to choose one rule to violate, I guess.
Also noted by his proud pappy was the fact that perhaps the kid didn't go screaming for help because the strangers wouldn't have had the 'secret password' that the family shared. But you would think, being lost in the desert (or mountains, or wherever), thirsty as hell, hot as hell, the kid would have been tempted to toss aside those rules for the present.
But he didn't. Those rules were so ingrained in his brain that he couldn't do it, even when his life was in danger.
I find that fact interesting, and it dovetails with a comment made by Thomas 'tommy-boy' Friedman in a recent column in The New York Times. He noted that, as children, we're taught not to talk to strangers, but that, as adults, it's absolutely essential that we do so. You have to talk to strangers to understand the world and your own place in it.
Perhaps the source of all of society's ills comes down to that simple maxim shoved into our heads by our well-meaning elders: Don't talk to strangers. That's the first thing we learn. We internalize it, fetishize it, and make it our own unconscious mantra. The result being that, as adults, we're locked into our own little universes, convinced we're right, desperate to be right, and not interested in what other, stranger people have to say.
Well, I'm here to say: Talk to strangers. Repeatedly. Every day. You'll learn something.
Especially if you're lost in the desert. (You might even get some water, too.)
Thursday, June 23, 2005
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
DAMN YANKEES, RALPH NADER, AND HOW I FINALLY FOUND OUT JUST WHAT THE HELL A 'BENJAMIN' IS
I’ve always admired about Americans what others around the world tend to resent – their ambition, moxie, gall. It’s almost a brand of assertiveness that says: This is who I am, and if you don't like it, tough. (In varying degress of intensity.)
Before living abroad, the only time I actually, like, spoke to Americans was when I travelled to Disney World or Myrtle Beach, and the conversations one has at age seven or fifteen are not usually ones conducive to contemplation of nationalistic similarities (or differences).
Now that I've lived abroad for a great while I've picked up the habit of studying different people from different cultures and trying to figure what they often tend to do, and why. I’m always amazed when the Americans I meet just commence to, well, announce their political beliefs, their moral beliefs, their personal beliefs, whatever, right off the bat, without even knowing my nationality, or whether I might be offended. Canadians are more cautious; we feel people out. Americans dive right in. That always jars me, every time. (I remember one American who came to my old university sitting in the teacher's lounge -- or our version of a teacher's lounge -- just ranting and raving about Bush, and what a prick he was, and he didn't know if we were Americans, or Republicans or Democrats, and I suspect he wouldn't have cared one way or the other. He was going to say what he was going to say, period.)
On a (kind of?) related note, the other day I was in an Internet café and an Asian-American girl was trying to break some change.
“What are you trying to break?” I asked.
“A Benjamin,” she said.
“I’m Canadian,” I said. “I don’t know how much that is.”
She probably heard my accent and assumed I was American. That happens all the time here. I’ll ask somebody where they are from and they’ll say ‘Chicago’ or ‘Detroit’ or ‘Los Angeles’ – not ‘the United States’. Most other foreigners tell you the country they’re from; Americans tend to name the city, or the state, assuming either: a) you’re American, or b) you’ll know the city or state, regardless.
This doesn’t bother me the way it bothers other foreigners. I've learned that every culture has its stereotypes, that a lot of the stereotypes are true, and that, most importantly of all, you really gotta cut people some slack, people.
The reality is, especially in Cambodia, Americans have a somewhat poor reputation, one that has more to do with their own individual policies than the policies of their country. Some language schools or universities won’t even hire Americans. Why? Because they do their own thing. They don’t play the game. They won’t adapt. They tend to have a fixed view of things, are stubborn as hell, and cut loose when things don't go their way. (That's what people in managerial positions here have told me, anyway.) When I started teaching at the University of Cambodia at its inception, four of the people in high management positions didn’t last longer than six months at the place; a few didn't even last three. All of them quit, and all were American.
This is not an indictment by me -- I swear. I just find Americans, well, curious; they are somewhat similar to Canadians in tone and temperament but are possessed by a confidence, an assertive poise, that Canadians simply don’t have. I can usually tell within five seconds of talking to a person over here if they’re Canadian or American, and accent has nothing to do with it; attitude does. A boldness to their personalities. The world as a whole has been so bombarded by American media that Americans themselves, as people, as individuals, have become lost in the electronic morass of their cinematic substitutes; trying to figure out who they actually are, divorced from any pre-conceived media conceptions, has been difficult, but I'm betting that 'boldness' would definitely be on my top-three-adjective-list-of-American-character-traits.
I’m thinking about all of this because I’m reading an old hardcover book I picked up in a used bookstore over here called Citizen Nader, written in 1972, chronicling the remarkable rise of that quintessentially American rabble-rouser Ralph Nader. He had barely been on the scene a decade when the book was written, and he was already a legend.
I say ‘quintessentially’ American because, to me, a Canadian, Nader possess what I sense most Americans possess – a form of boldness that us Canucks lack. Nader does his own thing. He doesn’t give a flying fuck what anybody thinks. I absolutely agreed with his presidential ambitions, and I found it disgusting that everybody was telling him to drop out of the race in order to save the nation from Bush and his cronies. If America is what it purports to be, what it presents itself to be, then Nader had every right in the world to run for President; he had an obligation to do so, one could say. And to all those who said that he was ‘stealing’ votes from Gore, I say: Do people not have their own minds and their own intentions? People can vote for whoever the hell they want to vote for, and if they choose Person A over Person B, you can’t fault Person A simply because he’s in the race to begin with. If anything, you should fault Person B for not putting up a more attractive argument.
I’m rambling. I tend to do that when I write or talk about something that not a lot of other people agree with. The truth is, all of the Americans I have met, both in Japan and Cambodia, have been good, decent, likeable people. Jon Stewart was dead wrong on The Daily Show when he recently responded to Russel Crowe’s plea for more Americans to travel, to see the world, by saying: “Dude, if we traveled, people would hate us even more.”
A funny line, sure, but I don’t think it's necessarily the case. I would hate to think that that's the case, anyway. As Crowe also said, the only advertisement Americans have for America are themselves. Period. Americans have gotten a bum rap based on the actions of their warlords back home. Americans as individuals – like the Swedes I’ve met, the Finns I’ve met, the Cameroons I’ve met, the Filipinos I’ve met – have something to offer to the world. (And to me.) Something different and uniquely their own. Something we can, if we choose, even seek to emulate. The more Americans travel, the more other people around the world will see them as people, with the same faults and virtues that we all possess, the better we'll all be.
In the end, I'm not sure if Canada could produce somebody like Ralph Nader. Somebody with that much chutzpah. That much passionate, informed rebelliousness. Living abroad, you will find out how (insert nationality here) you really are; I can see Canada more clearly from a distance, its people and its form, and I wonder about the possibility of a Nader-like Canuck. Are we doomed to forever be the emotional and psychological denizens of our home and native lands? Can we sample and integrate the qualities of other nationalities that we'd like our own to wield?
Not sure.
But living abroad, I've learned, is a hell of a good way to try and find out.
Before living abroad, the only time I actually, like, spoke to Americans was when I travelled to Disney World or Myrtle Beach, and the conversations one has at age seven or fifteen are not usually ones conducive to contemplation of nationalistic similarities (or differences).
Now that I've lived abroad for a great while I've picked up the habit of studying different people from different cultures and trying to figure what they often tend to do, and why. I’m always amazed when the Americans I meet just commence to, well, announce their political beliefs, their moral beliefs, their personal beliefs, whatever, right off the bat, without even knowing my nationality, or whether I might be offended. Canadians are more cautious; we feel people out. Americans dive right in. That always jars me, every time. (I remember one American who came to my old university sitting in the teacher's lounge -- or our version of a teacher's lounge -- just ranting and raving about Bush, and what a prick he was, and he didn't know if we were Americans, or Republicans or Democrats, and I suspect he wouldn't have cared one way or the other. He was going to say what he was going to say, period.)
On a (kind of?) related note, the other day I was in an Internet café and an Asian-American girl was trying to break some change.
“What are you trying to break?” I asked.
“A Benjamin,” she said.
“I’m Canadian,” I said. “I don’t know how much that is.”
She probably heard my accent and assumed I was American. That happens all the time here. I’ll ask somebody where they are from and they’ll say ‘Chicago’ or ‘Detroit’ or ‘Los Angeles’ – not ‘the United States’. Most other foreigners tell you the country they’re from; Americans tend to name the city, or the state, assuming either: a) you’re American, or b) you’ll know the city or state, regardless.
This doesn’t bother me the way it bothers other foreigners. I've learned that every culture has its stereotypes, that a lot of the stereotypes are true, and that, most importantly of all, you really gotta cut people some slack, people.
The reality is, especially in Cambodia, Americans have a somewhat poor reputation, one that has more to do with their own individual policies than the policies of their country. Some language schools or universities won’t even hire Americans. Why? Because they do their own thing. They don’t play the game. They won’t adapt. They tend to have a fixed view of things, are stubborn as hell, and cut loose when things don't go their way. (That's what people in managerial positions here have told me, anyway.) When I started teaching at the University of Cambodia at its inception, four of the people in high management positions didn’t last longer than six months at the place; a few didn't even last three. All of them quit, and all were American.
This is not an indictment by me -- I swear. I just find Americans, well, curious; they are somewhat similar to Canadians in tone and temperament but are possessed by a confidence, an assertive poise, that Canadians simply don’t have. I can usually tell within five seconds of talking to a person over here if they’re Canadian or American, and accent has nothing to do with it; attitude does. A boldness to their personalities. The world as a whole has been so bombarded by American media that Americans themselves, as people, as individuals, have become lost in the electronic morass of their cinematic substitutes; trying to figure out who they actually are, divorced from any pre-conceived media conceptions, has been difficult, but I'm betting that 'boldness' would definitely be on my top-three-adjective-list-of-American-character-traits.
I’m thinking about all of this because I’m reading an old hardcover book I picked up in a used bookstore over here called Citizen Nader, written in 1972, chronicling the remarkable rise of that quintessentially American rabble-rouser Ralph Nader. He had barely been on the scene a decade when the book was written, and he was already a legend.
I say ‘quintessentially’ American because, to me, a Canadian, Nader possess what I sense most Americans possess – a form of boldness that us Canucks lack. Nader does his own thing. He doesn’t give a flying fuck what anybody thinks. I absolutely agreed with his presidential ambitions, and I found it disgusting that everybody was telling him to drop out of the race in order to save the nation from Bush and his cronies. If America is what it purports to be, what it presents itself to be, then Nader had every right in the world to run for President; he had an obligation to do so, one could say. And to all those who said that he was ‘stealing’ votes from Gore, I say: Do people not have their own minds and their own intentions? People can vote for whoever the hell they want to vote for, and if they choose Person A over Person B, you can’t fault Person A simply because he’s in the race to begin with. If anything, you should fault Person B for not putting up a more attractive argument.
I’m rambling. I tend to do that when I write or talk about something that not a lot of other people agree with. The truth is, all of the Americans I have met, both in Japan and Cambodia, have been good, decent, likeable people. Jon Stewart was dead wrong on The Daily Show when he recently responded to Russel Crowe’s plea for more Americans to travel, to see the world, by saying: “Dude, if we traveled, people would hate us even more.”
A funny line, sure, but I don’t think it's necessarily the case. I would hate to think that that's the case, anyway. As Crowe also said, the only advertisement Americans have for America are themselves. Period. Americans have gotten a bum rap based on the actions of their warlords back home. Americans as individuals – like the Swedes I’ve met, the Finns I’ve met, the Cameroons I’ve met, the Filipinos I’ve met – have something to offer to the world. (And to me.) Something different and uniquely their own. Something we can, if we choose, even seek to emulate. The more Americans travel, the more other people around the world will see them as people, with the same faults and virtues that we all possess, the better we'll all be.
In the end, I'm not sure if Canada could produce somebody like Ralph Nader. Somebody with that much chutzpah. That much passionate, informed rebelliousness. Living abroad, you will find out how (insert nationality here) you really are; I can see Canada more clearly from a distance, its people and its form, and I wonder about the possibility of a Nader-like Canuck. Are we doomed to forever be the emotional and psychological denizens of our home and native lands? Can we sample and integrate the qualities of other nationalities that we'd like our own to wield?
Not sure.
But living abroad, I've learned, is a hell of a good way to try and find out.
Monday, June 20, 2005
Virsna Yoeung Oudam (1982-2005)
I first met him when I first moved to Cambodia. He was one of the young Cambodian chaps working for another Canadian compatriot of mine in the Marketing department at the University of Cambodia. He was good natured, friendly, always ready with a laugh and a smile, as Cambodians often are. Sometimes, when I was about to go home from work, he would spot me and say: "Oh, Scott, where are you going? To go somewhere, to do something, with someone?" And then he would laugh. I saw him every day for about a year; sometimes he would have to interrupt one of my lessons to speak to the class about this or that school announcement, or I would see him in the library, or in the halls. He was one of the dozens, hundreds, thousands of people who formed a backdrop to my life.
He died the other day. Killed by a drunk driver. Heading home to a party at his house where everyone was waiting for him. A party he never got the chance to attend.
He was not my best friend, or even a good friend, but he was someone that I knew. Someone I had shared a goodnatured moment or two with quite often over the past year or two.
I saw him for the last time about a month ago. He had moved on to another job, as had I. He gave me his card for his new job, and we discussed the possibility of me working for the same place at some point in the near future. I shook his hand, slapped him on the back, said see ya. Phnom Penh is a small town; I would see him again.
Every so often the ordinariness of life is upended. We are jolted and reminded that our time here is short, our options few, our guarantees nil. A world that takes a young man not yet twenty-four is not a fair one, or a balanced one, but it is a real one, and it is the realness of the real world that I have not yet begun to grasp or comprehend. I hope I never do.
Harlan Ellison once wrote: "Nobody should go down into the darkness with too few words."
I fear that these meager words are far too few to give justice to a life. Hell, I know that they are. But I humbly offer them with the hope that the news of the death of this young Cambodian man in a foreign land you will never visit, just starting out in life, will remind you of all those people in your own life -- at school, at work, at the supermarket --who you talk to on a regular basis, who you pass in the halls with a smile and a nod, who ask after your children, who you know little of other than that they are kind and good and pleasant. I hope that you will consider them. I hope that you will appreciate what they give you, however small it is. It's the small things in life that cushion us and accumulate.
He died the other day. Killed by a drunk driver. Heading home to a party at his house where everyone was waiting for him. A party he never got the chance to attend.
He was not my best friend, or even a good friend, but he was someone that I knew. Someone I had shared a goodnatured moment or two with quite often over the past year or two.
I saw him for the last time about a month ago. He had moved on to another job, as had I. He gave me his card for his new job, and we discussed the possibility of me working for the same place at some point in the near future. I shook his hand, slapped him on the back, said see ya. Phnom Penh is a small town; I would see him again.
Every so often the ordinariness of life is upended. We are jolted and reminded that our time here is short, our options few, our guarantees nil. A world that takes a young man not yet twenty-four is not a fair one, or a balanced one, but it is a real one, and it is the realness of the real world that I have not yet begun to grasp or comprehend. I hope I never do.
Harlan Ellison once wrote: "Nobody should go down into the darkness with too few words."
I fear that these meager words are far too few to give justice to a life. Hell, I know that they are. But I humbly offer them with the hope that the news of the death of this young Cambodian man in a foreign land you will never visit, just starting out in life, will remind you of all those people in your own life -- at school, at work, at the supermarket --who you talk to on a regular basis, who you pass in the halls with a smile and a nod, who ask after your children, who you know little of other than that they are kind and good and pleasant. I hope that you will consider them. I hope that you will appreciate what they give you, however small it is. It's the small things in life that cushion us and accumulate.
Saturday, June 18, 2005
WHY GETTING HOOKED ON SOLVING THE JONBENET RAMSEY MURDER CASE IS REALLY, REALLY NOT A GOOD IDEA SHOULD YOU VALUE SLEEP
I think the mother did it. I honestly do. Or it could have been the brother. I believe that's a possibility, though not as likely. Either way, the father helped cover it up. But that doesn’t explain the motive: why? Why would a family kill its six year old daughter? And the ransom note left on the stairway – there was no fingerprints, no folds, no creases. Pristine. How is that possible? (But how would an intruder know to place it so carefully on the back staircase that Patsy used every morning?) And the unidentified DNA in the child’s panties – whose was it? And that palm print on the cellar door – unknown.
I’m hooked.
See, this is the thing. I could be reasonably happy alone in a room for the rest of my life, provided that I had a supply of good books. If the books happened to be true-crime stuff, I would be in heaven. Usually, this is a genre that gets a bad rap, and deservedly so; exploitive, lurid junk, most of it is. It is a genre, however, that has also given us Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD and Norman Mailer’s THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG – two books that are about as good as books can get.
Mailer’s researcher on THE EXECTUIONER’S SONG, Laurence Schiller, wrote PERFECT MURDER, PERFECT TOWN, which I recently read, a 1999 true-fiction account of the JonBenet Ramsey case that gripped the United States back in 1996 and 1997.
You remember it. Probably vaguely. I was in university at the time, and didn’t pay much attention to all the media shenanigans surrounding it. I knew the outlines of the case, roughly: A wealthy family, a beauty-queen child, the girl killed, the parents under suspicion. Whatever.
Oh, but let me let you in on a secret. Come closer. Don’t be shy. This is no ‘whatever’ story. This is one of the most fascinating, infuriating, maddeningly unsolvable cases I’ve ever encountered. I read the 600 page book in two days flat. Couldn’t get enough. No movie could make this up. No case could be more tragic.
In brief: Jon Benet Ramsey and her family went to a Christmas party on December 25th, 1996. They came home, went to bed. The next morning, the police received a phone call: a kidnapping had taken place. They arrived at the home of wealthy Boulder socialites John and Patsy Ramsey. A ransom note had been found by Patsy Ramsey on the back staircase, asking for $118 000 for the safe return of their daughter. The note stated that the kidnappers would call later that morning. They never did. Sometime in the early afternoon, the father, John, searches the house once again. He finds the body of his dead daughter in a wine cellar in the basement. She is wrapped in one of her favorite blankets. A noose is around her neck. A garrote has been fashioned around her neck.
And that’s just the beginning.
What makes this case so fascinating is the physical evidence, and the human evidence, and all the things that should add up but don’t. The fact that the ransom note was the ‘war and peace’ of ransom notes, as the police put it, when most ransom notes are short and to-the-point. The fact that the amount of money asked for in the ransom note is $118 000, which just happens to be the amount of John Ramsey’s Christmas bonus. The fact that the note was written using a Sharpie pen and a pad of paper that were already in the house. The fact that a Bible was found open in the Ramsey’s bedroom to psalm 118, which talks about giving a sacrifice unto God. The fact that the house was so large and so winding that there was no way anyone unfamiliar with the house could have located the wine cellar where the body was found. The fact that a neighbour heard a scream in the night, but the parents didn’t. The fact that the parents said that their son, Burke, was not awakened until after the police had arrived and the body had been found, and yet, on an aural enhancement of the original 911 call placed by the mother, in the distant background, you can hear the son’s voice asking: “What do I do now?” The father, John: “We’re not talking to you.” The son: “What DID you find?” The fact that, despite the ransom note stating that if anyone was notified about JonBenet’s disappearance their daughter would be killed, the family instantly phoned not only the police but their priest and closest friends and invited them over to the house. The fact that, only thirty-five minutes after finding the body of his dead daughter, John Ramsey phoned his private pilot to try and arrange for his family to fly out of state that evening. The fact that some experts declared the sexual abuse evident from examination of the vagina determined that JonBenet had been the long-term victim of abuse, while others stated it had happened for the first time the night of the killing. The fact that a flashlight was found on the kitchen counter that could have been used to knock her unconscious. The fact that it was proven that Patsy Ramsey purchased material from a hardware store the month before that was the same exact price as the rope and duct tape used in the killing. The fact that the role of duct tape was not found at the house. The fact that fabric from the outfit Patsy Ramsey wore the night of the party was found on the duct tape plastered across the daughter’s mouth. The fact that it was proved the duct tape was placed on the girl’s mouth after she was already dead. The fact that she was found wrapped in her favorite blanket and near her Barbie outfit, indicating that the killer wanted her to feel comforted. The fact that the ransom note uses phrases like “and hence”, the same exact phrase that the Ramsey’s themselves used in a thank-you message to their church the following Christmas. The fact that handwriting experts could not exclude the mother from writing the ransom note. The fact that a linguistic expert, after examining various samples of the mother’s writing, determined that she wrote the ransom note. The fact that two experienced investigators, viewing the same evidence, came to opposite conclusions: one determined an intruder had killed the girl; another determined it was the parents.
And all of that is just the beginning.
I’m losing sleep, I’m telling you.
See, I’m the deluded type of guy that actually thinks: I can figure all this out. I can crack the case, given enough time. In high school, I became obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, reading every book ever written on the subject that I could find, culminating in my Grade 13 History Independent Study that was supposed to be eight pages and ended up being thirty. (I haven’t figured that one out yet, not completely, but I have my theory, more or less, and I’m sticking to it.)
Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor? It’s the rule stating that, all things being equal, the simpler explanation for an unexplained event is usually the correct one.
When a child is murdered in the home, it is usually the parents who do it. That’s a fact. All of the circumstantial evidence in this case, and the parents’ behavior, indicates that one or both of them were in on it. (The evidence for an intruder, I think, is quite scant.)
So, bearing that in mind, my two cents:
As one interesting article I read recently on the Internet postulated: If you stop thinking of it as a ‘murder’, and instead think of it as an ‘accidental death’, then things become clearer.
I think either the mother or the brother accidentally killed JonBenet.
If it was the mother: The little girl had a history of wetting her bed, and still wanted to be wiped by others after using the bathroom. Perhaps the mother got angry, wiping too hard, resulting in the vaginal tears that the autopsy found. They later determined that the type of head injury she had was consistent with a fall on a bathtub or the floor. So the mother accidentally kills the daughter, panics, awakens her husband, and the two decide to make it look like a murder to save their own skin. (This could account for why the husband and wife acted completely distant from each other the morning of the murder, never once seeking to console the other.)
Or, if you believe the other experts who insist that the girl had been sexually abused for quite some time…
If it was the brother: The brother sometimes slept in the bed with JonBenet. The fact that the parents did not tell the police that the brother was awake and aware when they made the initial phone call indicates that they did not want to implicate the brother in any way. The anger in the father’s voice audible in the aural enhancement of the phone call – “we’re not talking to you” – indicates he was pissed at the son. Perhaps the parents found out that night that the brother had been molesting JonBenet. (A photo from the crime scene shows a dictionary open to the ‘I’ section, and the page folded so that it points towards the word ‘incest’.) The angry mother takes JonBenet into the bathroom, accidentally whacks her, kills her, and the scenario plays itself out again.
This case, I’m telling you…
It’s not an open and shut case, by any means, and I’ve left out a bunch of evidence, a ton of evidence. It’s almost ten years later, and nobody’s been charged. If you’re at all intrigued by what I’ve written (and if you’re still awake by this point in the post), I recommend the book PERFECT MURDER, PERFECT TOWN. It draws you into these people’s lives, their community, their loss. It’s a fair and multifaceted and balanced look at a heartbreaking, tragic story, as the saying goes, and I can’t pretend to have it all figured out.
But I’m working on it.
I’m hooked.
See, this is the thing. I could be reasonably happy alone in a room for the rest of my life, provided that I had a supply of good books. If the books happened to be true-crime stuff, I would be in heaven. Usually, this is a genre that gets a bad rap, and deservedly so; exploitive, lurid junk, most of it is. It is a genre, however, that has also given us Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD and Norman Mailer’s THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG – two books that are about as good as books can get.
Mailer’s researcher on THE EXECTUIONER’S SONG, Laurence Schiller, wrote PERFECT MURDER, PERFECT TOWN, which I recently read, a 1999 true-fiction account of the JonBenet Ramsey case that gripped the United States back in 1996 and 1997.
You remember it. Probably vaguely. I was in university at the time, and didn’t pay much attention to all the media shenanigans surrounding it. I knew the outlines of the case, roughly: A wealthy family, a beauty-queen child, the girl killed, the parents under suspicion. Whatever.
Oh, but let me let you in on a secret. Come closer. Don’t be shy. This is no ‘whatever’ story. This is one of the most fascinating, infuriating, maddeningly unsolvable cases I’ve ever encountered. I read the 600 page book in two days flat. Couldn’t get enough. No movie could make this up. No case could be more tragic.
In brief: Jon Benet Ramsey and her family went to a Christmas party on December 25th, 1996. They came home, went to bed. The next morning, the police received a phone call: a kidnapping had taken place. They arrived at the home of wealthy Boulder socialites John and Patsy Ramsey. A ransom note had been found by Patsy Ramsey on the back staircase, asking for $118 000 for the safe return of their daughter. The note stated that the kidnappers would call later that morning. They never did. Sometime in the early afternoon, the father, John, searches the house once again. He finds the body of his dead daughter in a wine cellar in the basement. She is wrapped in one of her favorite blankets. A noose is around her neck. A garrote has been fashioned around her neck.
And that’s just the beginning.
What makes this case so fascinating is the physical evidence, and the human evidence, and all the things that should add up but don’t. The fact that the ransom note was the ‘war and peace’ of ransom notes, as the police put it, when most ransom notes are short and to-the-point. The fact that the amount of money asked for in the ransom note is $118 000, which just happens to be the amount of John Ramsey’s Christmas bonus. The fact that the note was written using a Sharpie pen and a pad of paper that were already in the house. The fact that a Bible was found open in the Ramsey’s bedroom to psalm 118, which talks about giving a sacrifice unto God. The fact that the house was so large and so winding that there was no way anyone unfamiliar with the house could have located the wine cellar where the body was found. The fact that a neighbour heard a scream in the night, but the parents didn’t. The fact that the parents said that their son, Burke, was not awakened until after the police had arrived and the body had been found, and yet, on an aural enhancement of the original 911 call placed by the mother, in the distant background, you can hear the son’s voice asking: “What do I do now?” The father, John: “We’re not talking to you.” The son: “What DID you find?” The fact that, despite the ransom note stating that if anyone was notified about JonBenet’s disappearance their daughter would be killed, the family instantly phoned not only the police but their priest and closest friends and invited them over to the house. The fact that, only thirty-five minutes after finding the body of his dead daughter, John Ramsey phoned his private pilot to try and arrange for his family to fly out of state that evening. The fact that some experts declared the sexual abuse evident from examination of the vagina determined that JonBenet had been the long-term victim of abuse, while others stated it had happened for the first time the night of the killing. The fact that a flashlight was found on the kitchen counter that could have been used to knock her unconscious. The fact that it was proven that Patsy Ramsey purchased material from a hardware store the month before that was the same exact price as the rope and duct tape used in the killing. The fact that the role of duct tape was not found at the house. The fact that fabric from the outfit Patsy Ramsey wore the night of the party was found on the duct tape plastered across the daughter’s mouth. The fact that it was proved the duct tape was placed on the girl’s mouth after she was already dead. The fact that she was found wrapped in her favorite blanket and near her Barbie outfit, indicating that the killer wanted her to feel comforted. The fact that the ransom note uses phrases like “and hence”, the same exact phrase that the Ramsey’s themselves used in a thank-you message to their church the following Christmas. The fact that handwriting experts could not exclude the mother from writing the ransom note. The fact that a linguistic expert, after examining various samples of the mother’s writing, determined that she wrote the ransom note. The fact that two experienced investigators, viewing the same evidence, came to opposite conclusions: one determined an intruder had killed the girl; another determined it was the parents.
And all of that is just the beginning.
I’m losing sleep, I’m telling you.
See, I’m the deluded type of guy that actually thinks: I can figure all this out. I can crack the case, given enough time. In high school, I became obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, reading every book ever written on the subject that I could find, culminating in my Grade 13 History Independent Study that was supposed to be eight pages and ended up being thirty. (I haven’t figured that one out yet, not completely, but I have my theory, more or less, and I’m sticking to it.)
Have you ever heard of Occam’s Razor? It’s the rule stating that, all things being equal, the simpler explanation for an unexplained event is usually the correct one.
When a child is murdered in the home, it is usually the parents who do it. That’s a fact. All of the circumstantial evidence in this case, and the parents’ behavior, indicates that one or both of them were in on it. (The evidence for an intruder, I think, is quite scant.)
So, bearing that in mind, my two cents:
As one interesting article I read recently on the Internet postulated: If you stop thinking of it as a ‘murder’, and instead think of it as an ‘accidental death’, then things become clearer.
I think either the mother or the brother accidentally killed JonBenet.
If it was the mother: The little girl had a history of wetting her bed, and still wanted to be wiped by others after using the bathroom. Perhaps the mother got angry, wiping too hard, resulting in the vaginal tears that the autopsy found. They later determined that the type of head injury she had was consistent with a fall on a bathtub or the floor. So the mother accidentally kills the daughter, panics, awakens her husband, and the two decide to make it look like a murder to save their own skin. (This could account for why the husband and wife acted completely distant from each other the morning of the murder, never once seeking to console the other.)
Or, if you believe the other experts who insist that the girl had been sexually abused for quite some time…
If it was the brother: The brother sometimes slept in the bed with JonBenet. The fact that the parents did not tell the police that the brother was awake and aware when they made the initial phone call indicates that they did not want to implicate the brother in any way. The anger in the father’s voice audible in the aural enhancement of the phone call – “we’re not talking to you” – indicates he was pissed at the son. Perhaps the parents found out that night that the brother had been molesting JonBenet. (A photo from the crime scene shows a dictionary open to the ‘I’ section, and the page folded so that it points towards the word ‘incest’.) The angry mother takes JonBenet into the bathroom, accidentally whacks her, kills her, and the scenario plays itself out again.
This case, I’m telling you…
It’s not an open and shut case, by any means, and I’ve left out a bunch of evidence, a ton of evidence. It’s almost ten years later, and nobody’s been charged. If you’re at all intrigued by what I’ve written (and if you’re still awake by this point in the post), I recommend the book PERFECT MURDER, PERFECT TOWN. It draws you into these people’s lives, their community, their loss. It’s a fair and multifaceted and balanced look at a heartbreaking, tragic story, as the saying goes, and I can’t pretend to have it all figured out.
But I’m working on it.
Friday, June 17, 2005
SLIM JIM, TUNNELLING THROUGH VIETNAM, AND A CANADIAN TODDLER, DEAD IN CAMBODIA
It was Slim Jim who took us to the tunnels. His real name was Thong, Thong the tour guide, but everyone called him Slim Jim, because he ate like a bird, smoked like chimney, and drank like a fish. That’s what he said. He said lots of funny things, strange things, the things that learners of a foreign language love to say. He freely admitted that he learned much of his English from an Aussie slang book somebody gave him. “I’m as busy as a one-legged man in an ass kicking contest!” he said. Or: “I’m sorry to tell you that the air conditioner is no longer active, as it is FUBAR.” Then, later, in an aside to one of the Aussie ladies: “Do you know what FUBAR means? ‘Fucked Up Beyond All Reocognition’!” He laughed, turned around, flashed me a grin. (I knew what it meant because I watched TANGO AND CASH a long time ago.) Earlier we had chatted outside of the Cao Dai temple, whose worshippers combine Daoism, Buddhism and Catholicism into their own religious hybrid, one that features three saints whom they worship: a Vietnamese, a Chinese, and, no shit, Victor ‘Les Miserables’ Hugo. “When I was young, we were so hard done by,” he told me, referring to his life in the South. “Do you know that phrase – ‘hard done by’? I learned it from Elton John! ‘It’s No Sacrifice.’ Good song." Slim Jim began to softly sing the words. In the background, I could hear the worshippers chanting, humming, praying to their Gods. Praying to Victor Hugo.
The Vietcon tunnels at Cu Chi are located near Black Lady mountain, which served as the stopping point for the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam war. The town of
On this day, this rainy day, there were no bombs -- only Canadians and Filipinos and Poles and Brits and Chinese and Aussies.
The tunnels were designed for protection. Americans could bomb and bomb and bomb some more, but the Vietcong could hide, underground, in their own, elaborate network of twists and turns.
We were allowed to crawl through a portion of the tunnels. They had been widened a bit for Westerners; they had been readjusted for the tourist dollar. Before we did this we watched in awe as Slim Jim, who leds into the middle of the forest, introduced one of the workers. The ground looked like ground does: brown and leaf-covered and ordinary. Slim Jim kicked aside some dirt, revealing a secret hole. The worker, clad in a military style uniform, cheerfully lowered himself into a whole that looked, from my vantage point, no bigger than a postage stamp. Moments later, behind my back, there he was! Another hole in the ground, and up he came, smiling, alive. The rain began to fall. The air was hot. I thought: I am standing in a jungle in
Then we were all given the chance to crawl 120 metres through a tunnel dug by the Vietcong before I was born.
I used to run track – the 800 and the 1500 and the 3000 metre races; I’m currently (half-heartedly) training for a marathon. 120 metres? Pleeeease. Not. A. Problem.
Note to self: The next time you are told that you are going to crawl through a hole in the ground in former Vietcong territory, you pray to Buddha, God, Victor Hugo, George Burns, whoever. You pray hard, and you pray long.
Because let me tell you. I don’t give a shit if this tunnel has been widened for western dopes like me – 120 metres, on your hands and knees, in three-quarters darkness, in a space no bigger than a matchbox (it seemed) is enough to make a grown man cry. I didn’t cry, but man. I didn’t have a panic attack, but Jesus.
It was one of those moments in life. Impossible to describe. At various points I have been a reader and a runner, a writer and a teacher, a student and a hockey player. We all live various lives within our real lives; we all have moments in time that resonate.
This was one of those moments. At a certain point – five years from now, ten years from – I will be at a desk. I will be paying a bill. I will be changing lanes. And I will remember that moment – crawling through a VC tunnel in the jungles of
Or to me, anyways.
A short trip, only three days, mostly spent in and around Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), but invigorating nevertheless.
Coming by bus from
A Canadian kid was killed in an international school in Siem Reap the other day, as you may have seen on the news. A hostage situation gone awry. A group of Cambodians taking a group of rich people hostage. They asked for money – a thousand dollars – and other various weapons, and a van, and perhaps something else. I don’t have all the details. I don’t need all the details. A three year old is dead. Everything else is window dressing.
It’s easy -- living here, working here -- to become superior. To feel superior. Even the amount of money that the hostage takers asked for – one thousand dollars – sounds ridiculous to us. One thousand dollars! Reminds me of the first Austin Powers movie, when Dr.Evil, just revived from thirty years of suspended animation, demands ONE…MILLION…DOLLARS for his scheme, not realizing that that isn’t much money.
Bullshit. One million dollars is an insane amount of money. I saw on the net today that a lottery winner in the States, who won over a hundred million dollars, has decided that he wants to be a billionaire, so that he can "take care of his family, give back what I've received." Right. And one hundred fucking million dollars won't allow you to take care of your family, or give you that kind of security. We in the west have lost all perspective. In
Word is that the hostage takers simply wanted some money from some people who had some.
People wonder what leads to crime. To murder. To vengeance. And after living here for two years, I can say, with true conviction, that it does not involve video games, or violent movies, or animated cartoons.
Poverty leads to crime. Living in villages that have no electricity and where the death rate for children is so high that babies die by the week leads to crime.
I’m not justifying what happened. A murdered kid needs no justification. It is what it is, and I hope who did it is punished for years and years and years.
The thing is, you can see it here. You can feel it. When people have nothing, absolutely nothing, they have nothing to lose. You can’t lose what you haven’t got. Criminals here who steal motorbikes are often caught by other moto-drivers. These moto-drivers stomp these criminals to death. Happens all the time. Every week. And yet the thieves take their chances. Why? Because they have nothing to lose.
All this: besides the point. A three year old Canadian kid is dead in
The country deserves better. The people deserve better. That three year old Canadian deserves a life. And I’m left. Left wondering why working in this country has given me the opportunity to become bigger than myself, while others, Cambodian and Canadian, have only become smaller, finite, gone.
COMING SOON...
In case anyone's wondering, I survived my Saigon excursion.
Tomorrow I'll write my thoughts on Vietnam, as well as the recent killing of a Canadian child in an international school in Siem Reap, Cambodia. (Probably the first and only time I will ever see a headline featuring Cambodia on Canada's www.thestar.com.)
Tomorrow I'll write my thoughts on Vietnam, as well as the recent killing of a Canadian child in an international school in Siem Reap, Cambodia. (Probably the first and only time I will ever see a headline featuring Cambodia on Canada's www.thestar.com.)
Sunday, June 12, 2005
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT VIETNAM I LEARNED FROM SYLVESTER STALLONE AND CHUCK NORRIS, or WHY JON STEWART NEEDS A PASSPORT
Watching a little bit of Jon Stewart interviewing Russel Crowe on The Daily Show the other day made me think about my own upcoming jaunt to Vietnam, a country that was once, for me, simply the repository of Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone get-em'-back-alive POW movies and has now become, within the blink of an eye, a place I can actually, physically enter.
Let me explain.
Crowe somehow got Stewart to admit that he (Stewart) didn't have a passport. Which I found surprising. And troubling. And not that it should even matter, because Stewart is, after all, just a comedian, yes, absolutely, but he's also a comedian who's a sharp and witty commentator on foreign events and policies and politics; the fact that he's never been out of the country, and that only 14% of Americans actually have passports, troubles me for some reason.
Maybe it's because I often feel that I didn't know anything about the world, anything, until I exited my world, Canada; I often think that everything you read in a newspaper or a magazine has little, if any, resonance unless you've actually been there, done that.
(That's why the idea of foreign policy 'experts' like Condoleeza Rice has always troubled me, too; a Soviet expert she is, supposedly, and yet, how much time has she actually spent there? She's never lived there; she's never worked there. Never hung out in a corner pub and shot the shit with a bunch of drunken Siberians. The same goes with the people who so nonchalantly rearrange geographical history and priorities; call me crazy, but I don't think Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld had ever spent all that much time in the Middle East before deciding to do a little bit of bombing. I'm not saying this is essential, this first hand knowledge; I am saying that it's illuminating, that's all.)
Not that this is an exlusively American issue; I would bet that most Canadians don't have a passport either, and I think, by and large, on the whole, with the understanding that there are always exceptions, the majority of Canadians haven't travelled out of the country all that much.
Don't get me wrong. Travelling abroad, living abroad, doesn't necessarily make a you a saint, or a prophet, or even a good person. You don't have to leave your homeland to have a satisfactory life, a fulfilling life, a generous and useful life. You can be happy and healthy and wise merely by living down the street from where you grew up. I believe this. I do.
But I also know that I loved, absolutely loved all of those 80's Vietnam flicks that dealt with American POWs being held behind enemy lines: Rambo: First Blood Part II, Uncommon Valor (starring Gene Hackman as a dad who goes to Vietnam to find his captive son), the Missing In Action trilogy featuring Chuck Norris. (And I am a firm believer that Missing in Action II: The Beginning, is a rockin' prequel, and that Braddock: Missing In Action III, has its moments, few and far between as they admittedly are, and I will fight to the death anyone who says otherwise, anyone who is judging Chuck Norris firmly on the legacy of Walker: Texas Ranger, without even considering how he once gave Bruce Lee a good cinematic run for his money. Chuck is good people.) These films, in a sense, got me thinking about Vietnam, about foreign countries, about the globe. Not in any kind of intellectual way or even, I guess you could say, sane way, if a nine year old even can be sane, but they did get me thinking about something beyond Canada. But not enough to make me want to explore; not enough to make me want to escape my own childhood comforts. I would have to wait for that.
And, come to think of it, practically everything I knew about Asia pretty much descended from the above mentioned flicks. (Which, also come to think of it, is pretty freakin' scary.) My image of the Vietnamese was basically: somebody who Stallone killed to bring to the Americans home. Which worked perfectly well for me at nine, but at twenty-nine, well, it leaves something to be desired.
And now I've read a lot of books about Vietnam, and I've lived next door to the country in Cambodia going on two years now, but I've never, you know, been there. Never seen the traffic. Never slept in a bed within its borders.
So really, truthfully, in actuality, I don't know diddly-squat about the place.
When we allow our knowledge of the world and all its shades and textures to come from a little box in the corner of the room, something happens, as Joseph Heller might say. We substitute uninformed opinion for direct observation. We become cocooned in rationalizations that we have not discerned for ourselves. We become lesser people. We shrink rather than expand.
So, Wednesday I'll take the bus to Vietnam for a few days. I'll pass through the border. I'll be nervous and scared and wondering what the hell's going to happen. What I once knew only from Hollywood action movies will now, at last, twenty years later, have the weight and ferocity of life. The boy inside of me will hope that Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris will, against all odds, be around to come bail me out should the shit hit the fan -- but I will also be ready, alert and aware and curious, above all, curious to see what will happen to me if their rescue mission fails and I'm left alone (albeit with a friend or two) to try to comprehend this brave new world on my own.
Let me explain.
Crowe somehow got Stewart to admit that he (Stewart) didn't have a passport. Which I found surprising. And troubling. And not that it should even matter, because Stewart is, after all, just a comedian, yes, absolutely, but he's also a comedian who's a sharp and witty commentator on foreign events and policies and politics; the fact that he's never been out of the country, and that only 14% of Americans actually have passports, troubles me for some reason.
Maybe it's because I often feel that I didn't know anything about the world, anything, until I exited my world, Canada; I often think that everything you read in a newspaper or a magazine has little, if any, resonance unless you've actually been there, done that.
(That's why the idea of foreign policy 'experts' like Condoleeza Rice has always troubled me, too; a Soviet expert she is, supposedly, and yet, how much time has she actually spent there? She's never lived there; she's never worked there. Never hung out in a corner pub and shot the shit with a bunch of drunken Siberians. The same goes with the people who so nonchalantly rearrange geographical history and priorities; call me crazy, but I don't think Bush or Cheney or Rumsfeld had ever spent all that much time in the Middle East before deciding to do a little bit of bombing. I'm not saying this is essential, this first hand knowledge; I am saying that it's illuminating, that's all.)
Not that this is an exlusively American issue; I would bet that most Canadians don't have a passport either, and I think, by and large, on the whole, with the understanding that there are always exceptions, the majority of Canadians haven't travelled out of the country all that much.
Don't get me wrong. Travelling abroad, living abroad, doesn't necessarily make a you a saint, or a prophet, or even a good person. You don't have to leave your homeland to have a satisfactory life, a fulfilling life, a generous and useful life. You can be happy and healthy and wise merely by living down the street from where you grew up. I believe this. I do.
But I also know that I loved, absolutely loved all of those 80's Vietnam flicks that dealt with American POWs being held behind enemy lines: Rambo: First Blood Part II, Uncommon Valor (starring Gene Hackman as a dad who goes to Vietnam to find his captive son), the Missing In Action trilogy featuring Chuck Norris. (And I am a firm believer that Missing in Action II: The Beginning, is a rockin' prequel, and that Braddock: Missing In Action III, has its moments, few and far between as they admittedly are, and I will fight to the death anyone who says otherwise, anyone who is judging Chuck Norris firmly on the legacy of Walker: Texas Ranger, without even considering how he once gave Bruce Lee a good cinematic run for his money. Chuck is good people.) These films, in a sense, got me thinking about Vietnam, about foreign countries, about the globe. Not in any kind of intellectual way or even, I guess you could say, sane way, if a nine year old even can be sane, but they did get me thinking about something beyond Canada. But not enough to make me want to explore; not enough to make me want to escape my own childhood comforts. I would have to wait for that.
And, come to think of it, practically everything I knew about Asia pretty much descended from the above mentioned flicks. (Which, also come to think of it, is pretty freakin' scary.) My image of the Vietnamese was basically: somebody who Stallone killed to bring to the Americans home. Which worked perfectly well for me at nine, but at twenty-nine, well, it leaves something to be desired.
And now I've read a lot of books about Vietnam, and I've lived next door to the country in Cambodia going on two years now, but I've never, you know, been there. Never seen the traffic. Never slept in a bed within its borders.
So really, truthfully, in actuality, I don't know diddly-squat about the place.
When we allow our knowledge of the world and all its shades and textures to come from a little box in the corner of the room, something happens, as Joseph Heller might say. We substitute uninformed opinion for direct observation. We become cocooned in rationalizations that we have not discerned for ourselves. We become lesser people. We shrink rather than expand.
So, Wednesday I'll take the bus to Vietnam for a few days. I'll pass through the border. I'll be nervous and scared and wondering what the hell's going to happen. What I once knew only from Hollywood action movies will now, at last, twenty years later, have the weight and ferocity of life. The boy inside of me will hope that Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris will, against all odds, be around to come bail me out should the shit hit the fan -- but I will also be ready, alert and aware and curious, above all, curious to see what will happen to me if their rescue mission fails and I'm left alone (albeit with a friend or two) to try to comprehend this brave new world on my own.
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