Elizabeth Smart, Chandra Levy, JonBenet Ramsey, Madeleine McCann And Vicky Iseman
IN “McCain Sex Scandal Blonde Missing – Day 12”, the Huffington Post’s Chris Kelly wonders what happened to the “missing blonde woman in John McCain’s lobbying scandal”, Vicky Iseman?
Iseman is not dead. She is not presumed to be dead. There is no police case. Says the trite Kelly: “Until we hear her speak, or hear she’s been identified from dental records, how can we ever have closure?”
(Iseman was the subject of a New York Times story that suggested she and Sen. John McCain had a close relationship that “may have been romantic”.)
And that’s it. Only:
Elizabeth Smart and Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson and JonBenet Ramsey, Madeline McCann and Jessica Lynch, the Runaway Bride and the remains of Anna Nicole Smith. Those stories were made for cable. Sure, it’s fun to watch a casino implode, the first hundred times, but it doesn’t have the same urgent familiarity; the same prurient arc of tension and relief, like a cross between a nipple slip and a mining disaster. There’s something about missing white women that just works for 24-hour news. Like shipwrecks in Shakespeare, or the way you can’t write a truly awful folk song without mentioning smoking.
Says Kelly: “Here at Huffington, the two headlines are OBAMA and SOMEONE’S NOT PAYING ENOUGH ATTENTION TO OBAMA.”
And Ms Iseman. The organ likes Ms Iseman, too. Barack Obama is a black man. You can read about him and listen to him on 24 hour news. Ms Iseman is a white woman. Madeleine McCann is a missing child whose name Kelly misspells.
In the prurient language of the tabloid, amid a vociferous media feeding frenzy, all are made equal. Just forms of entertainment…
Posted: 3rd, March 2008 | In: Madeleine McCann Comments (151) | TrackBack | Permalink
