One Fiend From Bangkok

Imagine finding a child sex offender in Thailand. What are the odds, I ask you?

So I've crawled from under my rock, peeked at Nashville Is Talking, and seen the breaking news. A man--identity withheld--has been apprehended in Bangkok for his participation in the death of JonBenet Ramsey. And of course, two tunes repeat themselves. I'll probably never get them out of my head. The first is that annoyingly catchy One Night In Bangkok Murray Head single from the musical "Chess." (I ask you. Bang-cock. Head. How more juvenilely titillating can you get?)

The other is my belief that the Ramseys were more intimately involved in the crime. I have an instinct about these things borne out of a deep-seated cynicism and long years of watching people act like total vermin. So when very wealthy people have their child's body turn up in an unused room in their basement, and the child is beautiful and the mother is sickly and the father is older that right there spells 'inside job' to me. Maybe it's a classist thing. It's not so much that they have lots of money, or that they are beautiful and prosperous. They have unused rooms in their basement. That gets me. You have rooms in your house you never go into, then you have too much house I think. It's a symptom of a lifestyle that screams danger. To have to have a big, fancy home that you don't need--with much of it going unused--says that you are more about how things look than how things matter and that's when crap ends up happening.

So maybe I'm wrong and this guy they're bringing back from the far east in state-issue jewelry is just your average run-of-the-mill shorteyes. He's not in any way connected to the Ramsey family other than through this death. I have to say that I'm betting that isn't the case. But for the sake of argument let's say that it is. How did he pick that child? Again, more concerned with how things look than how things matter, someone decided that it was a good idea to paint up that small girl like one of the bar girls on Gunsmoke and trot her around. Granted, I'm a woman who won't even show her dogs. If I had ponies, I wouldn't show them either. The idea of parading a human being in such a fashion has always struck me as grisly. I'm fine with the beauty pagents for girls of age. If they decide on their own they want to show the goods, hey, it's a free market. But little kids? Let's teach them to read before we teach them the finer points of eyeliner.

But I'm not saying anything new. Frankly, my money is still on some type of familial involvement. But that's just speculation from somebody without a dog in the fight. Or a horse in the race. Or a small child tarted up and paraded in public.