Let's Be Fair, Rona

At least Greta doesn't have to write pizza shack commercials to get on the air. Geesh!

Update: Web logging bud Steve from The Dark Side isn't writing commericals, either. He's web published with a killer article, so to speak.

Comments

[stacy]

thanks Rona!!! i think i'll buy a shirt!!!

[stacy]

thanks Rona!! i think i'll buy a shirt!

[chen]

I emailed the following to Rona, and I controlled myself to try and remain nice:

I have nothing against Aruba or it's people, but your polis department is a different matter. After 30 days of nothingness in the Holloway case, they do appear to be keystone cops(inept if you will). As far as the American media such as Fox and CNN, if they were not down there pounding the pavement on this story, it would be swept under the rug, and thanks to them, that is not going to happen. It is not just going to "go away," as much as Aruba hopes it does. It will only go away when the truth is learned, whatever the truth might be. So I strongly disagree with your slamming of Greta/Fox and CNN, as they are not allowing this tragedy to be swept under the rug and forgotten about, much to the desmay of many on Aruba. Get to the bottom of what happened, and they will leave, but not until then.

Good Day

I wonder if I'll get a response?

[Catherine]

Chen,
I doubt it...but that was good. :)

[Sarah]

That was good Chen.. good post!

[PoorPaulaNNJ]

Wow, Dan. On top of being a fair, balanced, accurate reporter/blogger guy, you consistently come up with the best blogs I've ever seen. Thanks to you, I am hopelessly and happily addicted to blogging. Thanks for being such an all-around wealth of knowledge and interesting stuff. It's very appreciated.
Take care.

[TheTruthTell]

Wow, Can I have some of what Rona's smoking? It must be some good
stuff, because she is no where on this planet and she has obviously
not read any of the facts in this case. To even suggest the three
boys are innocent and had nothing to do with it (Natalee's
boyfriend....give me a break), is just down right stupid and
illogical. And to think that she has the nerve to say the
International media is just trying to create a story.....with as
ridiculous as her points are, I'd have to say she needs to realize she
was looking in the mirror when she saw sensationalism, and not at a
TV with Fox News or CNN. It shocks me to think people can even think
the way she does, but then again....I guess it happens every
day....just look at Joran himself.

[Janet]

I have been reading Rona's column for many years and she has come up with exactly my thoughts on this situation which the American mega news television companies have chosen to make their cash cow.

It is obvious that the boys do not have any information about the activities of the American girl after she left them early Monday morning.

Yoronn had exams at school on Monday which he aced as he is an honors student in the American school on Aruba with a scholarship to Eckerd College in Tampa, Florida where he will play tennis for them.

In the States, the family of the missing child is always investigated as prime suspects...however, this media maven Southern belle mother has deflected all suspicion of family involvement in this away from her family. We do not even know what the step brother was up to during this time.

This family has visited Aruba often...they know their way around and are very savy to getting the press involved, leading them by the nose rings.

I am amazed that someone like Greta van Susteren...and that is a very Dutch name...has been snowed by these people...she is being their personal patsy.

It is all sensationalized beyond proportion while the double murder of American visitors to the Virgin Islands and the missing children in Idaho are stories being ignored.

Seems you have to be a ditsy blonde to attract the news cameras.

FoxNews has lost all credibility, if it ever had any.

That girl was so drunk that she probably went for a swim and drowned, floating off to Colombia before anyone noticed she was had not been accounted for by flight time.

I am positive the boys had very little to do with the situation beyond taxi service back to the hotel strip from Carlos'n Charlies.

If they had actually been involved in some kind of death to the girl, they would have had the good sense to throw the body to the sharks by Boca Mahos or Andicuri or even off the California point where it would never be seen again.

The FBI divers took one good look at the forty miles of rugged coastline with ferocious undercurrents and packed up their gear and went back to the States, unwilling to risk their bodies in that wicked undertow with jagged rocks being battered by the constant Trade Winds driven seas. Not for unidentifiable bones.

This will drag on until the public gets as weary of it as I am and the family finally has to go back to Alabama for economic reasons...but, they seem to have endless funds.

[jasonca]

Janet,

You are quite possible the most ignorant person I have ever come across. There was a movie about people like made a few years back. It was called Clueless! you truly are just that

[Janet]

The American television audience who have made this little case into a news junkie obsession, but have never been out of their American milieu, are the truly clueless ones. And, they are very fortunate to have chosen a tiny island, which understanss Americans, for this smothering obsession because most of the rest of the world truly dislikes Americans and would like nothing more than for all of you to go missing or be lost in the sea.

When there are so many serious and significant problems in the world, you spend your idle time harassing and disrespecting a peaceful, tolerant country like the Netherlands, which has been an American ally since before your country of excesses was more than revolting colonies struggling against British colonial rule.

Those boys will not be extradited to the States, despite treaties and alliances between the two countries, (the Kingdom of the Netherlands of which Aruba is a member, and the United States of America) because the people of the Netherlands do not approve of, or allow, the death penalty. None of their citizens, and Arubans are Dutch citizens, will be exposed to the possibility of the death penalty.

You have no access to the evidence so far held by the Dutch authorities in this case. By Dutch law, the innocence of the defendants is protected until the judge has reviewed the evidence and ordered a trial. No one will be releasing or leaking that information so you do not have any clues to what the evidence is in this case...just wild, speculations.

Aruba is savy to American attitudes and retribution. They would not let these boys loose if they believed they had evidence of a crime from their text message records, their email data, or their website information which, although erased by the computer user, is able to be reconstructed by the computer technicians in the Philips electronics company research labs in Eindhoven, Nederland.

Obviously, that takes time and Aruban authorities, by law, have time...up to four months of time to have the entire case laid out for the judge before they put their materials before the judge and none of that may be leaked, or it is invalidated and not usable in the case.

If the judge, at that date, denies their materials, the government has the legal obligation to appeal to the court in the Netherlands where more judges will look at what the Aruban authorities have in their case. In your country, the OJ case did not have the benefits of that part of Dutch law. The case was put on by the government and denied by the jury...that was the end of the road for American justice. Not so in the Netherlands...the government has the obligation to appeal to higher court if they believe they did not get the right outcome at the level of the first judge and trial.

It has a very long way to go. This is not a one hour CSI case written to entrance Americans for a spot of evening entertainment.

This is real life under a different kind of government and it will move at its natural pace, now much hampered and down paced by the encumbrance of the American television mega news/entertainment companies inculcating themselves into every part of this investigation that they can manage to invade.

You are getting what you have demanded for news/entertainment, until something else draws your appetite for cliff-hanging, edge of your seat participatory television intrusions into your lives.

I wish you were as interested in the murders of Black American in the American Virgin Islands where you understand the law because it is like the law you all seem to have learned from NYPD Blue and CSI. But, the news companies like little blondes better.

Unfortunately for those who spend so much time in front of television sets and absorbing movies, the real world does not have Spielburg as its director or Tom Cruise and Cate Blanchette as the performers. There are not neat packaged answers for sating the demanding public.

Real life requires patience and intelligent objectivity...neither being needed in your reel lives.

[LauraLoo]

Janet,

Anyone w/a 1/2 ounce of brain knows that Aruban polic would have a heck of lot MORE evidence to lay out b 4 a judge had they collected all the evidence the first days after the crime. It doesn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out. Janet, tell us when they finally dragged the vehicles away? The simple task of gathering fresh evidence? The reason this is such a high profile case is that even a rookie Sherlock Holmes can see what Aruban authorities r doing! No wonder no one wants to waste thier typing skills on you!

[Janet]

The psychology of the current frenzy over another "Damsel in Distress Syndrome" from another of my childhood friends who is baffled by the interest in this isolated case on a distant speck of the tropics:

(White) Women We Love
By Eugene Robinson

Friday, June 10, 2005; Page A23
Someday historians will look back at America in the decade bracketing the turn of the 21st century and identify the era's major themes: Religious fundamentalism. Terrorism. War in Iraq. Economic dislocation. Bioengineering. Information technology. Nuclear proliferation. Globalization. The rise of superpower China.
And, of course, Damsels in Distress.


This is undated family photo released by Marcia Twitty shows Natalee Holloway of Mountain Brook, Ala. Holloway has been missing since May 30, when she vanished in Aruba while on a trip with classmates celebrating their high school graduation. The search for Holloway continued on Tuesday, June 7, 2005. (AP Photo/Family photo) (Natalee Holloway Family Photo Via Associated Press)
Every few weeks, this stressed-out nation with more problems to worry about than hours in the day finds time to become obsessed with the saga -- it's always a "saga," never just a story -- of a damsel in distress. Natalee Holloway, the student who disappeared while on a class trip to the Caribbean island of Aruba, is the latest in what seems an endless series.
Holloway assumed the mantle from her predecessor, the Runaway Bride, who turned out not to have been in distress at all -- not physical distress, at least, though it's obvious that the prospect of her impending 600-guest wedding caused Jennifer Wilbanks an understandable measure of mental trauma.
Before the Runaway Bride, there were too many damsels to provide a full list, but surely you remember the damsel elite: Laci Peterson. Elizabeth Smart. Lori Hacking. Chandra Levy. JonBenet Ramsey. We even found, or created, a damsel amid the chaos of war in Iraq: Jessica Lynch.
The specifics of the story line vary from damsel to damsel. In some cases, the saga begins with the discovery of a corpse. In other cases, the damsel simply vanishes into thin air. Often, there is a suspect from the beginning -- an intruder, a husband, a father, a congressman, a stranger glimpsed lurking nearby.
Sometimes the tale ends well, or well enough, as in the cases of Smart and Lynch. Let's hope it ends well for Holloway. But more often, it ends badly. Once in a great while, a case like Runaway Bride comes along to provide comic relief.
But of course the damsels have much in common besides being female. You probably have some idea of where I'm headed here.
A damsel must be white. This requirement is nonnegotiable. It helps if her frame is of dimensions that breathless cable television reporters can credibly describe as "petite," and it also helps if she's the kind of woman who wouldn't really mind being called "petite," a woman with a good deal of princess in her personality. She must be attractive -- also nonnegotiable. Her economic status should be middle class or higher, but an exception can be made in the case of wartime (see: Lynch).
Put all this together, and you get 24-7 coverage. The disappearance of a man, or of a woman of color, can generate a brief flurry, but never the full damsel treatment. Since the Holloway story broke we've had more news reports from Aruba this past week, I'd wager, than in the preceding 10 years.
I have no idea whether the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida hung on every twist and turn of the Chandra Levy case; somehow, I doubt he did. But I suspect the apostle of "deconstructionism" would have analyzed the damsel-in-distress phenomenon by explaining that our society is imposing its own subconsciously chosen narrative on all these cases.
It's the meta-narrative of something seen as precious and delicate being snatched away, defiled, destroyed by evil forces that lurk in the shadows, just outside the bedroom window. It's whiteness under siege. It's innocence and optimism crushed by cruel reality. It's a flower smashed by a rock.
Or maybe (since Derrida believed in multiple readings of a single text) the damsel thing is just a guaranteed cure for a slow news day. The cable news channels, after all, have lots of airtime to fill.
This is not to mock any one of these cases (except Runaway Bride) or to diminish the genuine tragedy experienced by family and friends. I can imagine the helplessness I'd feel if a child of mine disappeared from a remote beach in the Caribbean. But I can also be fairly confident that neither of my sons would provoke so many headlines.
Whatever our ultimate reason for singling out these few unfortunate victims, among the thousands of Americans who are murdered or who vanish each year, the pattern of choosing only young, white, middle-class women for the full damsel treatment says a lot about a nation that likes to believe it has consigned race and class to irrelevance.
What it says is that we haven't. What it says is that those stubborn issues are still very much alive and that they remain at the heart of the nation's deepest fears.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com