begins with p

Praxis: the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted or practiced. A new word to learn. I had to ask the native brainiac, then I had to look it up too.



Praxis is also a word used by educators to describe a recurring passage through a cyclical process of experimental learning.

Ahem.


More simply put it means doing something, and then only afterwards, finding out why you did it. Perhaps I should stop everything and rename this blog.

Dr. Mike Tracey's article in the Journal of Media Practice, writing of his experience along with David Mills, the London-based film maker and early years education researcher Tracey co-produced three documentaries about the murder of JonBenet Ramsey--

"From theory to praxis and back:
a commentary on making television and related issues"

Available at Intellect.

15 minutes past

On the heels of Professor Michael Tracey's publication of "From Christmas to August, an essay on murder, media mayhem and the condition of the culture" Rick Weaver explores the impact of the media in the confession and arrest of John Mark Karr back in 2006--

Monday, November 10th, 2008
Why is the Media Trying to Prove Karr’s Innocence

In the case of JonBenet Ramsey accused killer, John Mark Karr, the media has found themselves in the unusual position of actually defending someone charged with a crime.

The media is normally quick to back acquisitions of wrong doing. O. J. Simpson, Robert Blake, Jim and Tammy Bakker, Tom DeLay, and others were quickly vilified by the press as soon as they fell under suspicion. Not so with Karr. Almost immediately following his confession, media giants began to deny that he could actually be the killer. Their behavior shows a shortcoming inherent in political and business leaders.

The Ramseys were convicted in the court of public opinion despite their claims of innocence. Now that someone has actually confessed, particularly somebody that the press had not previously considered as a potential suspect, it seems that the media feels a necessity to overcome their earlier Ramsey conviction by proving Karr could not possibly have been the killer.

All leaders must reach the point that they can confidently be completely open and honest with those whom they want to follow them. If the media were to do so in the Ramsey case, the coverage would change from an emphasis of why he could not be the killer to an open an objective reporting of both sides of his potential guilt or innocence.

Find Rick Weaver's bio and the entire post above is over at Ethics Seek.

twist of fate

As Mike Tracey publishes a few of the emails (made available by the Boulder DA) from Daxis , aka John Mark Karr in his series on media, democracy it's worth spotlighting the predator's seduction in Karr's own words - -that gooming process - - and the innocent responses of a child.

Karr writes to Tracey of his new target Melanie, whose name has been changed to protect her in this story, just weeks before Karr's arrest in Thailand:

"...We continued to eat together and to talk. Finally, I let go of herhand. My hand then dropped under the table. She kept tapping me with her little foot. I suddenly held on to her foot underneath the table. She was wearing sandals and I massaged her little foot with her sandalon. She looked at me intently and with pleasure.

"Oh Melanie, I love you. Your little foot is precious."

I eventually let go of her foot. In a matter of a second or two, she pushed her little foot back into my hand. She had quickly slipped off her little sandal. She wanted the full effect of her little foot in my hand. It was so special that she would toss that shoe aside and seemed to indicate that she was expressing interest in a serious interaction with me. Her naked little foot felt so sexy in my hand.It was almost like feeling her naked body sliding up next to me. Her little foot was divine. I looked down at it as I caressed it. Her little toe nails were painted with glitter polish.

"Oh sweetheart, I love this little foot."

She just looked at me with that same smile. I rubbed her little footall over. I caressed her little toes and massaged the sole of little foot. It was truly intimate and very sexual.

And it all happened right there under that little table, in the middle of the school lunchroom.

At the end of our time together, Melanie looked at me very seriously and said,

"Will you please come back and be with me tomorrow?"

It was the sweetest request and was expressed from her heart. Her voice was soft and so intense. I replied,

"Oh yes, my love. I will be back tomorrow to be with you."

And so, my little Melanie left me with all her wonderful and profuse goodbyes. But tomorrow never came for us. Her mother came to get her early on that day and she was not there for lunch. It would be the last day I would see her for a month. I deeply regret that she willnot be my student in the Fall. She will be a first grader and I teach second grade. But I will see her again. The problem is, her first grade teacher doesn't like me for some reason and will most probably make it hard for me to have any contact with her. In a year's time, if either of us are still at the same school, she will be my student.This is when Melanie and I will become closer. I cannot wait.

Over the briefest period of only two days, I had the loveliest interaction with a little girl named Melanie.

With Melanie and many others in the past, a bond was formed quickly - romantically attached almost instantaneously.”

Is it too presumptive to suggest something similar could have happened to JonBenet that led up to her death? A brief encounter between a charming, loving and trusting child whose responses are misinterpreted as sexually romantic within the twisted mind of one lustful predator, one compulsively and sexually attracted to children?

Some would contend Karr meets the personality and perversions of JonBenet's killer.

And this encounter and others like it can take place in public places, like a school lunchroom. In a twist of fate, we should in some detatched way be thankful to Mr. Karr for writing so clearly and detailed how one so inclined initiates the grooming process with an innocent child, while the pedophiles themselves might be livid for Karr's vast disclosures - and subsequent claim he accidentally (but obviously so brutally) murdered the object of his affection.

A valuable map of the warning signs for those that care about children lies in Tracey's experience. Those concerned might be beholding to Tracey for the unqualified courage to persevere and the fortitude to publish, all degredation he may received considered. Few have had his experience, that opportunity to interact with the non-convicted sexual predator of a very young child, so unguarded and verbose.

The entire email and others from Karr to Tracey are published in full in the chapter
Meanings, pt. 4: an awful, dark year

the wake of destruction

Next in the series From Christmas to August, Mike Tracey writes of Daxis' lusting after yet a another little girl, gossip and the media, and of course the most horrific experience of his life in that year Tracey was exposed up front and personal to one John Mark Karr.

Meanings, pt. 4: an awful, dark year

I don’t want to be misunderstood here. I’m claiming no high moral ground and recognize that I have vices galore and that, for example, some of the women in my life have decent grounds for a war crimes tribunal. I understood that life is a constant struggle between the competing sides of our nature, and that in fact the whole issue of cultural identity, of the dialogue about what is good and bad in culture is an enlarged version of this agonizing struggle about personal identity, and the vexing question of, is this who I am, is this who I should be?

In this instance, from that first stirring of empathy for the Ramseys to the decision to find Karr, for good or ill, I sought to do the right thing, and I am perplexed that there were those who chose not to see it that way.

I could not get rid of one image in particular, that of his tying the ligatures to her wrists and then hanging her from the window. I don’t know how long I sat there, but there came a point when I could hold it inside no longer and, for the first time in almost a decade of thinking about and talking about the appalling things that were done to JonBenet and to her family, I started to sob. Not just tearing up, not just tears running down my cheeks but a flood and a wail of anguish and sorrow. In that sense Karr may not have killed JonBenet, but he sure as hell came close to destroying me.

Those that have been pulled into the grave with Karr, or those that use his brand of medicine, may have a better understanding of the toll and depth of personal sacrifices made in the spirit of doing the right thing. The world, and all our innocent children especially, need more heros.


This chapter and Tracey's entire essay, From Christmas to August is here.

Mike Tracey's From Christmas to August "Meanings" part 3

Meanings, pt. 3: public service

by Michael Tracey


A particularly odious aspect to rumour, gossip and innuendo is that they are rarely if ever presented as such. They can masquerade as “concern” for the victim, a pretentious proffering of “…it pains me to say this but…” The gossip or rumour-monger is not especially concerned with solving a problem, rather drawing a kind of narcissistic sustenance from them, from “knowing” something that others don’t. I was, for example, told by three different people, who were in no way connected, that they knew someone who had been on the chair lift at the Eldora ski area near Boulder with a cop who told them that the Ramseys were about to be arrested, and I was told this in each case with a kind of knowing glee. And gossips thrive on the negative, the controversial and the sensational – qualities which were present in abundance in the Ramsey case, as neither the media nor their public heeded the admonition of Psalm 34: 13-15: “Guard your tongue from evil, your lips from deceitful speech.”

Read the entire series:

Prologue: Christmas to August

Part 1: 'JonBenet'

Part 2: 'vile bigotry and voodoo stupidityJonBenet'

Part. 3: 'time to wake up, Professor Tracey'

Daxis: part 1 son of the devil

Daxis: part 2 Bangkok

Daxis part 3: Snake on a plane

Meanings, pt. 1: Post-OJ America

Meanings, pt. 2: a crisis of prevailing values

The Moronic Inferno

Meanings, pt. 2: a crisis of prevailing values

by Michael Tracey

It isn’t just that there is an appetite for scandal, sex, sleaze, death narratives, it is also that feeding such appetites can be very profitable. The fact is that an essential problem with today’s media, one that has been gestating for many years, even decades, lies with the families and trust-funders that own media chains, and with the media moguls that, like great beasts, roam the landscape of a new grim cultural ecology, gobbling up this and that tasty morsel, a television station here, a newspaper there, forever seeking to sate their own insatiable appetite

The Moronic Inferno

The absence of that fullness and completeness, the startling lack of mature judgment and cultivated taste, so prevalent in much popular culture, is very much suggested in the fact that by some bizarre alchemy of the times JonBenet became a celebrity and remains one - which begs yet again the question of why. How did a dead six year-old child become part of what Sean O’Hagan has called the “moronic inferno that is contemporary celebrity…”? As ever, the answer is both simple and complex: simple because it’s clear that people like and need celebrities; complex because of the complex intertwining of psychology, culture and personal biography that feed that need.

Mike Tracey's From Christmas to August "Meanings"

Meanings, pt. 1: Post-OJ America

...One other possible, even likely, explanation for the popularity of the story of her death and others like it, the energy which feeds the news value, is that they ‘speak’ to a vital aspect of the human condition, an innate, morbid curiosity in death and mayhem, a compulsion of sorts that incites excitement and fear in exploring macabre topics such as death and horrible violence.

The obvious question I’m trying to engage is why do stories such as the death of JonBenet take hold of the collective imagination, and why stories that what one might properly define as more substantive, are so often marginalized?....

Daxis : snake on a plane

Fresh off the press at Scholars and Rogues...

Daxis, pt. 3: snake on a plane

by Michael Tracey

...It was real, as I knew it would be since, to reiterate, everything about Karr that could be checked out, checked out. It was therefore reasonable to assume that the children that he had mentioned in the emails were real as well.

Karr’s classroom was exactly as he had described it, including a large window overlooking a road. The surveillance team had a clear view of him as he taught his eight students, four of whom were girls. On the evening of his first day he wrote me a long email describing how things had gone, and mentioning that

“I have an unusually young girl in my class. She is six but will be seven in September. She’s very affectionate with me. She likes me. I’m not really that attracted to her but I need her badly. ...

Daxis - part 2 Bangkok

From Professor Mike Tracey's From Christmas to August

Daxis Part 2 Bangkok

In the spring of 2006 one email caught my attention. Daxis had been demanding that I provide him with contact details for Patsy, an email address and a phone number. I had of cohushurse refused to do this and, in a highly frustrated tone he wrote that he would be sitting in their living room in Charlevoix before he got the information.

How to interpret this? He claimed that he was out of the country, that there was an arrest warrant for him (which we now also know to be true) and that he could never return. What if all that was nonsense, what if he did intend to go to find Patsy, what might he do? Hindsight, to borrow a cliché, is an exact science but then it was less than clear as to what he was implying or threatening. I chose to err on the side of caution and interpret the message as a threat, that he would indeed turn up in Charlevoix.

Daxis

Daxis Part One: Son of the Devil

From Professor Mike Tracey's essay titled

From Christmas to August - -

The correspondence began, at first on an occasional basis. All the emails are available out there in the vastness of the Internet and so I am not going to dwell on them in any detail, not going to seek to psychoanalyze them any more than I am gong to try and “understand” him. All I will say is that they were the product of a highly intelligent, if strange and controlling mind, and that they were torrid, violent, sinister, an endless word tapestry of unyielding compulsion. Here’s a sampling:

“it was never a kidnapping attempt, Michael. Never. Her death was a ritual and every aspect is harbored by her killer.”

“Patsy, please, I beg thee, listen to a man who has a connection with your daughter as no other can have…”

“On my last visit to her home, I remembered the sweetness of JonBenet’s laughter.”

“She ‘played rough’. She was no ‘sugar and spice’ girl. She did not break easily.”

.....

Up Next: Daxis

On Monday Scholars and Rogues will publish the next installment in Tracey’s series on the Ramsey case, in which he focuses on Daxis, as Karr called himself. In this
sequence, readers will finally see communications from Karr that have never been
made public.

From Christmas to August: A Scholars and Rogues Exclusive

The Preview:

Announcing the soon to be published essay of Professor Mike Tracey, Dr. Slammy begins - - "Few events in recent memory have inflamed the American imagination quite like the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. More to the point, it’s hard to recall a case where passion and profound ignorance of the facts came together in such an explosive mass media cocktail. Ramsey’s death remains unsolved, but how many dollars has it generated for the nation’s “press”?"

Where's Caylee Anthony? Web sleuths on case

Bianca Prieto in the Orlando Sentinel writes - - Thousands of Web sleuths, bloggers and concerned citizens captivated by the missing Orange County child are lighting up the Internet with their thoughts, theories and suggestions on the continuing investigation.

There are a lot of missing kids, but some stories just catch fire," said Michael Tracey, a journalism professor at the University of Colorado. "We live in a world of tabloid news values. This kind of story gets the juices flowing."Tracey knows how a local crime can turn into a national sensation. He was at the center of the Ramsey murder mystery when the girl's supposed killer began communicating with him. The conversation pushed both into the international limelight at warp speed in August 2006, until the man's story turned out to be untrue.