Lee Siegel, berating James Kincaid, writes:
Like a lot of academics who had their heyday in the theory-ridden eighties, Kincaid thinks that the more media attention something gets, the less reality it has. He apparently has never tried to imagine kind of society would let the murder of a little girl pass without massive amounts of attention and anxiety.
Does Siegel mean the murder of a white, upper class, beautiful little white girl? Because we live in a society where all manner of children are slaughtered for all manner of reasons and nobody ever bats an eye. In DC, every once in awhile you'll read about a toddler struck by a stray -- or non-stray -- bullet, but you're very unlikely to read about him again. We're well able to let the murders of small children pass without massive amounts of attention -- it's only when they look like our children or, better yet, idealized versions of our children, that CNN sends in the camera teams.
