What the hell is wrong with this country? Will someone please explain to me why I still have to watch news reports about JonBenet Ramsey?

In case you haven’t heard, the grand jury investigation into the death of the murder of the six-year-old beauty queen (as she’s always referred to) has come to an end, and no one has been indicted for the crime.

Everyone from the editorial board of the National Enquirer to the friggin’ Governor of Colorado is up in arms that a killer is still on the loose.

Of course, suspicions abound. In the nearly three years since the tragedy, the Enquirer and their ilk have implicated everyone from the girl’s parents and brother to the late Dean Martin. I think the latest theory involves the cast of “Caroline in the City” in cahoots with Branson, Mo. mainstay Andy Williams.

I want you all to know that I’m up in arms, too. I’m up in arms about so many things about this trashy story.

First of all, what kind of a sick world do we live in where there are beauty pageants for six-year-olds? For Christ’s sake, can’t we let our children reach at least the ripe old age of eight before we start separating them based solely on appearance.

Research has shown that people react more positively towards attractive children at as young an age as five. What is it about our culture that makes us put such a high premium on physical appearance?

Shot in the dark here; maybe it’s because we have beauty pageants for freaking six-year-olds!

But what pisses me off the most about this whole JonBenet Ramsey thing (other than the fact that she has two capital letters in her first name), is how long it has stayed in the news.

We’re sick people in this country, so I can understand why it made national news in the first place. But there have been few real developments in the case, so what is it about this story that has kept it around more than any other grizzly, unsolved juvenile murder?

I’ll tell you what’s keeping this story afloat: All the closeted and not so closeted pedophiles in this country.

All of this media attention is the mainstream equivalent of a snuff film, and I’m sick of seeing it. Why doesn’t someone have the decency to put this damn thing to rest and try to save this girl some shred of dignity?

Well, that would be the noble thing to do, so odds ain’t too high that our friends at the network news are going to do that. Not when they can keep scoring high ratings with the dirty, old man set.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’m surprised at the mainstream media on this one. I know that they’re more than happy to compromise their journalistic integrity on the whims of their advertisers, but I’m surprised that they’d do all this for sheer smut value.

On the other hand, we expect this kind of thing out of the tabloids. Let’s be honest, when you buy a copy of the Star you expect to have to flip past a few JonBenet stories to get to that story about Bruce and Demi’s steamy weekend rendezvous you were looking for.

But when that trash spills over into the evening news, I for one get the urge to move to Montana and renounce the whole damn system. Just me, an AM radio and my radical leftist political beliefs.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that blatant kiddy porn can garner such mainstream exposure. If you look around, it’s all over the damn place.

These days, MTV features more jailbait than your average frat party. Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears and God knows how many other underage sex symbols populate the pop culture landscape.

Apparently, popular music in the ’90s has gone all the way from alternative to hip-hop to Mousketeers with breast implants. My God, maybe the apocalypse is near.

Of course, Ms. Aguilera may claim that she is not selling her sexuality when she invites the listener to “Rub [her] the right way,” but I still think “Genie in a Bottle” should be called “Underage Prostitute in a Trashy Outfit.”

What I’m getting at is how ludicrous it is for a culture that treats 17-year-old pop singers like porn stars to feign outrage at the killing of JonBenet Ramsey.

Yes, her murder was a tragedy. But isn’t it almost more tragic that nearly three years later we are still fixated on it? The news value of the story died out long ago, and all that remains now is a perverse fascination.

It’s high time that the story was put in the ground, and we stopped trying to disguise child pornography as breaking news or popular music.

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Ben Godar is a senior in sociology from Ames. He don’t want no scrubs. See his play, too.