By Myles Ludwig
Kids allegedly say the darndest things. Apparently, about 20,000 of them, in the case of the loquacious Kaitlyn Hunt.
I remember chipmunk-cheeked Art Linkletter and later, the condescending king of Jell-O-land Bill Cosby, manipulating a batch of freckled-faced, Rockwellian 3-to-8- year-olds into a cul de sac of “cuteness” (read humiliation) with their own words, though the kids were likely much too young to appreciate their existential predicament.
Or to understand that their pithy non sequiturs were destined to part of their eternal, digitally bronzed baby shoes. Maybe not their parents, either. They didn’t seem to mind dropping their children into media quicksand, unlike Hunt’s parents, who have seemed to relish her slow self-made sink.
Somebody should have showed the family a kinescope of those vintage TV shows. Especially to Ms. Hunt herself, who allegedly couldn’t stop herself from texting the darndest things (or trysting), despite a court order to keep her thumbs to herself.
The Kaitlyn case is an interesting example of how a story started life as one thing but became another one entirely different. It’s a story that wound its way through the media and, like a distorted double helix, looks like it’s folding in on itself, barely balanced on the rim of a different kind of genus.
It began as a sexual preference cause célèbre. It masqueraded as a matter of sexual rights. Prosecutorial threats of a 15-year sentence stirred the slow-cooked, ready-to-eat stew of the politically correct. Oh, the mighty forces of Facebook were marshaled. The battle-hardened troops of Twitter took to the field, armed to the hashtag. It was played like a “poor kid having a little fun” story in the mainstream media.
Like everything else in our eat-it-up culture of consumption, it was cynically merchandised, complete with FreeKate.com T-shirts and Lance Armstrong-esque bracelets. It was beginning to feel like we might expect to see action figures of the teens or, maybe, a Kaitlyn bobblehead on sale in Wal-Mart, Target and CVS for Christmas. Could Kaitlyn Hunt become the next Cabbage Patch moll?
But it’s looking more and more like these were ploys to plea for sympathy, smoky screens to cover-up a simple, but unpleasant truth. Sex –of whatever sort — with a minor is a crime in Florida and most of the rest of the country. Not in every culture, of course, but currently in America.
Nevertheless, and likely less out of compassion than a self-protecting desire to avoid national derision, a plea was offered. Simple terms: Don’t ask, don’t tell. No jail, community service, curfew. Keep quiet and out of reach.
But when Ms. Hunts’ apparent unflagging sense of entitlement and her unstoppable compulsion to contact her amour fou was outed, the deal was whisked off the table quicker than a magician could snatch a linen tablecloth out from under a swanky dinner party setting with a silver candelabra centerpiece.
She just had to stick a thumb in the court’s eye. She just had to flaunt her disregard for the law. Kids.
Catch me if you can.
The big-eyed teenage girl I watched on a live stream from the courtroom showed a very different kind of picture than the one who posed on a bed (PR blunder!), all a-girly with a potentially bright future as a nursing student. Really? The court outfit of orange-is-the-new-black jumpsuit, yellow manacles and jail sandals didn’t complement her painted toenails and decorated fingernails, all a-sniffle.
Crocodile tears? Sorry for self, not for action? The Weiner-Spitzer gambit.
Do not pass go. Go directly to jail.
Reckless.
I’m not throwing stones. We’ve all acted recklessly at times, sadly. All idols have clay feet, as my father used to say.
But somebody ought to talk straight to this kid and explain how she’s compounded her crimes and escalated her own problems definitively. Maybe even egged on by her parents, who are apparently oblivious to the consequences. Why?
This is a head-shaker, for sure.
Psychologists might call this a case of compulsion in extremis. Philosophers might call it a moral transgression. That is to say, if we can’t keep our cute little libidos in check — or sublimate them productively, creatively — how can what we like to call Western civilization continue on its merry, often brutal way?
Any way you slice it, this kid is in trouble for what she said. And the trouble is darned, but not cute.
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.