The Weekly Screed, 29 November 2007

Oh, what a tangled Web we weave…
by David Benjamin

29 November, 2007 — Megan Meier died because she wouldn’t talk to her parents.

Yesterday in the newspaper, I came across Megan, whose story reads as though it was scripted by some sick-puppy free-lance tabloid TV producer. It seems that Megan, after a rough patch in 7th grade, was upwardly mobile in her new junior high. As she climbed the social ladder, she kicked aside her previous best friend, the daughter of Lori Drew, whose reported age — 47 — suggests that she’s a grownup. The Meiers and Drews all live on the same block in Dardenne Prairie, Missouri.

Informed of Megan’s snub, Lori Drew, who evidently never read Paul’s advice to the Corinthians to “put aside childish things,” undertook to avenge her daughter. She accessed Megan’s MySpace site and posed as a teenage boy named Josh Evans. Josh was a real charmer, and Megan fell head-over-heels. Then, having sucked Megan into the scam, Lori Drew — as Josh — turned against Megan and her brittle 13-year-old ego. Lori/Josh told Megan she was a worthless skank who was cruel to her friends and unfit for decent society. Josh added, gratutitously, that he hated Megan and never wanted to see her again — although, of course, being virtual — Josh and Megan had never seen each other in the first place!

Megan, rejected by her first and only true love, quietly slipped into her room and hanged herself in the closet. Eventually, Josh’s true identity was discovered,. The police were consulted. Alas, all the king’s lawyers and all the king’s judges had no choice but to determine, rather logically, that a cybernetically enhanced girl being virtually jilted by a deranged housewife posing as a non-existent teenage boy, is not a crime. At worst — although fatal — it’s a prank.

If only Megan had confessed her heartache to her parents, she might have lived to see 14. She might even have teamed up with Mom and Dad to figure out a really snarky plan to get back at Lori Drew. But most teenagers (with the obvious exception of Lori’s bad-seed daughter) do not talk willingly to their parents. They’ll talk to someone else — anyone! — but not Mom and Dad. Granted, American television has invented the fictional archetype of the parent-confiding adolescent, played by — among dozens of others — Elinor Donahue, Lauren Chapin, Billy Gray, Shelley Fabares, Paul Peterson, Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers as the Beaver.

The fictional archetype that far better illuminates the death of Megan Meier, however, is none of those well-scrubbed sitcom WASPs. It’s Holden Caulfield, who — despite being the most loquacious adolescent in literary history — never exchanged a civil word with his parents. In fact, the entire narrative of The Catcher in the Rye is a sort of quixotic quest for someone non-parental to talk to, in which Holden ends up repeatedly, invariably, baring his tortured soul to the wrong person — which is why he’s such an eerily believable teenager.

Holden’s wisest effort at dialog is his visit to “old Spencer,” his favorite teacher. But old Spencer starts speaking in loco parentis and the conversation fizzles. Another option for Holden was a call to his big brother, who had been his lifelong best friend. But the brother was in Hollywood, “prostituting” himself by writing for the movies. For Holden, as we all know, phoniness is the unforgivable sin and Hollywood is the world’s capital of phony.

After old Spencer, Holden’s next best shot at soul-searching involves the hooker sent to his room by Maurice, the sleazy elevator operator. This encounter ends badly, with Maurice punching Holden in the stomach while the girl goes through his wallet.

As depressing as this fictional scene is, it’s far happier than what happened to Megan in real life. Moreover, the hooker —who only took the five dollars that Maurice demanded — was a much finer human being in every respect than Josh Evans. This is largely because the whore, unlike Josh, was an actual person. In her way, the nameless hooker is as phony as everyone else in Holden’s universe. But by meeting her and trying to talk, by looking into her eyes, Holden summons the insight to penetrate her mask and feel for this girl a measure of empathy. In his halting effort to connect with someone — anyone — Holden Caulfield finds a glimmer of genuineness.

In Megan’s adventure through the looking-glass of MySpace, she found nothing beneath the mask but a masked cipher. She could not look into Josh’s eyes because Josh had no eyes to look into. Unlike Holden Caulfield, Megan was not wary of a big city she knew to be dangerous. She was not cautious among a million strangers whom she knew might be false, selfish and predatory. There were no strangers. Megan was alone, cocooned in her own room, where her parents had tucked her away — with her wireless connection — trusting that no harm could come to her there. There could be no Maurices in this child’s life — no hookers, no predators, no sucker punches to the gut.

I imagine that Holden, who would be in his seventies now, would grind his dentures and lament “products” like MySpace as the final triumph of the phony. For all its conveniences, the Internet (otherwise known as Paradise for Pedophiles) is a cystic labyrinth of “information” that can be good, dubious, pernicious or no information at all. It fosters intimacy with “friends” whose identities are willfully and often viciously false, whose voices are disguised, whose eyes are pixillated facsimiles and whose intentions are as ethereal as the tendrils of cyberspace that reach out invisibly for credit card numbers, penile enhancements and little girls’ hearts.

The Web, our children’s brave new playground, is no place for kids.