Paradise Shmaradise

So it's starting to look like Natalee Holloway, the latest pretty blond missing girl over whom the media have been salivating for the last week, has probably met with a pretty sorry end.

There are a number of stories associated with this story. One of them is the media frenzy that erupts every time a young, pretty WHITE American woman is missing. We endured video of Laci Peterson every night for a year, while hundreds of American kids were dying just as horribly in Iraq. We endured more salivating over the possible fate of Jennifer Wilbanks, instead of, oh, say, coverage of the Downing Street memo, while the media hoped against hope for another young female corpse to cluck over. Now we have a barely legal girl, blond, photographed with too much black eyeliner, missing on an island most people regarded as "safe."

This story really didn't achieve critical mass until the arrests earlier this week of two former security guards at a hotel near the one where Holloway was staying -- two men who just happened to be black. Their photos, showing them cuffed and bewildered, were plastered all over the place.

As the week went on, and these men turned out to have pretty good alibis, we started hearing rumblings of three other "persons of interest", who have now been arrested. Said "persons of interest" consist of two brothers of Indian ancestry from Surinam, and the 17-year-old Dutch son of a high-ranking island official. None of the three are black. Some reports as of this writing have one of the three giving the police information that "something bad happened". Interestingly, the two Surinamese brothers are being identified by name. The Dutch teenager from a prominent local family is not.

And the two black men are still being held, for reasons unknown. The three teens, no doubt influenced by news reports about the case, have claimed that they dropped Holloway off at her hotel, where she was approached by a man in a security guard uniform. So based only on the word of three kids in a heap of trouble trying to point fingers elsewhere, are trying to point the fingers elsewhere -- towards a pair of black men they regard as expendable. And so far the police in Aruba are going along with it, keeping these men in custody even though in all likelihood, a kid from a privileged Aruba family is trying to frame them.

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There's a part of me that has to chuckle about all this, because Aruba is one of those places that Americans always regard as "safe" (unlike, say, Jamaica, which is Mr. Brilliant's and my vacation destination of choice for the past 19 years). It's interesting that the Holloway case has received so much attention, where the mysterious case of travel writer Claudia Kirschhoch, who disappeared from the Beaches resort in Negril, Jamaica in 2000, was briefly mentioned in news reports for a short time. The case was the subject of a 20/20 report on ABC television, which featured its share of Scary Looking Black Men. Perhaps the 24-hour news cycle wasn't as ferocious then; after all, CNN was still broadcasting actual news in those days; or perhaps a 29-year-old adult who is now past thirty if she's still alive, doesn't make as good a story as a barely legal blond in today's heavily competitive news-o-tainment environment.

Jamaica has always taken the rap for Caribbean crime, despite the fact that there has over the years been more crime against tourists in, say, St. Thomas than in Jamaica. Jamaica has its history from the 1970's of election-related violence, and has been paying the price ever since. It is a blatantly poor country with a culture of its own, not a theme park for tourists, and perhaps that keeps the Tourist Dumbass factor down.

But there's something about these island "paradises" that makes people lose their common sense, particularly women. People who wouldn't think about going off in a car with a guy they just met in, say, New York, or Madrid, will just go blithely off with someone they don't know if the place has turquoise water in front of it. It's as if they think they've died and gone to heaven, and heaven is a Caribbean beach with hot, spicy food and even hotter, spicy guys. In some ways, so-called "safe" tropical locales such as Aruba are even more risky on that front, because there is less mingling of the local and the tourist population, they have somewhat less entrenched poverty, and are frequented more often by people seeking luxury as opposed to the funkier experience that traveling to Jamaica can be. In the Holloway case, it's beginning to appear that Holloway may have felt safe with three guys she didn't know BECAUSE they were varying degrees of white.

The fact of the matter is that there's NO place in the world where anyone is 100% safe from predators, thieves, rapists, and just plain bad people. I don't care how much a place seems like paradise, you have to keep your wits about you. You're in an unfamiliar place, and a healthy degree of wariness is warranted. This doesn't mean you have to be afraid to leave your hotel, but there's a lot of gray area between cowering in your room and being just plain dumb.

None of this is to say that Holloway, or anyone else who has met with trouble on a tropical vacation "deserves" what they get. I can't imagine being 18, off someplace with people you don't know, meeting who-knows-yet what fate. I also can't imagine sending your kid off for a dream vacation and having something terrible befall her. But I would hope that when something like this happens, it would wake people up from their idiocy of thinking that a tropical paradise is somehow inoculated from Bad People and use their brains when making decisions as to what to do on vacation. Because what happens in paradise, doesn't always stay in paradise -- and if it does, sometimes it's what's left of you.