Showing posts with label Britney. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Britney. Show all posts

Sunday, February 10, 2008

It is better that Britney should die. . . .


It was the high priest Caiaphas who decided "it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish."

He was worried this Jesus character was becoming too popular, that the Jews would come to worship Him as a god, and that would bring the terrible might of the Roman Empire down on all their heads. So the math was easy -- Jesus had to go. Better Him than many thousands.

Caiaphas obviously was a man after 21st-century America's heart. Trouble is, the Romans wiped out Israel anyway . . . albeit a few decades down the road. And not because of the Jesus Thing.

I WONDER how much -- in our own postmodern American Way -- we have determined that it is better that now-famous-for-being-famously-troubled Britney Spears should die so that the whole nation may not . . . what? Call it "Psychotherapy Is Not Enough."

The thought occurred to me tonight as I was browsing yet another volume in the library of Britney Goes Mental coverage --
this one from Rolling Stone -- consuming the worldwide press nowadays. It's really beyond debate that this poor child is likely to die, probably fairly soon, due to whatever usually befalls famous, psychologically troubled addicts living life on the edge in the company of the People Who Prey Upon Them.

And the best that we, as a society, can muster is to stand around and gawk at the spectacle of it all. It's as if we have stumbled upon a bad car crash, there's horribly injured young people trapped inside the ball of twisted metal and broken glass, and the whole mess is starting to catch fire.

No cops yet. No fire truck or paramedics, either.

So what do we do? Pose next to the broken bodies of the dying victims while the significant other takes pictures with the camera phone . . . of course.

And Junior -- a pragmatic lad, he -- grabs a bag of marshmallows, snaps off the antenna from the burning, wrecked car, and starts making delicious, roasted treats for the gathering crowd. At a quarter a marshmallow.

LIKE I SAID, that's what occurred to me as I read
this excerpt of an upcoming Rolling Stone article:
In person, Britney is shockingly beautiful — clear skin, ruby lips, a perfectly proportioned twenty-six-year-old porcelain doll with a nasty weave. She cuts through the crowd swiftly, the way she used to when 20,000 adoring fans mobbed her outside a concert, with her paparazzi boyfriend, Adnan Ghalib, trailing behind.

Only a few kids are in the store, a young girl with her brother and two blondes checking out fake-gold charm bracelets. Britney rifles the racks as the Cure's "Pictures of You" blasts into the airless pink boutique, grabbing a pink lace dress, a few tight black numbers and a frilly red crop top, the kind of shirt that Britney used to wear all the time at seventeen but isn't really appropriate for anyone over that age. Then she ducks into the dressing room with Ghalib. He emerges with her black Am Ex.

The card won't go through, but they keep trying it.

"Please," begs Ghalib, "get this done quickly."

One of the girls runs to Britney's dressing room, explaining the situation through a pink gauze curtain.

A wail emerges from the cubby — guttural, vile, the kind of base animalistic shriek only heard at a family member's deathbed. "F*** these bitches," screams Britney, each word ringing out between sobs. "These idiots can't do anything right!"

Ghalib dashes over to console her, but she's already spitting, growling, throwing a big bottle of soda on the floor so that it begins to spill underneath the curtain, and then she's got a box of tissues and is throwing them on top of the wet floor along with piles of discarded merchandise. A new card finally goes through, but by then Britney is out the door, leaving her shirt on the ground and replacing it with the red top. "F*** you, f*** people, f*** , f*** , f*** ," she keeps screaming, her face splotchy and red as she crosses the interminable mall floor, the crowd behind her growing larger and larger. "Leave us alone!" yells Ghalib.

The siblings run after Britney to get a video to put up on YouTube, and some of the shopgirls run after her to hand off the merchandise she left behind, and there's an entire bridal party wearing yellow T-shirts who have pulled out camera phones too. A crush of managers in black shirts and gold name tags try to keep the peace, but the crowd running after Britney gets larger, and now the shopgirls have ­started to catch up to her, one of them slipping spectacularly in her platform shoes, grazing her elbow. She pulls herself up, mustering the strength to tap Britney's shoulder. "Um, I'm from the South too," she mumbles, "and I was wondering if I could get a picture with you for my little sister."

Britney turns to Ghalib and grabs his arm. "I don't want her talking to me!" she screams. She whirls around and stares the girl deep in the eyes, her lips almost vibrating with anger. "I don't know who you think I am, bitch," she snarls, "but I'm not that person."
BRIT MUST DIE. Because we demand it.

We won't admit that, any of us, but it doesn't make it any less so. If the bitch lives, the narrative is dramatically compromised. And even reality TV needs a compelling dramatic narrative . . . and redemption is so f-ing Bing Crosby playing yet another Catholic priest in an old black-and-white movie, you know?

Nope. The ho gotta go.

It is better for us that one Britney should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish. See, if this Greek tragedy in a modern Rome doesn't conclude with a media riot in a cemetery in Kentwood, La., we shall not be spared.

There will be a defective morality play to deal with. Then there will be ourselves to deal with.

If Brit doesn't die, then we're not any better than her, ultimately. Losers die while people laugh. We're not dead, and we're unaware of the laughter, so we're not losers. Or at least not as bad a loser as Britney Spears, who could not overcome being hillbilly trailer trash, alas.

Which is why she couldn't deal with all the drink, drugs, divorce, promiscuity, selfishness and extreme materialism. Or with the mental illness.

Unlike ourselves, who have a pretty good handle on things. That is why we can fake a long face for the benefit of Brit, even though
the economy depends on her remaining miserable . . . at a bare minimum.

YEP, WE'RE DOING FINE right here in America, the New Jerusalem. And we think we can well afford our crocodile tears, as did a people long ago and far away.

Yet, there is that Cassandra's cry, drifting across millennia, settling -- unsettling, actually -- somewhere on the fringe of our consciousness as we ever more desperately try to overwhelm it with cacophony:

"Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep instead for yourselves and for your children, for indeed, the days are coming when people will say, 'Blessed are the barren, the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed.' "

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Mother of the Year

Pity poor Lynne Spears. She might have to work for a living now that one showbiz kid is a chemical-dependency spokesmodel -- so whacked out that she neither can hang on to her kids nor her drawers -- and the other gravy train is with child.

At 16.


And on top of all that, the hootchie-mama mama has seen the Thomas Nelson publishing house, which used to be known for Bibles, shelve her guide to good parenting,
Pop Culture Mum.

Yes, all
this is true. Even Brit Brit doesn't have big enough of a stash for me to go on that wild a flight of fancy. Ditto for the news sources cranking out the stories on what happens when you move a south Louisiana trailer park to Malibu.

Actually, it's pretty much the same thing that happens when the trailer park stays down on the bayou. Only with more paparazzi and fewer pickup trucks.

THIS SOUNDS MEAN, I know. Thing is, though, having grown up in Britneyland, I've seen this tired act for as long as I can remember from people different only in that nobody wants to buy their CDs or watch them on TV --
unless, of course, they turn up on an episode of COPS.

And just to what,
pray tell, do you liken such as this:
Jamie Lynn is the star of Nickelodeon’s hugely successful “Zoey 101,” and her future there — and income — are up in the air. Nickelodeon issued a statement to TMZ on Tuesday saying, “We respect Jamie Lynn’s decision to take responsibility in this sensitive and personal situation. We know this is a very difficult time for her and her family, and our primary concern right now is for Jamie Lynn’s well being.”

As for whether she’ll return to the show, Jamie Lynn told OK!, “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“I don’t know how she can go back,” said the family friend. “And, what’s worse for the Spears is Britney doesn’t want to be a part of that Spears gravy train any more. That’s part of why Britney is freaking right now. With Jamie Lynn to focus on, she [Britney] was no longer the family’s only focus, and their only hope for income."

At the end of the day it also doesn’t help the Spears image that the father of the baby is Casey Aldridge, 19, who met Jamie Lynn in church and started dating her when she was only 13½. “Lots of people have been worried that this relationship was moving too fast. I guess there was a good reason to worry,” said a friend of the Spears family.
LET'S SEE. Not only did Lynne Spears let her 13-year-old daughter date -- a recipe for trouble right there, and I don't give a damn that they met in church. No, she let her barely-teen-age daughter go out with a 16-year-old.

Who had Jamie Lynn good and knocked up less than three years later.

If the pattern holds once Jamie Lynn moves back to Louisiana for a "normal life'' -- read: "I want me a pickup and a pack of Marlboro Reds" -- the girl could be one hot grandmama at age 32.


She could fellowship after church with all the other grammaws and complain about "the niggers down in New Orleans." Irony often is lost on the folks back home.

YES, AS SOME PEOPLE much holier than I am have said, it's good Jamie Lynn isn't going to kill her baby. Then again, there are lots of ways to kill a kid -- only a few of which actually involve physical death.

Maybe that's one way Thomas Nelson can retool that book by their Mother of the Year. Package it with a carton of hot-pink WWJD condoms.

Trust me, it'll be big.