In the years since I have left the US, I have found myself rather obsessively looking over my shoulder as if watching the Titanic from the vantage point of a nice dry life boat.
"Row, people! Row" I say, lest we should get caught in its' wake. I can still hear them playing Nearer My God to Thee on deck, but it's getting awfully gurgly.
So I watch CNN International fairly regularily because, ya know, it's good to keep connected and also it's good for lazy old me to watch a news broadcast that isn't in Dutch. I don't have to concentrate so much. I can enjoy my morning coffee. And mostly, CNN International is pretty informative. They have nice British and Australian people telling me the weather in centigrade and they have reports about different stuff going on in the world, sometimes puncuated by cool rock and roll licks if it's Anderson Cooper. And they have......Larry King.
Larry King seems like a pretty intelligent guy - that's what threw me at first. I thought ah, this is nice; an American interview show hosted by a kindly old grandfather of a man. He kind of looks like one of those old guys who insists on wearing a suit and tips his hat to you as you pass him on the street. He's got one of those no-nonsense faces and old guy slightly gruff been-there-done-that voice. In short: I trusted him.
A while back I started to notice a creeping proliferation of tabloidy topics on his show; but I'd sort of dismiss them and think well maybe there's a lot I don't understand in American news. Maybe the fact that Scott Peterson murdered his pregnant wife while maintaining an uncanny resemblance to Ben Affleck is important. Who am I to judge? Larry would still cover other stuff like when people would shoot Amish kids or when Hugh Hefners girlfriends had their own TV show. I was OK with that.
Then I started noticing that Anna Nicole Smith was getting an awful lot of airtime. Who was the father of her baby? What happened to her son? It was relentless. And I started wondering how can anyone think Anna Nicole is this important? Her live-in-lover/lawyer Howard K. Stern became a a constant fixture on the other side of Larry's desk with all the articulation of a surfer with a head injury and I learned that gee, maybe it isn't that hard to pass the Bar. Then Nicole figured she wasn't getting enough publicity so in a daring career move she died and now Howard K. Stern has his own little cot in Larry's studio. Dear God. I was thinking where will the madness end and then along came Britney.....
.........to deflect attention. Thank God, I thought, anything so I don't have to look at footage of that sedated tranny anymore. Now don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to speak ill of the dead or anything, but I think we (and this includes Anna) could all agree that her's was a life that had sort of run the gammit of it's potential. Does it make me mean to say that? Am I supposed to imagine that she was going to suddenly sober up, be given some sort of Flowers for Algernon transformation and find a cure for cancer? Or am I just a realist who recognizes that there's a limit to the entertainment value of a mentally challenged silicone enhanced celebrity? In that wisdom and awareness that we all achieve when we leave this mortal coil, I imagine even Anna Nicole is looking back thinking, "Well that was silly." Perhaps she'll try to compensate in her next life by coming back as a Nuclear Physisist. One can only hope.
So America turns it's entertainment starved eyes to Britney and her newly shaved head. I thought this was a good thing, until Larry had a team of psychologists and pundits and even a guy who gave Britney a tatoo on his show to talk about this National Tragedy. Here's an excerpt from the transcripts of that show:
DR. ROBI LUDWIG, PSY.D. PSYCHOTHERAPY:
I think she was making a statement that she doesn't want to be aligned with this Britney image anymore. It did not work for her and she had a little bit of a tantrum. And I think she was saying I'm not doing well. And I don't think it's -- it's reading too much into it. I think we really need to take -- when celebrities act out seriously before something dangerous happens.
You get it people? She was trying to tell us something. Us. You and me. The public. She can't say stuff to us in a normal way like in an email, there's just too many of us. So she has to do it in a cryptic way like by shaving off her golden locks of pretty pretty hair. She knows that we'll know what's up. And God love her, we do. Something dangerous is happening. A girl shaved her hair. Please call for help. Someone.
So now this Kevin Federline person that she used to be married to has got a lawyer to try to get custody of their kids because clearly anyone who would shave her head is not a fit mother. I mean who knows what she'll do next? Stop wearing makeup? Stop hanging out with Paris Hilton? This could get seriously out of control! Get those kids out of there and into the stability of a household headed by a male gold-digger!
Needless to say, this whole fiasco has seriously stolen focus from the antics in the courtroom of those trying to decide where to bury 140 pounds of silicone formerly known as Anna Nicole. The judge (who coincidentally had earlier pitched an idea to a television network to become the next Judge Judy) had to resort to tears, yes folks, tears, just to get the attention that this important case deserves.
Good move, your honor.
So now the collective mind boggles as to what Britney will have to do in retalliation. She might choose to hack off a limb or be caught in public reading a book. Whatever happens, it won't be pretty.
Watch this space.
(Not literally. Go out and live your life.)
The only thing we can really count on is that uncle Larry will be there to tell us all about it. God Bless America.
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