Gee, Britney’s Not So Funny Anymore…

Hey, remember back when Britney Spears’ biggest problem was that she was too stoned to remember she wasn’t wearing underwear?

Ah, the good old days.

I remember the first time I heard about Britney Spears like it was only a few years ago.

I saw a clip of her first video.

Much in the way of a sake swilling Japanese salariman, I was both taken aback and impressed with the rampantly cynical filthiness on display in hardselling the music of a barely girl by sliding her into a Catholic schoolgirl skirt and having her act out the female half of seventeen different sexual positions for the viewing pleasure of MTV’s hormone crazed demographic and the grim faced middle-aged men tuning in when nobody might catch them.

It was an inspiring, but not particularly original mass media moment. I was neither surprised, nor offended.

Has there ever been a time when freshly pubescent females untouched by the ravages of cellulite and gravity weren’t used in such a way? I think not, and I have seen the paintings in the Louvre to prove it.

It is, of course, completely unsurprising that a number of our modern day sex fantasy celebrities were shipped into dirty circulation fresh from the Mickey Mouse Club. Unsurprising, but still icky. But I am not here to point the finger at Disney. You can do that for yourself. I can’t wait to read what you come up with.

I am here to state what has become obvious to even the most casual media observer:

Britney Spears is not funny.

We’ve all grown accustomed to famous crackheads, drunks, sniffers, shooters, tweakers, boozehounds and pill-poppers. That’s nothing new, and far be it from me to suggest that late night talk show hosts should refrain from taking cheap shots at the pop culture millionaires rolling in and out of high-end rehab centers all over the world.

Kicking heroin with Bhuddist vomit therapy in Thailand is funny stuff.

But Britney isn’t taking that easy road.

Not anymore.

She’s in the big leagues now.

It would be fair to say that the Britney story started out with a fairly common psychological stew of mismanagement, manipulation and fiendish misappropriation at every level, involving what would appear to be pretty much every adult she’s had the misfortune to work with since she overfilled her training bra with high end silicone.

That part of her story is no different from any one of a thousand similar child star stories. Michael Jackson wasn’t built overnight. It takes years to make a monster.

What is different with Britney’s story is how it brings some new aspects to this milieu.

These are what I would like to examine, if I may.

1. Britney is a feral child.

Clearly, this woefully undereducated girl has grown up in a total moral and intellectual vacuum, without logical checks and balances, without the mental stimulation that even a homeless kid would find scraping the streets for spare change, without a successful model for adulthood for which to strive. She is the 21^st century new media equivalent of a feral child, only instead of being raised by wolves in the Indian jungle, she was raised by Armani wolves in the media entertainment corporate jungle. And by raised, I don’t mean to indicate anything to do with actually raising a child.

To all outward appearances, she is in many ways similar to those hideously abused children who locked away in cages for years, are never taught to speak, never touched, never given unconditional love and a sense of her own intrinsic, independent value.

She is like a typical, mentally healthy human being in that she can (nearly) communicate with others through written and spoken language, but through even a small amount of time spent listening to and reading what she has to say, it becomes apparent that there is something profoundly broken in there.

Britney has no ability to forecast or discern possible outcomes of her actions. She would appear to be incapable of making rational judgments from an informed perspective. She seems to lack reflective capability, existing in a permanent now, without any frame of reference to the past and without any understanding as how her actions have causal link to the future.

What happens when you have sex without birth control?

What happens when you take whatever pill you’re handed without question? Or handfuls of pills? Or glasses or bottles or syringes or powders?

What happens when you thoughtlessly spend all the money you get on things you don’t need and couldn’t possibly use?

What happens when you aren’t sixteen anymore and grim physical reality shows up with gravity and cellulite and stretchmarks and everything else?

What happens when you don’t know how to actually do anything?

And that brings me to –

2. Britney is Us and We are Britney.

What happened to Britney Spears is a microcosm for what is happening to young people all over North America. She is the canary in the coal mine. What’s happening to her is what is happening all over.

I knew that the U.S. economy was doomed for the dumper as soon as she started her descent into insanity.

When I read that she’d shaved her head I knew that I should get out of the stock market and throw into bonds.

When I saw her drooling cappuccino/vodka spew all over herself in the front seat of a plush European sedan, I said to myself, lock in that mortgage, because the party is finally over.

It would be nice to simply blame her parents, but it’s not all their fault. We made Britney Spears what she is, we built her up and invested in her all of our hopes and dreams for the future. She is what we wanted to have, what we wanted to be and now we are seeing her, and thus ourselves for what we really are.

And it’s anything but funny.

Prince Charles’ Hypnotic Technique For Picking Up

I recently discovered an amazing photo that shows, for the first time, Prince Charles using the same hypnosis techniques for picking up that he must have used on Diana Spencer.

Look out, Scarlett, you’re next…

(AFP Photo from news.com.au)