Next Brittany?
“Before I met [Miley] Cyrus, an editor at a tabloid told me that all the celebrity weeklies have been ratcheting up their focus on her. With Lindsay Lohan rehabbed and Britney Spears under psychiatric care, the tabs are looking to Cyrus to flame out, or at least do something mildly outrageous. In December, some pictures made it onto the Net showing Cyrus and a girlfriend sharing what looks like a Twizzler and almost kissing, prompting a brief, halfhearted spate of ’lezzie’ rumors. …
“But I do ask if the ’people around you’ worry about the Spears-Lohan precedent. ’No, cuz I mean — everyone has their time. And I think most 21- to 25-year-olds go through this kind of thing. It’s just not on a platform.’ …
“The real question is: How do you grow up in public, both as a person and as a commodity? For every Jodie Foster or Brooke Shields there are a dozen Gary Colemans. Michael Jackson’s face speaks volumes. So did Judy Garland’s medicine cabinet.”
— Bruce Handy, writing on “Miley Knows Best,” in the June issue of Vanity Fair
Virtual love
“The one that provides the most oddness for your fake-dating dollar is a site I stumbled upon … called Imaginary Girlfriend. Go ahead, take a look, and try not to chuckle. … Basically, you pay for girls to leave you romantic phone messages and send you love letters, e-Mail, photos and gifts so you can pretend to be in a long-distance relationship. Yes, really. …
“Sure, you get to walk and talk like you’re in a relationship, but it’s not real and you know it. You can re-read those letters all you want, but that won’t make the sentiments in them any more real. And you don’t even get any intimacy out of the deal. …
“This sounds desperate even to me. How arrested does your development really have to be for Imaginary Girlfriend to be acceptable by your standards? Seems to me the only thing a customer can get out of this is the ability to front like he has a girlfriend. …
“On the Imaginary Girlfriend site, there’s a warning: ’Anyone who has difficulty distinguishing reality from fantasy should NOT use this service.’ Funny, because that’s just about the only sort of person I can imagine getting any enjoyment out of it.”
— Paul Clark, writing on “Yes, Of Course They’re Serious,” on May 1 at the blog Silly Hats Only
Never sorry
“No matter how crappy and even frightening things might look today, I cannot imagine how they must have appeared in the years 1968-1975. Several of the Weathermen say in the film [’The Weather Underground’] that the war made them crazy — offloading guilt over what they did to others. …
“Looking back on the tumult of that time, it’s hard to believe that the kind of fanaticism that we now think belongs only to Islamic religious nutters was once alive and well among a fringe of the student left. It is interesting to contemplate [Bill] Ayers’ and [Bernardine] Dohrn’s rehabilitation and acceptance into respectable academic society.
“Were they unrepentant right-wing domestic terrorists who’d been part of a cult that bombed abortion clinics and government buildings, how likely do you think they would be to have good jobs at a prestigious university today? Being on the left never means having to say you’re sorry.”
— Rod Dreher, writing on “Weather Underground and 1968” on May 2 at the Beliefnet blog Crunchy Con
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