Here's another little tabloid/cable news bombshell. Now she's banging (assumedly) the Bahamian immigration minister. He let inside the country and she let him inside her ...
... God this is ludicrous. But there were two distinctive local takes on Anna Nicole over the weekend worth mentioning. The first came from Palm Beach Post entertainment reporter Leslie Gray Streeter, who starts with the now-familiar "train wreck" theme.
"We all know that term, used to describe a person whose sheer weirdness should compel us to look away as we drive by, yet we just can't help slowing down for a look. We're bursting to capacity with celebrity train wrecks like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears and the Simpson sisters — we just shake our heads and cluck our tongues."
Cluck our tongues? Not in my car
you don't. Nobody over the age of five clucks their fucking tongue in my ride. Anyway, Streeter then falls into a bit about how we all wanted to "save" Anna Nicole and then it devolves from there into a schlock-fest about how she's the "embodiment of fragility" and how all she wanted was to live a fairy tale life. Poor Anna, all she wanted was to be filthy rich queen in her own kingdom. Yeah, and so does every crook in the world.
Anna Nicole wasn't "nice." She could act that way, maybe, while she was swinging on the better end of her mood pendulum. But she was fundamentally gluttonous, shallow, mean, greedy ... oh hell, look up the seven deadly sins and then add a dozen more, some of which might not even have names yet. To try to mythologize her as an innocent following our "collective dream" isn't just wrong-headed and juvenile, it's reprehensible.
Don't worry, though, Leonard Pitts Jr. came to the rescue this morning. He largely share's my viewpoint, only he has taken the time to craft it in a wonderful piece.
"My contempt is not for Smith," he writes, "but for the tabloid culture that enabled her, that gawked and laughed at the train wreck that was her life, that was still pointing and gawking, though maybe not laughing, as her last performance unfolded on cable news."
Exactly. He rails against the tabloid culture (my favorite part is when he calls Paris Hilton a "spoiled, empty-headed little skank") and ends, as will this post, with this:
"What seemed an endless joke dissolves into the pitiless truth of a body on a gurney. All the humor of her clueless life drains away and you find yourself vaguely startled to realize it was ever considered funny to begin with. As if cluelessness made her less real, less human, made you forget she was nothing more -- or less -- than a high school dropout using what she had to get what she wanted.
That's not glamorous and it's not amusing. It's small and human and kind of sad.
That's something to ponder as you watch the clips of her posing and smiling in life. Something to remember as the voice-over recalls all the scandals and tabloid headlines. Something to keep in mind as you switch the channel to see what else is on."
