She Always Was An Allegory of America

On VH1, they’re currently showing a special about Britney Spears.

It’s one of many to be found in this, The Britney Decade, but there’s been a particular glut of TV specials in the last few months, when the Spears shitstorm hit the harsh fan of institutional psychiatry.

The show’s called “Britney’s Secret Childhood.” To save you the suspense: nothing secret. Same sequence of white trashy escapades and child star exploitation we’ve always heard about, the circle of a dumb life.

But they’ve acquired some of her letters from youth — she drew hearts over her Is, of course — and have hired a girl with a cheerful Southern twang to approximate her voice, and voice-over their cursive content.

I would shoot myself in the fucking face before allowing anyone to read anything I drafted privately in middle school. Out loud. To an audience. In my fake voice. I would shoot them in the face, first, for trying.

But that’s neither here nor there.

What’s here is that the last time they did a Britney letter segment, they made the picture go all fuzzy and old-fashioned at the sides, and there was music in the background, the Civil War documentary fiddle kind.

They read a letter from Britney Spears to her teenage boyfriend with the exact investigatory gravitas and slavish attention to detail that the History Channel would give to an exchange between Lee and Grant.

Fuckitall, if we’re being honest, with the production values History Channel v.2008 would give to the hidden alien conspirators who ruled the Ancient World of sex and magic from tunnels and kept correspondence with da Vinci concerning the superweapon that Nostradamus predicted would finally help reveal Winston Churchill’s secret descent from Mary Magdalene.

They’re taking up all our time and energy and brainwaves and attention with the minute dissection of a misguided girl who turned us on once, but now that she doesn’t, we can look at her constantly failing and fucking up and feel better about our own miserable condition. This is the Britney Spears phenomenon. That’s all she ever did, unless someone would like to make a case for her musicianship.

None of this matters. That’s pretty much the point.

Kind of staggering, though, that Iraq has been happening for so long, that when Britney was first asked about it, she was at the peak of her career. She’d just come off of her “scandalous” kiss with Madonna in 2003 — remember that, and remember when a little peck on television could be a scandal? — and Tucker “Bow Tie” Carlson asked whether she would come out against the war, like other, traitorous stars had done. Would she support our fearless leader? Would she believe that a war already increasingly unpopular in 2003 for its lies and mismanagement and general savage fuckuppery would still be chugging along 5 years later?

Britney told her adoring public then: “Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens. “

I don’t think I’ll ever have a sounder argument against faith and the faithful laid out so naturally, so I’m a gonna quit while ahead, and go sleep the sleep of the paparazziless.