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Friday, February 09, 2007

I swore I wouldn't do this, but...
Posted by Jill | 6:16 PM
I'm going to do a post on Anna Nicole Smith.

There's something truly disgusting about the media frenzy about the death of a very troubled young woman taken within the context of a week that saw Tim Russert have to testify in a Washington DC court in a trial which is showing pretty clearly that the Vice President of the United States committed treason for a petty personal grudge. The Libby trial has not exactly shown so-called media journalism in its most flattering light, and the desecration of Anna Nicole Smith's corpse is just the final nail in the coffin of what used to be an honorable profession.

As I write this, there are ten - count 'em - ten articles on MSNBC.com about this woman's death, with "Pentagon provided 'dubious' intel" below the fold, right underneath "Congress' ratings up; majority still disapprove", "Judge refuses to order DNA test on Smith" and "Sen. Johnson recovering, works from hospital", and right above "Russert says testifying 'not pleasant'"

It's quite horrible when you think about it -- we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Iraq War is a sham, entered into based on cooked intelligence....and all the media cares about is Anna Nicole Smith.

What is it about this woman that generates this kind of media frenzy? Part of it is that this story at the moment hits the trifecta for tabloid journalism deliciousness -- sex, money, and death. But there's more than meets the eye here. There's a certain glee underlying the relentless coverage, a sense that the media are portraying the death of this troubled woman from Texas as "the wages of sin".

I've never been sure what made Anna Nicole Smith the favorite whipping girl of the tabloids, more so than either Britney Spears OR Paris Hilton. She always seemed kind of pathetic, even in her ridiculous, gleefully and unabashedly gold-digging marriage to an 89-year-old billionaire. It wasn't by accident that she played up a passing resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, right down to her unfashionably curvy figure.

Anna Nicole Smith was like a sex toy come to life -- the huge breasts and prominent hips of a comic book vixen, the lipstick-red moue, the platinum hair, the ditzy blond demeanor. But where Marilyn Monroe tried for respectability as an actress during her life, Smith always knew her limitations, and was perfectly willing to settle for notoriety instead of fame.

Sometimes it seemed that all the fear and loathing of women that pervades our society was fixated on this one woman. That 51% of women are living without a spouse is a number regarded as horrifying by the likes of David Brooks. If these women decide they can live without a man, where are men supposed to get their power? Yet here was a woman who obviously felt she NEEDED men -- many of them, from what we're seeing now -- and every time she was linked with another one, she became more of a laughingstock.

Here was a male sex fantasy come to life -- a stripper, a big-breasted Playboy Playmate of the Year, a woman who fucked -- and everone, including the very men men who read playboy, who fantasize about the twins in the Coors ad, who go to strip clubs, and who profess to want women who fuck laughed at her. They laughed when she was fat. They laughed when she was thin. Whatever she did was ridiculed.

And now the woman is dead, her sad, fucked-up little trainwreck of a life over, and people now feel they have to kick the corpse. One would expect the men she was involved with, the ones fighting to be proven her 5-month-old daughter's bio-daddy so as to be co-heir to the Marshall Millions that may yet be up for grabs, to kick the corpse. But for an entire nation to do it, especially at arguably the most dangerous time in our nation's history, a time when we are led by men who are corrupt, greedy, AND crazy, is just reprehensible.

Enough already.

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