Britney's shame

It’s hard to pass a magazine rack without seeing the pop princess splashed across cover after cover, probably doing something embarrassingly contrary to her once squeaky clean image.\nBut the racks look different lately: Many headlines have a sense of urgency instead of smug amusement. Rolling Stone’s recent black-and-white cover on her, titled “Inside an American Tragedy,” might as well have been written about someone already dead.\nThe remarkable thing about the downfall of Britney Spears is her relatively short-lived fame. Most of us easily recall a time at which her name meant nothing. And since her subliminally sexual debut in 1999’s chart-topping “...Baby One More Time,” the world has been a witness to a rapid progression into adulthood. This otherwise average girl was made completely extraordinary – which means that, after all the lights are down and the starry-eyed sycophants move on to the next craze, an extraordinary amount of pressure and mental strain has been thrown onto a person with a no-more-than-ordinary means of dealing with it.\nAt no point in time did Britney show any sign of exceptional brain power: She was a young, sexy American girl with a cute Southern accent, and that’s all that was ever wanted of her – which is precisely why this is sad, not funny. And while she went along with the progression of her career, no one argues that Spears is a product of the limelight rather than her own talent.\nGranted, it’s not as if she had no choice in her conduct during the past decade. Other female stars who were famous at a young age, like Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman, have maintained careers that morphed into genuine class acts. Britney’s infamous padding out of gas station bathrooms barefoot and repeatedly flashing her crotch to the paparazzi are shenanigans she surely could have done without.\nBut the slide didn’t stop there. If it had, she’d still be lumped in a category with less-than-wholesome party girls like Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie. It continued, plunging her into episode after humiliating episode, laden with increasingly more serious themes of drug abuse, foul language and negligent parenting.\nAnd again, that’s not funny. That’s sad. \nWhatever one says about Britney Spears’ intellectual faculties or the depth of her musical talent, she was an American icon, however charmingly obnoxious she might have been. Looking at teenage pictures of her now evokes a sad sentiment, perhaps in part because her prima donna status was almost entirely thrust upon her.\nThe Mouseketeer turned sultry guilty pleasure has even allegedly attempted suicide. She’s not a sensation anymore, some semi-human object of the media’s drooling fancy. She’s a person, and she’s a bloody train wreck. \nIt’s time for the tabloids to poke fun elsewhere. Kudos to more respected periodicals like Rolling Stone for running substantive commentary on the matter.