Can a Country Enter Rehab?

Miss USA is going into rehab. With this simple announcement, the era of greatness in American culture has officially come to an end. We’re on the slippery slope to the path of ruin that will lead us over the edge of cultural credibility into the abyss of … well … you get the point.

The only drama still to unfold is to find out if this, the mother of all rehabs, is for Ms. Conner’s addiction to alcohol, drugs or teenage girls. That’s what the boys at the track call a trifecta – assuming you pick them in the right order. Culturally speaking, it’s the slope-path-edge-abyss thing.

How does a 20-year old young woman emerge from rural Russell Springs, Kentucky, and in less than a year become something between a national embarrassment and an international joke, depending on how seriously you take this matter. I’m not taking it too seriously, so I’m leaning toward the joke end of the scale. But I am taking it seriously enough to mention the slope-path-edge-abyss thing.

A likely answer to the aforementioned question goes like this: she has spent way too much time watching and listening to a lineup of celebrated losers: Paris, Nicky, Nicole, Britney, Christina, Tara, Lindsay, Mary Kate, Ashley, Jessica, Ashlee and fill-in-the-blank. Nominations for this list of cultural misfits remains, unfortunately, very much open. They even have an alumni club for grads like Shannen, Tori, LaToya, Anna, Pamela and Madonna. There’s also a pack of male misfits, as exemplified by K-Fed, K. Rock, R. Kelly, P. Diddy, Andy, Robert, Charlie, Mel and the like, but sadly it’s the young women who dominate the slope-path-edge-abyss thing.

The fact that we pay one minute of attention to children dressing up as adolescents who are trying to act like bad-ass adults is sad enough. The fact that we devote countless magazine covers, news articles, E! Entertainment stories, red-carpet interviews, tabloid exposés, etc., etc., ad nauseam, to these so-called celebrities is so far beyond sad that it becomes the slope-path-edge-abyss thing.

Too many otherwise decent Americans are caught up in a grotesque fascination with an endless array of crude, crass and classless behavior. If only it stopped there. But, on the serious side of the scale, bad party behavior and the distasteful antics of spoiled, rich kids has morphed into an endless Faustian tale of alcoholism, drug use, addiction, bulimia, anorexia, exhibitionism, and sexual affectation. What awaits us at the bottom of the abyss? Can an entire country enter rehab?

I don’t know if the Madonna – Britney – Madonna – Christina 2003 MTV tongue lashings signaled the beginning of the end or, worse, signaled that we’d already rounded the clubhouse turn and were closing in on the finish line, but seeing almost every media source in the country flashing the shot of Miss USA 2006 swapping copycat spit with Miss Teen USA 2006 surely signaled something along the highway to cultural hell, aka the slope-path-edge-abyss thing.

But, wasn’t it nice to see The Donald, is his oh-so-appropriate role as owner of Miss USA and Miss Teen USA, graciously granting a conditional pardon to Ms. Conner, he being the paradigm of morality and virtue. Like we can’t remember him letting his tongue wander into something maples-flavored not all that long ago, while Ms. Ivana was at home tending to the little Trumpets.

Alright, that’s enough. I can feel the slope slipping under my feet.