Dear Brothers and Sisters in Righteous Fury:

Friends, I'm growing rather worried about America's current klatch of ubiquitous celebrities -- both in Hollywood, CA and Washington, DC.  In our burnished "Bed, Bath & Beyonce" world of painstakingly marketed personalities, the glossy veneers are starting to peel disagreeably in the corners, revealing the disconcerting intimation that we may be a nation that only idolizes the annoying -- if not downright insane. 

While watching the mechanical, laughing Scientology robot Tom Cruise on Oprah last week, it occurred to me that most famous people are only an agile publicist away from revealing to worshiping throngs that their lovable quirks are actually the somewhat less endearing red flags of acute mental illness.

America's self-appointed queen mother Oprah Winfrey, a needy narcissist with a savior complex, sat back and obsequiously enabled the televised self-destruction of a manic-depressive with mood swings like a centrifuge. Verily, Tom screamed: "I'M IN LOVE WITH A PERSON WITH A VAGINA!" 

To which I respond: vive le indifference!

After existing safely under the impenetrable force field of Pat Kingsley, Hollywood's most pushy flack, for over ten years, petite and preening, yet robustly heterosexual, Mr. Cruise began to confuse the Tom Cruise his publicist had created with the one who blankly gazes back at him with bland adoration in the mirror every fifteen minutes.  Heady with the rancid perfume of opportunistic adulation, little Tom made the mistake that all stars suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder eventually make: thinking the public's affection is proportionate (rather than inversely proportionate) to how well we get to know a vacuous celebrity who is a member of foolish religious cult that doesn't involve a human sacrifice. So, ignoring the same advice I gave Michael Jackson (to keep his friends close, his enemies closer and his family in another country), Tom fired formidable Pat Kingsley and replaced her with his sister, the bumbling Scientologist sycophant Lee Anne DeGette.

Witnessing Mr. Cruise's real (well, to the comparative extent that any attribute of a perpetually guffawing Scientology zombie can be authentic) personality revealed on Oprah was akin to the discomfort of watching an unwieldy scab voraciously rended by a preoccupied meth junkie.  During the alarming spectacle of watching Tom lunge at Oprah, I had the same ineffable feeling of dread that I had experience when I reluctantly attended a Christmas cocktail party in Boulder in 1996 and was introduced to Mrs. Patsy Ramsey (clearly infested with demons hopped up on prescription diet pills). I'll never forget the look Pasty shot her lovely daughter when JonBenet interrupted Patsy's interminable story about how Arbor Day was the only holiday for which she still hadn't found the perfect theme-cardigan.  Patsy glared at her daughter, gripped her arm and said, "Just wait until I get you home, Missy."

I now realize that people like Pat Kingsley are not there to keep their clients in front of the public, but to keep them away from the public, locked away so that a more palatable, confected approximation can be peddled to America. Honestly, didn't we all like Michael Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, Martha Stewart and Tom DeLay with more ardor before we got to know them? And weren't Laura Bush's relentless reminders that she was a teacher more smoothly digested before she escaped from the watchful eye of her handlers to sign an Israeli guest book, spelling "commit" with an exuberant, if illiterate, extra t?

Yes, it's rather entertaining when irredeemably vapid people are given far too much time to talk or write, but thank the Lord our handsome President hasn't followed Tom Cruise's cavalier lead and jettisoned Karl Rove!   Otherwise, we'd be seeing W jumping up and down on Oprah's set, leaving scuff marks on her lovely upholstery. Or witness White House press conferences with people who aren't "on call" male prostitutes being allowed to ask any impertinent question that pops into their seditious little heads!   So let's be grateful that a carefully crafted buffer still exists between us and the person playing a beta of PlayStation3 in the Oval office.

The cardinals clearly had only one criterion in mind: find someone whose appearance would be so frightening to small children that they could be reasonably sure he'd never been able to consummate the oily seduction of even the neediest altar boys.  But, of course, one is tempted to ask the resplendently gowned cardinals, "So, all nostalgia for Lon Chaney aside, was there anyone in the application pool who didn't have "Nazi" on his resume?" 

But -- let's be honest -- "Rotary" would seem rather pedestrian next to the more attention-getting "Nazi Youth." Furthermore, I can only imagine that such a colorful affiliation was a career-making advantage for someone being chosen to run an organization that blithely turned, not just the other cheek, but also all eyes from the nettlesome inconvenience of that whole Holocaust thing during World War II.

Nevertheless, Pope Benedict XVI claims that he had no choice but to succumb to the admittedly ardent wooing of the National Socialist Party.  Apparently, he's just a girl who can't say no. But isn't that such a deplorably secular worldview, suggesting that one derives morality only after first assessing practicality, expediency and peer pressure from Satan? As I counseled my sorely tempted grandmother Mary Morris when she was propositioned by Colin Farrell last weekend: "One always has a choice to say no, dear."  But I guess this pope didn't want to become a saint the hard way.  They never do.

But, between us, I hardly think it is our place to scoff at people who toyed with fascism.  As our strenuously serene First Lady Laura "Pickles" Bush asked over her morning tumbler of Malibu Rum (with an enthusiastic dusting of Xanax along the rim and Formica tabletop), "What's the big hullabaloo about Hitler Youth? So, they picked a bad name.  Big whoop!  Here, they're called Young Republicans. Big diff!" 

I am so pleased that yet another season of American Idolatry has caterwauled its last frenzied approximation of a wistfully intended note. Frankly, the only entertaining thing about the show was poor, woozy Paula Abdul (talk to Corey Clark about "activist judges!") looking at Bo Bice and squirming in her seat, reminding herself in a boozy Blanche Dubois: "Run away now quickly. It would have been nice to keep you, but I've got to be good - and keep my hands off children. Adios. Adios." Come to think of it, maybe it was Michael Jackson who said that.

So close to Jesus, I was able to secure a promise to smite Paris Hilton (a request He acquiesced to with reassuring alacrity), but I now realize I was rather careless in not pinning Him down to a more immediate date,

Mrs. Betty Bowers

America's Best Christian

A woman known throughout Christendom for her joie d'apres vivre

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