Brit

“You say I’m crazy/
I got your crazy”


So, the Britney issue of Rolling Stone is out, just before her birthday, December 2. Britney is in official return mode. What is she returning from? What everyone agrees is an off the charts craziness. For instance, she got drunk a few times. She might have walked around naked in front of her children, infants at the time. She shaved her hair off. The cops came around, she was making a disturbance.

For this, she received the following punishments: the court took her boys away. The court gave her father control of all her money. The court gave her father control of all her possessions. Apparently even her phone calls are supervised.

I am the Leon Bloy among Britneyologists, I think. In the introduction to the Exegesis of Common Places, Bloy writes (as though presciently seeing, one hundred year ago, the sin the press commits daily in writing of Ms. Spears):

“The true bourgeois, that is to say, in a modern sense and in the most general of possible senses, the man who makes no use of the faculty of thought, and who lives, or appears to live without having ever been solicited, a single day, by the need to understand anything whatsoever, the authentic and indiscussible bourgeois is necessarily limited in his language to a very small number of formulas.

The repertory of patrimonial locutions that suffices for him is extremely cramped and never goes beyond a few hundred. Ah! If only one were holy enough to rob him of this humble treasure, what a paradise of silence would fall immediately upon our consoled globe!

When a manager or a clothing factory owner hazards the observation, for example: that you can’t remake yourself; that one can’t have everything; that business is business; that the doctor is a priest; that Paris wasn’t built in a day; that babies did not ask to come into the world, etc. etc., etc. , what would happen if one proved to him instantly that one or another of these hoary clichés corresponds to some divine reality having to power to make worlds tremble and to unchain catastrophes without mercy?”

And so it is with Spear’s ‘madness’, which is, of course, not madness at all, but the projection of a social madness, the madness of Autrui, so deepseated that Bloy would, of course, suspect a Luciferean origin. So when I read this part of the Spears story, I did feel an empathetic spear going through my side – or perhaps the one that went through her side, as she was nailed to an image that and put through a grinder to make money for someone, day after fucking day, ending up, as the journalist says, with as much control over her life as she had as a seventeen year old Mouseketeer:


"I feel like an old person now," she says one afternoon, as a manicurist applies rhinestones and girly pink lacquer to her chewed-up nails. "I do! I go to bed at, like, 9:30 every night, and I don't go out or anything, you know what I mean? I just feel like an old fart."
And this:

“Of all the things Britney has lost in the past year, it's the custody of her sons, Sean Preston, 3, and Jayden, 2, that has shaken her hardest. "Every time they come to visit me, I think about how they're such special people," says Spears, who currently sees the boys three days a week, with one overnight stay. "Like, they're going to preschool now! I went there to pick them up on Friday, and seeing them in their little classroom and seeing Jayden being bad or not listening? It's like, those are mine, and it's just crazy, you know what I mean? And the things that are coming out of their mouths right now — they're learning so much, and it's new, and you never know what they're going to say, and they're so smart yet so innocent. They're obsessed with monsters, and every night we look outside, and we have to show them that there's no monsters out there. It's dark outside, but there's nothin' out there, you know?"

Ever since she was a little girl growing up in Kentwood, Louisiana, Spears dreamed of having her own children. She considered the experience "the closest thing to God," she said in 2004 in a note on her fan site. "To be a really good mom, I feel your child needs to be your full-time job. I want to raise my kids and share all of those precious moments with them."

But things haven't turned out like she imagined. "I didn't think my husband was gonna leave me," she says, deadpan. She laughs to break the tension. "Otherwise, I'd be with my babies 24/7. But since they're almost like twins, they both take care of each other. I think they look like me," she says, going from affectionate to bitter as she gets distracted by thoughts of Federline, whom she sees only when one of them is picking up the boys. "They don't look like their father at all," she continues. "And it's weird 'cause they're starting to learn words like 'stupid,' and Preston says the f-word now sometimes. He doesn't get it from us. He must get it from his daddy. I say it, but not around my kids."

One has to remember that Spears lives in a city in which the D.A.’s office prides itself on taking frivolous cases against celebrities and running with them, all the way through a cycle of daytime talk shows and nighttime entertainment shows and perhaps into their own consultant spot. The lights is green, time to come out and feed another odorless, colorless victim who develops odor and color – the malignant disease of the non photogenic occasion, the gotcha photo op. But of course, the trolls lie in wait for good time girls all over America: the judge who dismisses a rape here or there in Northern Louisiana, the police chief who spends a perfunctory day tracking down killer unknown after discovering some dissected corpse of a whore in Houston, the whole sad sack of shit you can expect one you bump up against the thing that has been there since long before Judges 19:25.

All I want to know is: when is Britney going to get back her kids?