It’s very much like what happened to Carrie Prejean, whom I never would have heard of if she had won the Miss America (or was it Miss USA?) pageant.  But instead of smiling and saying everyone has a right to get married, she said what she really thought about same sex marriage, so Perez Hilton said all sorts of awful things about her and now everybody knows her name.

It may turn out to be a good thing for the formerly anonymous blogger, Rosemary Port, too, since now she’s got her 15 minutes of fame as well.  Since she’s very attractive (or at least she looks attractive in the only picture I’ve seen of her) she may well be able to parlay that into something less ephemeral if she’s smart.

Fame, that double-edged sword, more often than not entails being mocked and belittled, and just as Rosemary Port mocked Liskula Cohen, now bloggers like Robert Stacy McCain are mocking Rosemary Port.

I’ve written about my ambivalence toward fame – and old hagdom — before.   Frankly, I don’t think I’m ready for fame (or for hagdom), though by choosing to write a blog and a column under my own name I’ve left complete anonymity behind.

It really is bizarre how celebrities die in threes. And the three who died this week all mark in different ways the passing of my youth. Ed McMahon and Johnny Carson were a fixture of TV during my childhood and young adulthood, and the end of their late night reign marked the end of an age of pop culture innocence. The post-Carson-McMahon years have seen a steady coarsening of late night TV talk. I wonder if Ed McMahon watched Jon Stewart and the rest, or whether it was too depressing for him, a reminder that his own kinder, gentler era of comedy was dead and buried.

Of Farrah Fawcett I have little to say, beyond that I watched Charlie’s Angels just like every other girl in junior high, and that glorious mane of hers gave my teenage self a mild inferiority complex, since my hair just never would even remotely do what hers did. She was a good actress with bad taste in men, and to my knowledge never joined the parade of Hollywood ignorami lecturing her fellow citizens about politics. From what little I know about her, her life was hardly idyllic, but wasn’t as awful as the lives of many other tormented souls who’ve been chewed up and spit out by the beast that is Hollywood.

Speaking of tormented souls, Farrah’s death was bumped from the headlines almost immediately by the news that Michael Jackson had given up the ghost. When I was a child, the Jackson Five were huge, and it saddens me that a cute, tremendously talented little boy I used to watch sing and dance with his older brothers grew up into a freakish hermit and alleged pedophile rapist. I say “alleged” because Jackson was never actually convicted of molesting any of the numerous children with whom he had unorthodox “friendships” over the years. Celebrities (O.J. Simpson, Robert Blake, etc.) are notoriously hard to convict, and before his final descent into madness and bankruptcy, Michael Jackson had enough money to pay off an army of parental accusers. Given what any reasonable person must conclude about Jackson’s past relations with young children, the outpouring of love for him now amazes me. Yes, he was a talented singer and dancer. Extremely talented. No argument from me on that. But I find it deeply disturbing that so many people are willing to shrug and say, “Oh, well,” about his alleged crimes just because he could sing and dance like nobody’s business, and they have nostalgic memories of watching the premiere of the “Thriller” video with their friends.

Our society has such a love affair with celebrities that we even turn parasitic losers who feed off celebrities into celebrities. I speak, in case you can’t guess, of Perez Hilton. I don’t read Perez Hilton’s blog (you’re not really surprised, are you?) but I do get the RSS feed for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, where I very much enjoyed Ben Shapiro’s mercilessly funny exegesis of Hilton’s latest effusion of narcissism. I’m not going to write much about Hilton, a.k.a. Mario Lavandeira, because (a) I can’t top Shapiro, and (b) I think Hilton/Lavandeira is a wretchedly unhappy and troubled young man who is so vicious to others because he’s consumed with self-hatred.

Jon and Kate Gosselin are celebrities of more recent vintage, and I’ve actually blogged about them before (here , here and here). But this post is long enough already, so I’m going to save the Jon and Kate material for tomorrow’s entry. Stay tuned.

The Goodes, a family whose extreme political correctness provides much of the show’s comic fodder, don’t have much in common with the conservative, blue collar Hills, but there are similarities between the two families. Mrs. Goode is, like Peggy Hill, the butt of far more jokes than her husband. This, I suppose, would lead feminists to label Judge a misogynist, but I think it’s just because as a guy, he identifies more with guys, and this makes him give a little more common sense and humanity to his lead male characters.

The show premiered last Wednesday, but I didn’t hear about it until Friday, so I watched it on Hulu. I had heard it lampooned leftists, but as Mike Judge is no dummy, there were a few barbs at the far right thrown in to season the mix.

The show is hilarious. Go watch it.

Joy Behar, paragon of good taste and refinement that she is, has written a children’s book called Sheetzucacapoopoo. I couldn’t really believe this was the name of the book, so I checked on Amazon and sure enough, there it is.

The book is supposed to be a canine allegory about Barack Obama, apparently. As Behar told Robin Roberts on Good Morning America:

BEHAR: The kids love to say SheetzuCacaPoopoo. Well, that was the key. But, the book is really about Barack Obama. Okay? Let me explain.

ROBERTS: Everyone is looking around.

BEHAR: The dog- Max is in trouble. They send him to obedience school, okay? When he’s in obedience school is when he becomes Barack. He becomes a community organizer. And he organizes the big dogs around the little dogs. ‘Cause at first, the big dogs, also known as the Republicans, don’t like him. See? And so, he finds ways, pragmatically, to help the big dogs.

ROBERTS: Uh-huh.

BEHAR: They can reach itches for them. They can go underneath to get to spots. They can scare the cats away. And so, he becomes popular. And everybody loves each other.

ROBERTS: It’s all about change.

BEHAR: It’s all about pragmatism and change, and trying to find a solution in your situation, which is Barack Obama. Isn’t that- How did I jump to that? Pretty good? That’s- All because of SheetzuCacaPoopoo.

Normally I would comment on something like this, but really, I think this pretty much speaks for itself, don’t you?

But what, you may be wondering, does it have to do with the Holy Father? Well, the learned Professor McElvaine, in his righteous indignation about Benedict XVI, whom he deems worse than Bernard Madoff and all the terrible people at AIG put together, exhorts us:

Let’s start a movement within the Catholic Church to impeach Pope Benedict XVI and remove him from office. While we’re at it, let’s replace him with a woman.

I’m thinking Joy Behar might be just the kind of woman McElvaine is looking for to head up his new, improved Catholic Church. She can write a series of encyclicals titled with cutesy names for excrement, and work to canonize Barack Obama as the first patron saint of the Church. There wouldn’t be any rules about having to be dead to attain sainthood, since it makes more sense to pray to a living god who can help you out with some taxpayer money.

I wish Cardinal McElvaine all the best with his new progressive church. I just wish he’d leave mine alone.

Cordelia: “I thought we were going to a museum.”

Me: “This is a museum.”

Cordelia: “Where are the statues?”

Me (pointing at some of the painted folk art statues): “Those are statues.”

Cordelia (dismissively): “Those aren’t statues. They’re dolls.”

Me: “They look like dolls because they’re painted. This kind of art is called folk art, and sometimes the statues do look like dolls.”

Cordelia: “I want to see statues like the ones at the Getty Museum.”

Me: “Those are Greek and Roman statues. They don’t have any Greek or Roman statues at this museum.”

Cordelia: “Well, I like the Greek and Roman ones better.”

I like the Greek and Roman ones better, too, but unfortunately there isn’t a lot of Greek and Roman art in New Mexico, so we make do with what we have. Growing up in LA, I took high culture more or less for granted. Once I moved to Santa Fe, all that changed. Part of me (the Roman historian part) is happy that my daughter is already discriminating enough to think that classical art is better than folk art, but another part of me (the Mom part) thinks it’s a little sad that my child is already too sophisticated to be enchanted by cute little painted folk art statues.

I wonder whether Lew Wallace had young children while he was governor of New Mexico back in Billy the Kid’s day. Wallace was the author of Ben-Hur, and after his stint in the Palace of the Governors here in Santa Fe, he moved on to Constantinople, a city of ancient Greek and Roman splendor if ever there was one, to serve as ambassador to the Ottoman Sultinate. I wonder if he missed high art while he was here, and whether his children did, if he had children. Maybe he had his own collection. I’ll have to get a biography of him and find out. It would be nice to read about another kindred classical spirit who spent time in my new home town.

I occasionally wonder whether any of my daughters will become a classicist or ancient historian. I try not to encourage them too much, since my husband would prefer a more practical path in life for them. My eldest, Elizabeth, says she wants to be an archaeologist, but at the moment she’s more interested in Egypt than in Rome. Both she and Cordelia used to demand, “Tell us about the Greeks and the Romans!” every time we drove somewhere in the car. I told them every kid-friendly Greek and Roman story I could think of, and then moved on to the less kid-friendly ones, bowdlerized as best as I could. Elizabeth’s favorite is the Judgment of Paris, and Cordelia’s the abduction of the Sabine women. Tessie’s still little enough to prefer the Lorax, but I suppose she’ll be demanding the labors of Herakles before long.

One reason for this is the gaping chasm between our reality and our expectations, a gap that I would argue is greater today than it was a half or even a quarter century ago. We hear a lot about how bad the middle class is doing, how they can’t pay their grocery and heating bills. But many middle-class people who stand in danger of losing their homes have air conditioning, cell phones, i-pods, GPS systems, Wii game sets, DVD players (one for each TV in the home and one to shut the kids up in the car), computers, internet and Blackberrys — not to mention things that have become absolute essentials like microwave ovens, garbage disposals, TV sets and automobiles. How many of these things did our grandparents live without? Our grandparents not only did without TV and microwaves, but they didn’t have a bathroom for every person who lived in the house.

It’s true that I didn’t own a home until I was in my mid-30s and my parents bought one in their early 20s. So were they better off? Well, yes and no. The house they bought, where my parents and brother and I lived when I was young, was a two bedroom, one bath house that was probably about 1000 sq ft. The lone bathroom wasn’t much bigger than the oversize jacuzzi bathtubs that today grace McMansions across America. How many couples are content with a starter home like that today?

It’s also true that in order for my husband and me to pay our mortgage, I had to work the first five years I was a mother (I am home full-time with the children now), whereas my mother was able to be a full time housewife as soon as I was born. But did I really have to work? It sure seemed like it at the time, but in retrospect, I probably could have stayed home with my children if my husband and I had lived more like people did when I was a child. If we hadn’t taken as many vacations, eaten in as many restaurants, seen as many movies, if we’d gotten more of our books from the library than from Borders, if I hadn’t belonged to a gym and my husband hadn’t gotten a new computer as often, if we’d lived in a 1000 square foot house with a single tiny bathroom.

I don’t mean to imply that we were profligate. We lived well beneath our means for many years, which is how we were eventually able to afford a down payment on our first home. There were a lot of things we didn’t buy, making do with our eclectic mix of mostly second-hand furniture and buying our cars used. I’ve never been one of those women who just couldn’t resist the latest fashion in shoes or handbags, and resisting the urge to shop hasn’t been all that much of a hardship.

Shopping, however, is something of a compulsion for all too many Americans who are addicted to e-Bay, Home Shopping Channel and the mall. And let’s not forget all that tantalizingly cheap stuff they make in China and sell at Wal-Mart, seductively beckoning the shopper who went there intending to buy only cleaning supplies and breakfast cereal.

While up at 3 a.m. to feed the baby this past summer, I discovered a TV show called Clean House, in which people drowning in a sea of clutter call in sassy domestic diva Niecy Nash and her crew to help them find the floor again. I could not believe the stuff these people had in their houses — huge heaps of ridiculous, mostly useless flotsam that must have had them up to their eyeballs in credit card debt to pay for it all. Even more incredible is someone whose house looks like that letting a TV crew film it, but I guess a free home makeover is worth half an hour of public humiliation.

And then there are the intangibles for which people are pulling out home equity to pay — restaurant meals, bar tabs, movie and concert and sports tickets, travel, and yes, even plastic surgery. In “Saving the economy — one face-lift at a time,” Rosa Brooks writes,

Over the summer, 53% of the cosmetic surgeons surveyed by the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery reported that their businesses were suffering as a result of the recession. That may not sound too terrible to you — but the figure translates into untold thousands of Americans forced, by hard economic necessity, to soldier on without liposuction, breast augmentation or face-lifts.

The reason the economic downturn has had such an impact on cosmetic surgery is that it has ceased to be the province of socialites and starlets, and has become a consumer good for the masses:

In 2005, one survey found that 30% of cosmetic surgery patients had annual household incomes of $30,000 or less, and another 41% had household incomes between $31,000 and $60,000.

I’m not saying people with small incomes and large waistlines shouldn’t have lipo if they want to. I am saying that they shouldn’t be putting it on their credit cards or pulling equity out of their homes to pay for it if that equity is the result of an inflated real estate market that is due for a correction. I’m also not saying that cutting back on Botox and i-pods will solve our country’s financial crisis. It won’t. The problem has gone on far too long, and the crisis is far too severe, to be solved so easily. What I am saying is that our culture of consumerism has been an underlying cause of the crisis, and that as long as that culture remains intact, our economy will remain vulnerable.

The “I want it now” mentality that developed over the course of the late twentieth century in this country goes radically against the grain of the rugged pioneer spirit that built this country. Frugality, hard work and self-sacrifice are old hat. We are, in the words of the eminent philosopher Tyler Durden,

an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.

Ironically, the moment Americans stop buying things they don’t need, the economic indicators flash Red Alert. Every year on the day after Thanksgiving, the talking heads on the financial news shows wring their hands in anguished lamentation if the majority of their countrymen weren’t at the mall wearing holes in their credit cards. If the year ever comes when every American who calls him or herself a Christian really starts believing that Christmas is about the nativity of the Lord rather than the activity at the mall, it would start a recession.

Recession. It’s a scary word. And if you think about it, that’s exactly what would happen if every consumer in the U.S. was as careful about spending money as I am. Our economy is built on rampant consumerism, and if the party stops, the economy goes into cardiac arrest.

But people survive heart attacks, and so can our economy. For some people, a heart attack is a warning sign, making them change their eating and exercise habits, and they end up leading healthier lives afterward. Theoretically, the same thing could happen to our economy. The initial shock would be unpleasant, and so would the recovery, at first. But eventually, once the economy had contracted, it would be less volatile than it is now, since most of the spending that would be driving it would be necessary spending. The highs would be lower, but the lows would be less dramatic.

Of course, this is all my own personal economic fantasy. It’s never going to happen, at least from what I can see. All anyone wants to do now is call for government bail-outs or more government regulation, and nobody’s talking about the self-destructive mentality that got us into this mess.

Would government regulation help? Maybe, depending on the type of regulation. A regulation requiring 20% down on any home loan, for example, might have prevented a lot of the bad mortgages that are now in foreclosure.

Say a couple has $50,000 saved up for a down payment, and with both of them working can qualify just by the skin of their teeth for a $450,000 loan. With 10% down, that couple can get a luxurious $500,000 house with four bedrooms, five bathrooms and all the bells and whistles (assuming they don’t live in Los Angeles, New York, or some other high-end real estate market). Or they could put 20% down on a $250,000 house. That way, their mortgage payment would be so low that they could still make it if one of them lost his or her job, or if good times continued they could make extra payments and pay it off sooner, or put away a nice chunk of cash in savings. But who wants to live in a modest 3 + 1 or 2 + 2 little house without granite countertops and walk-in closets when they don’t have to? Who wants a little square of grass and window boxes when they can have a lushly landscaped garden and in-ground pool? Why should they do without? What the hell, they think, let’s go for it.

Then one of them gets laid off. They can’t make the mortgage payments. They put the house on the market, but it doesn’t sell. They take what they can out of savings, borrow what they can from their parents, but the great sucking sound continues, and each month the numbers get scarier. They’re part of the mortgage crisis, and people blame government and big business for letting it happen. But did anyone make them reach for the brass ring they could just barely reach by stretching their assets paper thin? Should the government be held responsible because this couple wasn’t?

Before the hate mail starts, please understand, I realize this isn’t the story of every family suffering foreclosure. A lot of them did the best they could, made smart decisions, worked hard, had bad luck, and could not have avoided it. But there are others like the hypothetical couple I described, people who wanted to have it all right now.

It’s sad that we need even consider additional regulation for the mortgage industry, sad that so many Americans are so lacking in self-discipline that they need government to tell them when they shouldn’t be taking out a loan, sad that so many mortgage brokers at so many mortgage companies are so unscrupulous as to make loans that they have a pretty good idea the borrowers are in no position to pay back.

But I guess we do need more regulation. We need it like those slobs on Clean House need Miss Niecy.

That last line was incorrect too, by the way. One isn’t supposed to end sentences with prepositions, as I just did — on purpose, may I add, to make a point. I ought to have written, “the one to which I’m used,” but who on earth talks like that? “The one to which I’m accustomed” sounds better, and for writing it’s fine, but in conversation it sounds pretentious. Same with who and whom: those of us who know the difference will in most cases write “Whom did you see?” but in conversation say “Who did you see?” Of course, which to choose, the correct but pretentious-sounding or the incorrect but normal-sounding, depends upon who you’re speaking to (which should read “to whom you are speaking”).

I realize I fixate on grammar more than the average (or ought I to say normal?) person, but my recent hospital stay kept grammatical errors in the forefront of my mind. Just about every nurse in that hospital told me to “lay down” or “lay still” or “just lay there,” when in fact each of those verbs should have been lie rather than lay. I have no idea why, but this is the error that irritates me more than any other. I have said “lie down” to my children from birth, but they all say “lay down” since everyone else they hear, including the teachers and aides at preschool, says lay rather than lie. Now that we are homeschooling (i.e., not paying other people to teach our children to use incorrect grammar in place of the correct grammar they learn at home) perhaps that will change.

A grammatical error that bothers a lot of people oddly enough doesn’t bother me: can vs. may. I know the difference of course, but grew up in a family that used can (be able) instead of may (be permitted), but that’s no excuse, since my mother says lay instead of lie and I broke that habit. I’m not entirely sure, but I think I say may sometimes and can sometimes, but I know my children always say “can,” except Cordelia, who says “may” a lot but misuses it, asking, “May you…?” instead of “Will you…?” I’ve explained a thousand times that “may” is for “May I…?” but she does right on saying “May you…?” and “Can I…?”

In her controversial book The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris made the point that children speak like their peers, not like their parents, which is why children of immigrants speak perfectly unaccented English and when they do speak their parents’ native tongue, they never reach the level of proficiency they have in English, and English is the language in which they dream. This is true of class-based accents as well; the example Harris gives is Margaret Thatcher, who came from a working-class family but spoke with the upper-class accent of her classmates at the elite school she attended on scholarship. The linguistic arguments aren’t the controversial part of the book, by the way. The uproar over the book was because Harris argued that it was peers rather than parents who were responsible for shaping not just language and accent, but personality and behavior as well. The book sparked reviews with titles like “Do Parents Matter?” and much passionate insistence that in fact they do. I finally got around to reading the book only recently, and it’s worth it’s own blog post, so I’ll say no more about the socialization debate here, and say only that I think she’s dead right as far as language is concerned.

Nevertheless, I will not take my children’s poor grammar lying (not laying) down, and will continue to go boldly (not to boldly go) on trying to fight the good fight as well as I can (not may).

I posted the other day about the fake archeological dig that’s supposed to be art. Now Pasatiempo, The New Mexican’s Weekly Magazine of Arts, Entertainment and Culture (June 20-26), brings us still more pretentiousness, Santa Fe style. Or maybe it’s just a paragraph-length typo? I sort of hope so. It’s hard to tell.

The cover of the magazine shows bunches of plastic water bottles (empty, labels removed) hanging like bananas from streetlights, and against the backdrop of sunset sky the word “Out of SITE” are written in orange. Inside, in the table of contents, the following paragraph appears in the listing for the cover story about SITE:

three-x skewed-church porn yellow-tunnel entrance? people come with thoughts (grunts/whats?), follow serpentine forms into space what kind of geometry is this walls and inclined walk inclining here and there through and around art art art things international things people make who come and see santa fe in january. exotic paint, |aliens abduct a navajo, digital grave markers, antique flour mill, rap crowds at nothing, mongolian chef and recycled bottle art and superpower (cord) snaking along up on ceiling though. people see things. ideas charge around the place. fun names like luchezar und fabien y zbigniew. then finally you can jump softly off the edge with the blessings of an italian leapmeister. both offsite and onsite! more things to think and experience and lance fung the man of the show making this community of artmakers having fun and meaning all over the place.

I didn’t make that up, I swear, though I did have to type the whole thing because it does not appear anywhere on the magazine’s online version. Or at least I couldn’t find it. Sometimes finding things at the New Mexican’s website can be tricky.

But back to the matter at hand: what WAS that? Now that I’ve read the whole story, I see that it makes reference to a number of the exhibits mentioned. But the presentation – all lowercase, mainly sentence fragments, odd bits of punctuation, etc., fairly screams, “Aren’t we hip? Aren’t we so much cooler and smarter than all you dummies who shop at Wal-Mart and aren’t sophisticated enough to understand our cutting-edge art? Aren’t we just as avant-garde as we can be, here in The City Different?” It seems to me just a pretentious exercise in postmodern verbal onanism, to adopt the Santa Fe artist’s vernacular.

Another thing about the story left me curious: why is SITE in all caps? Is it an acronym? I assumed so at first, but found no reference in the Pasatiempo story. So I looked for and found SITE’s website, but that didn’t give any clue either. The article also does not tell why the exhibit is called Lucky Number Seven. Instead, it quotes various people connected with the exhibit making affected statements about the artwork:

Curator Lance M. Fung says, “My work is me, and I’m my work. I’m not conceiving anything here. Lucky Number Seven is just an evolution of all my work and is an extension of me.”

Liza Statton, a Curatorial Fellow at SITE, writes in the exhibition catalog about the “interconnectivity between ideas, objects, time, and space” in one of the exhibits, and about the curator, “Through his weblike approach, Fung has created an exhibition that resists casual reductionism and the burdens of authorship.”

Wow. Sounds like one not to miss.

The local paper ran a story the other day about Australian artist Nick Mangas who has created a fake archaeological dig called A-1 Southwest Stone in a building that is currently unoccupied but used to house a business called A-1 Southwest Stone. So what’s the point of the exhibit? In the artist’s words, “The whole of Santa Fe is this sort of blurred line between fiction and reality in terms of its architecture and its style.” It is? How so? There are centuries-old pueblo-style buildings here, and new buildings that copy the ancient model in modern materials, but isn’t that true anywhere? He continues: “I kind of built this idea that this company was actually plundering a ruin and selling that as a product. … It very much fits into this idea of the myth of Santa Fe.”

But what is the myth of Santa Fe? Mangas never explains, nor does the reporter covering the fake dig apparently ask. Instead, he just lets this pretentious young Australian blather on in his semi-comprehensible way: “I’m actually excavating a fiction or a narrative,” he said. “I took the existing building’s title and used that as sort of an agent for describing Santa Fe’s culture … and how that sort of vernacular is being appropriated by this sort of romantic regionalism.”

Some people say that by being a SAHM instead of being employed in academia, I’m letting my PhD gather dust, wasting it. Maybe so, but I still love having it. Why? When pretentious people say asinine things, I can reply, “What on God’s green earth are you talking about???” without being accused of being too stupid or unsophisticated to understand. Those three little letters have given me the freedom to call a lot of spades spades.

And this “excavation of a narrative” nonsense is really just that – in spades.

BTW, the NRO article was about Kathleen Parker’s new book, Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care, which I haven’t read yet but probably will. Thanks to Patrick for the link, posted appropriately enough on Father’s Day, after the poor guy not only didn’t get breakfast in bed, but actually had to clean the kitchen.