So, over on Vanity Fair, they have this piece up on the relative importance of Britney Spears and why even respectable magazines such as VF have dipped their toes into covering, first Paris Hilton, and now Britney. Matt Pressman ponders in the piece:

In fact, this recent spate of "serious" coverage, combined with the uncomfortable fact that no dinner conversation can proceed for more than 15 minutes without the name Britney being invoked, raises a sinister question: is Britney Spears-along with, perhaps, President Bush-the most important cultural figure in America?

Maybe in Pressman's house, Britney is a frequent topic of dinner conversation, but she's certainly not in mine. If we're not talking to the kids about their current obsessions (Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, My Little Pony and Twilight), we're talking about how to best get our fledging organic garden going or mulling over the latest in the ongoing Clinton-Obama debacle. But Britney? Not so much.



Not that I don't understand the Britney obsession; the girl had everything for her (on the surface, anyhow), and then her breakup with Justin Timberlake, marriage to K-Fed, back-to-back babies she seemed vastly ill-equipped to deal with, divorce, and then subsequent total mental meltdowns are certainly dramatic and bizarre to observe, in a train-wreck kind of way. Personally, I just hope she pulls herself together -- I could totally see her coming out of what Pressman amusingly refers to as "... Christina-Ricci-in-Black-Snake-Moan treatment by her father, in early February-that is, being chained to a radiator and forbidden to leave the house until she changes her sinful ways ..." and making a hellacious comeback.

I kind of envision her staging a born-again-Christian comeback, myself: Britney emerges from all this trauma and turmoil to confess that she's found Jesus and is turning her life around, after which she remakes herself with '80s mall hair (as we used to say back in the day, the higher the hair, the closer to God), dresses like she's going to Bible Study, records a best-selling album of Christian music, and then makes a massive movie comeback by relaunching the dreadful Left Behind video movies into a series of stellar theatrical masterpieces directed by Mel Gibson. Hey, it could happen.

Meantime, back in reality, I'm left to ponder a world in which Vanity Fair touts Britney Spears as a "cultural figure." If she's really representative of who we, as a culture, have become, heaven help us. Who -- besides Britney, if you please -- do you see as the most influential cultural figures in America today? Okay, okay ... if you agree with Vanity Fair that Britney really is that important, weigh in with why you think so.