From Britney With Love

Shame on us. We should have seen it coming. Britney's flameout in 2007 will surely go down as one of the most spectacular celebrity supernovas in the history of the subject. It's nothing new, of course. Gatsby, Bobby Fischer, Robert Downey Jr,; The rich and famous have been exploding and/or imploding ever since there was such a thing as fame. Cases of famous persons with infamous personalities and quirks are well documented and are still wildly speculated about today. The madness of King George III or perhaps Catherine the Great's horse-loving apparatus, anyone? In this decade alone, Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown, and more recently OJ Simpson have all finally met their individual ends. But this time, though...This time something was different and yet so startlingly identifiable. We had, in fact, traveled this well-worn path before, seen the rock and pebble-lined road to tragedy as ghosts not from our personal or even national consciousness, but rather from our collective global past.

After all, can we blame her? Hollywood must admit that its success to failure ratio for child stars put into the pressure-cooker is far in the realm of the atrocious. Macaulay Culkin, Ricky Schroeder, the cast of 'Different Strokes' are all fine examples of the child-turned-star-turned-drug-addled-failure phenomenon. The streets of West Hollywood are littered with the woeful tales of the young and foolish, cautionary fables for a set more likely to appreciate the sycophantic rambling of a Dr. Phil than the quiet wisdom of Aesop. Let us never forget that the Britney we know and pity today emerged not from a pop-star cocoon at 16 but from the insidiously innocent yet fertile celebrity breeding grounds of the Mickey Mouse Club, along with others that would become her contemporaries; counterparts such as Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake, to name a pair as well as other generational stars like Keri Russell and Ryan Gosling.

But, if in fact it is true that Timberlake and Aguilera were born of the same blood and tested by the same fires that finally consumed our beloved Britney, why did she alone fall prey? Where did she foolishly rush in where pop angels feared to tread? It must be argued that her success was ultimately the architect of her failure. She had become a victim of too much too soon. And that, finally, was her great miscalculation. Where Christina succeeded on a slightly smaller scale, and Timberlake surrounded himself with a human shield of pubescent eye-candy that could bear the awesome force of America's great aggressive desire until he was strong enough to withstand it on his own, Britney forged ahead alone. She alone heeded no warnings, and when the sun finally melted away the wax that held those Ionian wings to our plaid-skirted songstress, she alone fell to Earth to her mortality. Still though, why does it all sound so damn familiar?

Mother Russia knows the tale all too well.

A child of the vision of that firebrand socioeconomic philosophy of Marx and Engels, the United Soviet Socialist Republic, too, rose to global prominence on the strength of its charisma and sheer force of will. After emerging from World War II a world superpower on par with the United States, the USSR set about consolidating, reinforcing, and in the end surrendering that great power to the twin shivas of civilizations; unsustainable largess and corrupt governance. Forces that effected the very same change in our intrepid heroine Ms. Britney Spears. So just how closely linked are our two cultural and globo-political icons? The best place to start, of course, is at the beginning.

Consider first that Marxist hotbed of activity, the Mickey Mouse Club. With eager pre-teens dressed identically in working-class denim and preaching socioeconomic equality through the magic of song and dance, its no wonder that Brit and the great Soviet Machine first make strange bedfellows here. At this point in their respective celebrities, the power vacuum that existed in those halcyon days of mice and sing-a-longs could have been filled by anyone. As much was true during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Lenin, anxious to ensure that the proletariat saw their rights protected from exploitative, capitalistic influences, made great strides in establishing his influence over and acceptance by the public work councils, known then as "Soviets." Through the work of his Bolsheviks and on the strength of a Russian Civil War victory in 1922, the embryonic USSR began to take shape as the the dominant power in the Near East.

Britney, after casting off her virginal Disney origins, at once arrived and cemented her position on a global stage of a different sort with her first hit single, "Hit Me Baby, One More Time." Her revolution was fought and won on the strength of this album, her snake skin innocence shed in favor of the schoolgirl seductress, her international relevance established seemingly never to be challenged. Not by Timberlake, a charming France to Britney's proud Mother Russia; sleek and sexy, contentious and seductive, but ultimately impotent in international affairs. And certainly not by Christina Aguilera, Spain for short, whose Franco-muddied internal politics and lack of any sort of world ambition hampered that nation's case for international recognition or respect for the next half-century.

Russia followed closely Britney's meteoric rise up the Billboard charts to mega-stardom by effectively fighting and aiding in the defeat of Hitler whilst managing a two front war in World War II and the subsequent acquisition of nuclear arms. Britney's two greatest weapons were the twin super-hits, "Hit Me Baby..." and "Oops, I Did It Again"; Russia's were first atomic, then hydrogen bombs. All four detonated with equally chart-stopping force, the demonstration of which sent both icons off of the map in terms of world respect. Russia developed Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles; Britney countered with "Toxic." Locked in eternity much like the serpentine interlopers from the staff of Hippocrates, the two spiraled on, creating steadily a pattern of power gain followed by power consolidation, until at last achieving their respective peaks: Spears, with the release of "In the Zone," which debuted at number #1 on the charts, making her the only female artist in history to have her first four albums debut at that position, while Russia outmaneuvered the United States in the Space Race, beating the world's pre-eminent superpower not once by sending up Sputnik, the first man-made satellite in space, but twice by sending Yuri Gregarin, the world's first man in orbit.

Despite their respective achievements and unrelenting lust for more, chinks in the armor began to appear, barely noticeable at first, but like acne on a previously puerile face, more obvious and unavoidable by the day. At first, Britney's childish romances with the now infamous Timberlake, and later childhood friend Jason Alexander (a man Britney would eventually commit the rest of her life to for 55 hours), combined with her brief flirtations with the graft and vice of the adult world seemed blithe and elvish. They were enviable faux pas to be made, much like the globular translucence of stained glass windows or the textured brush strokes of a Van Gogh. Congruently, the Soviet Republic was suffering her own slings and arrows; long bread-lines, a distribution system of wealth and state-appropriated commodities that was grossly overburdened and underfunded, rampant government corruption. Still, despite their distasteful nature, they were good problems to have, as considered by those impoverished nations green with envy as well as malaria and spiraling HIV infection rates. A small price to pay for global respect and power, it might have been argued by the famine-stricken sovereignties of Central Africa.

Whether anyone wanted to recognize it or not, however, the wheels were rapidly coming off. The last of the four horsemen had appeared on the horizons, sent from the nether with a single mission of destruction: Mikhail Gorbachev and Kevin Federline. Gorby and K-Fed, two figures had emerged from their respective background roles and rose to new levels of empowerment. Mikhail was a bright young farmhand turned political activist and prominent member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. K-Fed for his part was a talented backup dancer, complementing perfectly the woman that would one day be his soul mate for 3 years. Both began with the best intentions. Both would soon see their charges dead and buried. Gorbachev, ever the gentlemen, heeded the cries of his puppet governments for political sovereignty and elected to go first. First wielding the mighty Article 72, the USSR gave any and all satellite republics the opportunity to secede should that republic affirm such a measure by way of national referendum and 2/3 majority. Suddenly, what was one a proud and idealistic society became instead a smoldering pile of socialist borscht and broken dreams, with Gorbachev at the helm. The country had been professionally signed, sealed and delivered into the hands of warlords and mafia men. It's identity destroyed and surgically removed like the dog tags from a dead GI. The Nobel Commission, giving high marks for style in what had come to be widely regarded as the most beautifully orchestrated collapse of a sovereign nation in world history, a collapse punctuated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, awarded Gorbachev with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990.

K-Fed followed suit, assaulting Britney with a litany of drugs and alcohol, fathering two children in all before finally taking his fingers off of the flusher. In the spring of 2007, Britney's own Berlin Wall finally fell during a wild night out with new found pal Paris Hilton, showing the world that of which it spent years longing for a peak. What the international entertainment media and global paparazzi machine had been doing for years figuratively had finally happened physically. The wall had come tumblin' down, and more than once. As Britney's own personal descent into drugs and alcohol followed her political matriarch's, she too shed her international identity personified in this case by her impossibly silken hair, and finally her puppet republics. K-Fed fought for and ultimately won custody of both. Sean Preston and Jayden James had affirmed through referendum and subsequent 2/3 majority their right to individual liberty. The world, as we knew it, had ended. There were no winners; Only losers.

So where does that leave us today, you might ask? As fate would have it, there potentially exists a silver lining. If history can teach us anything, it has the power to teach us how to recover from even the most definitive of defeats. Russia, as she had now come to be called, found within herself a voice and a vision. She found the power to invoke the phoenix, the power to raise herself from the ashes and rebuild. It was not without difficulty. The corruption that flourished in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet regime is still a problem that hounds politicians and lawmakers in that society today. But it found a voice and a vision for strength in the eyes of one of its most trusted agents, Vladimir Putin. The lesson for not only Britney Spears but also ourselves is not that we need Britney. We knew we never needed her. Even Britney had become a student of such curriculum. The lesson is that for all the irony, to find her voice and her vision, the superstar that had for years thrilled us with her song and dance now needs us.