Assistant To the Quote of the Day

"Oh, it’s huge—it destroyed my family. I’ll tell you right now—the damn show destroyed my family. And I sit there and go, ‘Yeah, you know what? Some gave all.’ It is my motto, and guess what? I have to eat that one. I some-gave-all’d it all right. I some-gave-all’d it while everybody else was going to the bank. It’s all sad."

-- Walking punchline and word salad connoisseur Billy Ray Cyrus in GQ magazine, blaming the success of Hannah Montana for the downward spiral of his daughter, Miley

Yeah, and who put her on TV, grabbed onto her coattails and rode that rocket all the way to the bank?

In fact, you really think you'd be sitting there in that big house talking to GQ while sporting those ridiculous Juan Juan highlights and that obscenely expensive Gucci leather jacket if your daughter hadn't become the world's most powerful teenager?

Those Achy Breaky Heart residuals only would've gone so far.

But hey, this gives me an excuse to dig into the DXM archives and pull out a classic.

"Cyrus the Virus" (Originally Published, 6.17.08)

Back in high school, a friend of mine and I had a kind of litmus test -- an instant and surefire barometer -- used to determine whether someone was a complete fucking idiot.

That test: sunglasses indoors.

I'm not talking about the person who walks inside from a sunny day and happens to leave his glasses on for a few minutes; I'm talking about the one who seems to go out of his way to purposely keep his eyes covered in the hope of, I'd imagine, escaping detection from that flock of adoring fans and the strobing flashes it'll soon be aiming in his direction.

Whenever my friend and I spotted this special brand of clown, one or the other of us would make a point to walk up to him and say something like, "Hey, you know, if it's too bright in here we can have somebody turn the lights down for you."

Sunglasses indoors screams one thing: douchebag.

So it's no surprise that during his interview this morning on the Today show, Billy Ray Cyrus kept his oversized neo-Elvis shades on the entire time.

Which confirms something I've suspected for quite some time but have hesitated in officially declaring.

Billy Ray Cyrus is the world's biggest douchebag.

Seriously.

From the over-the-top Beverly Hillbilly aesthetic -- the blonde highlights, ridiculous soul-patch and Gucci calfskin jacket meets University of Tennessee t-shirt he wears without even the slightest hint of irony; to the preening, ego-laden seriousness with which he takes his role on Nashville Star; to his insistence on spouting trite "country wisdom" every chance he gets -- as if he's still some dumb-ass hick living in Appalachia and not worth a goddamned fortune; to his comical belief that Achy Breaky Heart was actually some sort of cultural touchstone; to the fact that he's the father of America's most virulent social disease -- Miley Cyrus -- and a guy who's managed to shamelessly exploit his daughter merely for the opportunity she's handed him to thrust his own worthless ass back into the spotlight; everything about Billy Ray Cyrus's ill-advisedly inflated sense of his own self-worth makes him a walking joke -- a living, breathing advertisement for the necessity of safe and legal late-term abortions -- the kind of guy that, if you wanted to create a "douchebag army," you'd need only a tiny sample of DNA from.

This morning on Today, Cyrus was in fine form -- which means that he was a pompous idiot. As he adjusted himself on the high stool opposite Meredith Vieira, assuming the one-foot-on-floor and the-other-on-rung-of-chair pose common to douchebags everywhere -- as if he were a J. Byron model, circa 1979 -- I waited patiently for him to apologize for his appearance. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he might have recently undergone some sort of eye surgery that had left his pupils dilated and therefore required him to wear sunglasses at all times. But no -- of course not. He was simply wearing them because he's just that cool.

Once again -- douchebag.

Vieira began the interview by asking him about the full-length feature film he's now shooting with his retarded daughter and will soon foist on a defenseless American public.

Cyrus did a quick shake of his chemically straightened mane and said, "Yeah, it's gonna be great. We've got a great director, a great script, a great team of folks, and we're shooting in the great state of Tennessee."

I'm kidding about none of this and, as such, would highly recommend that Billy Ray invest some of that money he's making in a fucking thesaurus. And for the record, that "great director" he's talking about is Peter Chelsom, who helmed the forgettable TNT/TBS staple Serendipity and the atrocious Beatty/Keaton/Hawn "comedy" Town & Country, which was released in 2001, making it the second unfunniest thing to happen that year. In Cyrus's defense, I'm not sure that anyone who was raised thinking The Dukes of Hazzard is the height of artistry would be qualified to recognize a decent director when he sees one.

Vieira then brought up, of course, the almost baffling success of his kid, Miley Hannah Cyrus Montana.

"Condé Nast says Miley will soon be worth a billion dollars," she enthused.

I held my breath and waited for Billy Ray to respond with an angry, "What'd you call my daughter?!" But no such luck. Instead, he flashed a full row of those perfectly capped teeth and reacted with what I guess was supposed to be pride but what looked eerily lupine. Suddenly, the utility of the sunglasses became obvious, as they were probably hiding the big-ass dollar signs in his eyes.

After awhile, Vieira finally got around to the heavily promoted nexus of the interview: Billy Ray Cyrus's supposed "first public comments" regarding the media-driven scandal over his daughter's sexed-up spread in Vanity Fair. At first, she asked Cyrus whether he was even there when the most controversial of the controversial photos was taken -- the one with Miley looking like she'd just woken up after a one-night-stand with the Joker. Billy Ray insisted he wasn't, adopting a sudden air of bullshit humility as he quietly proclaimed that, at the time, he had to get to Washington where his presence was required at a gig honoring U.S. troops returning from Iraq. He dropped the troops at least one more time before the end of the interview.

When asked if he thought another of the photos -- the creepy-as-hell shot of his daughter draped over him while he stared pensively into the distance, presumably at the big bag of money off-camera -- was a little too explicit, as some have suggested, he basically didn't even bat an eye (at least not that I could tell with the sunglasses on).

"Nah, I think it just shows a daddy that loves his daughter a whole lot," he said, then added, apropos of nothing, "We love acting. We love music. We love each other."

"Well, thanks for not making that whole thing any weirder," I said out loud as I sat on my living room couch, munching Funyuns.

Vieira then asked why Cyrus didn't fight back against the accusations of those who found the picture offensive. Cyrus, as expected, responded with some good old-fashioned frontier gibberish: "My daddy used to say that the more you stomp in poop, the more it stinks."

It was right about this point that my intestines began moving up through my throat in an effort to mercifully cut off the oxygen to my brain.

The whole thing ended with Cyrus offering one more pearl of wisdom regarding the whole miasma. "You git knocked down, you git back up," he said, smiling with apparent pride at his own profundity.

"Good advice," Vieira responded, returning the smile.

I'm pretty sure my jaw went slack, I lost control of my bladder, and the upper part of my body tipped sideways until it plummeted into the couch like a falling redwood.

And all of this was before Today brought out The Clique Girlz -- three bleach-blonde 'tweens named Paris, Destinee and Ariel who look like Hot Topic exploded all over them and whose music is about to "take America by storm."

Wanna guess whose tour they've already opened for?

Congratulations, Billy Ray, you pass the test with flying colors.

Tuesday is Recycling Day

In honor of two celebrity news items making the rounds this morning, I'm bringing back two related pieces: First up, since Miley Cyrus has been voted "Worst Celebrity Influence of 2009" by the kid readers of AOL's JSYK.com, let's look back fondly on last year's Today Show interview with the man whose semen and bad parenting skills gave us this national treasure: Billy Ray Cyrus. Remember, folks, this is the guy who, when asked about his 16-year-old daughter's pole dancing performance at this year's Teen Choice Awards, said, “You know what? I just think that Miley loves entertaining people.”

"Cyrus the Virus" (Originally Published, 6.17.08)

Back in high school, a friend of mine and I had a kind of litmus test, an instant and surefire barometer used to determine whether someone was a complete fucking idiot.

That test: sunglasses indoors.

I'm not talking about the person who walks inside from a sunny day and happens to leave his glasses on for a few minutes; I'm talking about the one who seems to go out of his way to purposely keep his eyes covered in the hope of, I'd imagine, escaping detection from that flock of adoring fans and the strobing flashes they'll all soon be aiming in his direction.

Whenever my friend and I spotted this special brand of clown, one or the other of us would make it a point to walk up to him and say something like, "Hey, you know, if it's too bright in here we can have somebody turn the lights down for you."

Sunglasses indoors screams one thing: douchebag.

So it's no surprise that during his interview this morning on the Today Show, Billy Ray Cyrus kept his oversized neo-Elvis shades on the entire time.

Which confirms something I've suspected for quite some time but have hesitated in officially declaring.

Billy Ray Cyrus is the world's biggest douchebag.

Seriously.

From the over-the-top Beverly Hillbilly aesthetic -- the blonde highlights, ridiculous soul-patch and Gucci calfskin jacket meets University of Tennessee t-shirt he wears without even the slightest hint of irony; to the preening, ego-laden seriousness with which he takes his role on Nashville Star; to his insistence on spouting trite "country wisdom" every chance he gets -- as if he's still some dumb-ass hick living in Appalachia and not worth a goddamned fortune; to his comical belief that Achy Breaky Heart was actually some sort of cultural touchstone; to the fact that he's the father of America's most virulent social disease, Miley Cyrus, and a guy who's managed to shamelessly exploit his daughter merely for the opportunity she's handed him to thrust his own worthless ass back into the spotlight; everything about Billy Ray Cyrus's ill-advisedly inflated sense of his own self-worth makes him a walking joke. A living, breathing advertisement for the necessity of safe and legal late-term abortions. The kind of guy that, if you wanted to create a "douchebag army," you'd need only a tiny sample of DNA from.

This morning on Today, Cyrus was in fine form -- which means that he was a pompous idiot. As he adjusted himself on the high stool opposite Meredith Vieira, assuming the one-foot-on-floor-and-the-other-on-rung-of-chair pose common to douchebags everywhere -- as if he were a J. Byron model, circa 1979 -- I waited patiently for him to apologize for his appearance. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he might have recently undergone some sort of eye surgery that had left his pupils dilated and therefore required him to wear sunglasses at all times. But no -- of course not. He was simply wearing them because he's just that cool.

Once again -- douchebag.

Vieira began the interview by asking him about the full-length feature film he's now shooting with his retarded daughter and will soon foist on a defenseless American public.

Cyrus did a quick shake of his chemically straightened mane and said, "Yeah, it's gonna be great. We've got a great director, a great script, a great team of folks, and we're shooting in the great state of Tennessee."

I'm kidding about none of this and, as such, would highly recommend that Billy Ray invest some of that money he's making off his daughter in a fucking thesaurus. And for the record, that "great director" he's talking about is Peter Chelsom, who helmed the forgettable TNT/TBS staple Serendipity and the atrocious Beatty/Keaton/Hawn "comedy" Town & Country, which was released in 2001, making it the second unfunniest thing to happen that year. In Cyrus's defense, I'm not sure that anyone who was raised thinking The Dukes of Hazzard was the height of artistry would be qualified to recognize a decent director when he sees one.

Vieira then brought up, of course, the almost baffling success of his kid, Miley Hannah Cyrus Montana.

"Condé Nast says Miley will soon be worth a billion dollars," she enthused.

I held my breath and waited for Billy Ray to respond with an angry, "What'd you call my daughter?!" But no such luck. Instead, he flashed a full row of those perfectly capped teeth and reacted with what I guess was supposed to be pride but what looked eerily lupine. Suddenly, the utility of the sunglasses became obvious, as they were probably hiding the big-ass dollar signs in his eyes.

After awhile, Vieira finally got around to the heavily promoted nexus of the interview: Billy Ray Cyrus's supposed "first public comments" regarding the media-driven scandal over his daughter's sexed-up spread in Vanity Fair. At first, she asked Cyrus whether he was even there when the most controversial of the controversial photos was taken -- the one with Miley looking like she'd just woken up after a one-night-stand with the Joker. Billy Ray insisted he wasn't, adopting a sudden air of bullshit humility as he quietly proclaimed that, at the time, he had to get to Washington where his presence was required at a gig honoring U.S. troops returning from Iraq. He dropped the troops at least one more time before the end of the interview.

When asked if he thought another of the photos -- the creepy-as-hell shot of his daughter draped over him while he stared pensively into the distance, presumably at the big bag of money off-camera -- was a little too explicit, as some have suggested, he basically didn't even bat an eye (at least not that I could tell with the sunglasses on).

"Nah, I think it just shows a daddy that loves his daughter a whole lot," he said, then added, apropos of nothing, "We love acting. We love music. We love each other."

"Well, thanks for not making that whole thing any weirder," I said out loud as I sat on my living room couch, munching Funyuns.

Vieira then asked why Cyrus didn't fight back against the accusations of those who found the picture offensive. Cyrus, as expected, responded with some good old-fashioned frontier gibberish: "My daddy used to say that the more you stomp in poop, the more it stinks."

It was right about this point that my intestines began moving up through my throat in an effort to mercifully cut off the oxygen to my brain.

The whole thing ended with Cyrus offering one more pearl of wisdom regarding the whole miasma. "You git knocked down, you git back up," he said, smiling with apparent pride at his own profundity.

"Good advice," Vieira responded, returning the smile.

I'm pretty sure my jaw went slack, I lost control of my bladder, and the upper part of my body tipped sideways until it plummeted into the couch like a falling redwood.

And all of this was before Today brought out "The Clique Girlz" -- three bleach-blonde 'tweens named Paris, Destinee and Ariel who look like Hot Topic exploded all over them and whose music is about to "take America by storm."

Wanna guess whose tour they've already opened for?

Congratulations Billy Ray, you pass the test with flying colors.


Next, because it's going to take years of therapy for me to get past the image of Kate Hudson enjoying being nailed by Alex Rodriguez directly under the portrait of him as a mythical centaur that supposedly hangs over his bed, here's what I once had to say about the fair Miss Hudson. I'm finally forced to take it all back.

"Penny Laid" (Originally Published, 8.16.06)

I usually do my best to ignore the wellspring of celebrity rumor and conjecture that passes for legitimate news these days; I figure I have more important things to concern myself with than whether or not Nick Lachey has a small penis, and how many minutes of manual strangulation on his part it would take to put Jessica Simpson into a permanent coma for publicly suggesting one way or the other.

But despite the claims of several ex-girlfriends, I'm human -- and every once in awhile something gets my attention.

The fact that the marriage between Kate Hudson and The Black Crowes' Chris Robinson is coming to an end isn't much of a surprise. I won't be one of those people who makes the case that their attempt at inter-species mating was doomed from the start, but I'm willing to bet that a near-constant barrage of this sentiment from everybody else on the goddamned planet constituted enough pressure to break even a marriage made out of titanium.

Now, though, the New York Daily News (motto: "The Second-Best Newspaper to Train Your Puppy on in the Tri-State Area") is reporting that Owen Wilson may have had something to do with Kate's ultimate decision to leave her husband.

Understand something: To me, Kate Hudson will always be Penny Lane. She turned in one of the best performances, creating one of the best characters in possibly the best rock n'roll movie ever made -- Cameron Crowe's almost perfect Almost Famous. Thanks to that movie, and her role in it, I'll always love Kate in much the same way that I'll always love Zeppelin; she just had the ability to speak to my soul without saying so much as a word.

She could make Raising Helen IV: Annihilation, and I'd still sigh like a smitten schoolboy at the thought of her.

Owen Wilson on the other hand constitutes one of the most baffling cinematic curiosities since, well, the canonization of M. Night Syhamalan. (Sorry, I don't think that's ever getting old.) He's made an entire career out of playing the guy who lived down the hall from me, and everyone else, in college -- the borderline autistic whom you wouldn't bother with if it weren't for the fact that he's a near-bottomless reservoir of pot, and even then you're wary simply because to gain access to his drugs you have to endure hours of ridiculously fucking giddy observations about why refrigerator magnets work or how Emily Bronte is the thinking man's Charlotte Bronte or a vast array of other crap that employs stoner-logic.

There's only one Wilson in the history of film that's turned in a duller, more lifeless performance, and he starred opposite Tom Hanks in Castaway.

Now I have to live with the possibility that a guy who couldn't get me into a theater for any of the movies that he's made, somehow got himself into Kate Hudson's heart and nether-regions.

In the immortal words of Weezer: Say it Ain't So.

Mouse Crap

I figure that since I already railed against the Stepford-esque evil of 'tween entertainment today, I may as well take a shot at the company behind almost all of it -- the brand name that's holding America's parents hostage by turning its kids into obedient little consumers. Of course, I'm talking about Disney. The following piece probably earned me more hate mail than just about anything else that's appeared on this site. Which is why I'm rerunning it.

"Montana Über Alles" (Originally Published, 11.20.07)

Let me make something clear right off the bat: I don't normally go around taunting small children.

About a month or so ago, a friend of mine was in town -- a guy I hadn't seen since the two of us were a couple of kids watching The Wrath of Khan for the 130th time and trying to concoct viciously creative ways to destroy our neighborhood via a seemingly bottomless arsenal of fireworks. Eager to catch up after all these years, we made the decision to hook up for dinner on a Saturday night at one of my favorite local restaurants, Balthazar; having traveled to New York City quite a few times in the past, he'd made a slew of new friends up here and asked if one of them could join us. I of course had no problem with it and when I arrived at the crowded upscale bistro -- after a hearty hug from my old partner in crime -- I was promptly introduced to a guy named Jeff who bore a somewhat frightening, doppelgangerish resemblance to Scrubs star and wuss-music connoisseur, Zach Braff.

The similarities were so striking in fact that after successfully emptying several glasses of fantastic red wine, I decided to have a little fun at the expense of the table behind ours. I had noticed the three slightly mousy middle-aged women decked out in full Dress Barn gear discreetly craning their necks in our direction since we first sat down. Every so often, they and the little girl at their table would steal a quick glance over their shoulders -- their faces registering slightly quizzical excitement -- then titter away to each other in hushed sybilance. Finally, I flashed a warm smile at them -- one that I hoped said "Why hello sisters from Michigan making your first trip to the big city! Welcome! Have no fear -- I have no intention of robbing or violently raping you or your child!" -- and blurted out what they no doubt wanted to hear.

"Hi ladies, do you know who this is?" I said, gesturing toward Jeff/Zach with my wine glass.

"We were wondering --" one of them came back sheepishly.

"Yes," I said, cutting her off. "It's Zach Braff -- you know, from the hit NBC television series, Scrubs?"

The second woman spoke up, stifling a giggle. "We're from Wisconsin." Close enough. "We weren't really sure if it was him."

This immediately made me wonder if the television reception was somehow inferior in Wisconsin, and if so, why the FCC hadn't seen to the problem.

A moment later, having wrapped up dinner, our new friends were up from their table and headed for the door, but not before stopping to get one last look at the famous face of my dining companion -- the focal point of a brush with greatness that would no doubt provide endless excitement at the next Junior League meeting or church pot luck dinner.

Jeff smiled demurely, giving off an almost supernatural level of Braffitude.

"Are you on TV too?" the little girl practically shouted into my ear, her braces gleaming in the candlelight; she was smiling so wide that I was concerned her rubber bands were going to snap.

"Me?" I said. "Nope, sorry. I work in television but I'm not actually on TV."

And that's when it happened -- the moment that, if you know anything at all about the pre-teen set these days, you could've seen coming light years away.

"Have you ever seen Zac Efron?"

Ah Jesus, that kid from the fucking Disney High School Musical thing.

The look in her wide eyes was positively feral. She looked like she'd just mainlined an entire bag of sugar.

After a brief pause -- "Actually, yeah."

"YOU HAVE?!?" She literally jumped. I was concerned she'd slip on the puddle forming directly beneath her.

"Yeah sure," I deadpanned. "I just saw him a couple of days ago on the cover of Rolling Stone. Something about him being the 'next teen hearthrob' I think."

Everything about her seemed to spontaneously slide downward five inches or so. Her face deflated. Her smile drooped into a desolate frown. Her shoulders collapsed. You'd have thought I'd just told her that her entire family had been killed when their plane collided with Santa's sleigh.

"Congratulations, kid. You're officially the youngest girl whose heart I ever broke," I muttered, downing a giant gulp of wine.

"Good meeting you -- sorry about Garden State," Jeff said with a wave to the backs of the dejected little rugrat and her family, who were now making as quick an exit as possible.

If Zach Braff has received any confusing hate mail recently with a Wisconsin postmark, I apologize.


It's probably right about now that I should mention how much I hate Disney.

I hate the Walt Disney Company for roughly the same reason that a seemingly normal Midwestern pre-teen came very close to experiencing her first orgasm in the middle of a pricey French restaurant in SoHo: because the cult of Disney has exerted and continues to exert an almost undefinable form of mind control over America's kids, hypnotizing them into swallowing wholesale an inexhaustible supply of cleverly marketed but wholly mediocre crap.

I hate the Walt Disney Company because it's somehow also able to cast the same strangely anodyne spell over America's adults, cynically brainwashing a group of people who should know better into ignoring the decades of misdeeds the company has been guilty of in favor of buying into the eerily Stepfordesque image it expertly perpetuates.

I hate the Walt Disney Company because the heartless barons behind it expect you to believe that it isn't a company at all -- that it's still just Mickey Mouse and not guys like Mickey Eisner and Mickey Ovitz.

I hate the Walt Disney Company because everything about it is a lie. It sells phony perfection -- and we happily buy it.

Disney is the definition of bullshit.

About ten years ago, troublemaking Miami Herald columnist and best-selling author Carl Hiaasen wrote a brilliant, hilarious and entirely terrifying little book called Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World. Having grown up on Hiaasen -- his muckraking spirit was part of what inspired me to become a journalist -- and being lucky enough to have met him several times while in Miami, I looked forward to every new book of his; this particular one though was like a revelation. Hiaasen managed to sum up the palpable unease I felt when it came to Disney, and he offered more than a few examples of the malignance lurking just behind the carefully constructed facade that the company showed to the world.

Just from a mischievously miscreant point of view, Hiaasen's assertion is that Disney's prime evil lies in its constant quest to improve upon reality.

He writes:

"Disney is so good at being good that it manifests an evil; so uniformly efficient and courteous, so dependably clean and conscientious, so unfailingly entertaining that it's unreal, and therefore is an agent of pure wickedness. Imagine promoting a universe in which raw Nature doesn't fit because it doesn't measure up... Team Rodent doesn't believe in (things like) sleaze, nor in old-fashioned revulsion. Square in the middle is where it wants us all to be, dependable consumers with predictable attitudes. The message, never stated but avuncularly implied, is that America's values ought to reflect those of the Walt Disney Company, and not the other way around."

Now before you begin chalking such indignation up to nothing more than sour grapes, general misanthropy or a lack of fairy dust sprinkled in one's hair, best to keep in mind that Disney has, throughout the breadth of its hegemony, engaged in corporate malfeasance so goddamned abominable that all the wishing upon a star in the universe couldn't put it right. Again, the goal of much of it has been nothing less than the creation and perpetuation of a strange utopia which doesn't exist in nature but which Disney believes should.

Disney has a script, and it will force any and all under its governance to adhere to that script word for word. There ain't no room for ad libbing when Chairman Mouse is in charge.

This is the company that drilled and dug into the fragile wetlands of Central Florida and deforested a massive area of land surrounding Walt Disney World, all to ensure that the water in the park's Bay Lake was the correct shade of deep blue.

This is the company that found itself accused of quietly poisoning and beating to death a group of federally protected large black buzzards that had the bad form to make a home atop one of the hotels on its Orlando property, potentially endangering Disney World's most salient ingredient -- the one tourists from around the world have come to expect with the certainty of a morning sunrise: absolute, inoffensive predictability.

Likewise, this is the company that needlessly killed hundreds of lemmings during the filming of its Academy-Award winning 1958 nature "documentary," White Wilderness.


Oh yeah, you didn't hear about that?

The story of White Wilderness is by now as legendary as the mass lemming death march that the film purports to show. Unfortunately, only one of the two tales -- that would be the former -- is true. Put another way, lemmings don't in fact throw themselves off cliffs; it's a myth that persists to this day thanks mostly to the good folks at Disney, who, during the making of White Wilderness, managed to capture this incredible, impossible migration on film. The movie's crew had heard the rumor about the sad fate of those suicidal lemmings and decided to travel to Alberta, Canada to see it for themselves. When they arrived, they found that not only was the story a bunch of nonsense, but that there weren't even any lemmings in Alberta, Canada -- they live almost exclusively above the Arctic Circle -- nor was there even a nearby ocean. Undaunted by such minor factual hurdles, the crew bought hundreds of lemmings from a group of Innuit schoolchildren in Manitoba (no doubt mesmerizing them with images of Mickey Mouse, the way a child molester might) and hastily constructed a snow-covered turntable which they then put the lemmings on top of and rolled cameras. The lemmings essentially ran in place, with only the background moving.

Once that was done, it was time for the money shot.

The film crew went to a nearby river, once again made sure the cameras were rolling, and then threw lemmings into the icy water by the handful. The poor lemmings of course drowned, but hey, Disney got its movie -- and an Oscar for that matter.

Knowing this story, it should surprise no one that Disney was responsible for creating a series of pro-American propaganda films that were aired all over Iraqi television -- it obviously has no issue with the innocent dying for a lie.

There are so many more examples of questionable corporate behavior: from strong-arming local governments that stood in the way of Disney World and Disneyland's "progress," to eventually creating its own puppet government -- the Reedy Creek Improvement District -- in Orlando, in charge of its own police force which answers strictly to the whims of the Mouse, to the purchase of a Caribbean island notoriously popular with drug-smugglers which the company benignly rechristened as a family friendly stop for its Disney Cruiseline, to the suing of a daycare center in Hallandale, Florida which dared to paint images of Disney characters on its walls. (The company claimed the daycare was violating its intellectual property rights.)

But Disney's true villainy lies once again not in what it's doing behind the scenes, but in the innocence of the scenes it's created to hide behind. Disney has what could be the largest and most offensive gap in the corporate universe between its image and its reality.

And most of that image is aimed at snaring your kids.

It's the perfect, self-perpetuating marketing technique -- literally raising the company's own consumers from birth.

Disney grabs your children right out of the womb, enticing them with colorful banalities and nurturing them through product placement and its own televised propaganda wing -- Cap Cities/ABC TV -- until brand name recognition is practically Pavlovian. As they grow, Disney plays the role of their BFF -- growing alongside them and responding to the very wants and needs that it's surreptitiously insinuating into their consciousness.

In effect, creating its own demand for dreck like High School Musical.

Or -- God save us all -- Hannah Montana.


I don't envy parents of young girls right now. I would probably consider going the Disney-approved-lemming route if it meant that I could avoid having to indulge a screaming 'tween desperate to lick the sweat from Miley Cyrus's ass crack. The High School Musical craze was utterly surreal to me; this Hannah Montana shit is just flat-out baffling. I'd like to think that the pre-teen worship of the young Miss Cyrus is at least amusing to most parents, who unlike their kids remember a time when her father Billy Ray was the most ridiculous man in America. Of course that's assuming that most middle-American moms these days would be unwilling to admit to their complicity in the God-awful "Achy Breaky" craze -- the one which held this country hostage for what seemed like an eternity during the early 90s.

Now, proving that Billy Ray Cyrus's sperm would indeed mutate exactly as many had feared, his daughter has taken her rightful place as the new Gozer the Gozerian of popular culture.

She's Blossom without the nose. She's Hillary Duff without the idiot from Good Charlotte. She's Hannah Montana!

And she's turning millions of girls below the age of 14 into little Veruca Salts, angrily demanding that their parents drop everything to buy them CDs, DVDs, concert tickets, lunchboxes and anything else adorned with the image and featuring the painfully average vocal ability of Miley Fuckin' Cyrus.

It's gotten so bad, what with Christmas (a wholly owned subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company) approaching and all, that people are now joining in a class-action lawsuit against Miley Cyrus's online fanclub because they feel that they were lured into buying up memberships with seductive promises of a first crack at tickets to the sold-out Hannah Montana tour.

Let me say that again: People are suing because they couldn't get tickets to see Billy Ray Cyrus's daughter. Who needs the striking late night writers? That kind of comedy gold writes itself.

Meanwhile, in Tampa, a 35-year-old man hung on to a nine-foot-tall statue of Hannah Montana's golden calf-esque likeness for six days to win tickets to a sold out HM show. "I'm ecstatic. It's like a dream come true," he said just moments after the final challenger died of shame, releasing her grip and ensuring his victory.

Look, I'm the first one to agree that the mitigating factor of a phenomenon like Hannah Montana is that, for most young girls, it likely represents the final relatively harmless stop on the pop culture line before MTV gets its hooks into them and graduates them to full-blown sluthood with noxious crap like The Hills. But even MTV -- which is owned by Viacom -- is either unable or unwilling to make use of the kind of full-spectrum corporate synergy that Disney brings to bear when it comes to marketing pabulum like Hannah Montana and High School Musical to America's kids. The onslaught from film, broadcast television, cable TV, DVD, publishing and music outlets is simply unavoidable. A child has almost no choice but to hop on the bandwagon.

Which of course is exactly the way Disney wants it, because for those engineering another generation of consumers -- Imagineering, if you'd like -- Hannah Montana is just the next phase in a lifelong strategy.

I have no doubt as to what that little girl from Wisconsin is already bugging her mom for this Christmas.

Sure, it's a small world after all -- but it's all Disney's.


And as a bonus, here's the bit on 'tweens from the year-end piece, "That Stupid Year: The Ten Most Ridiculous, Shameful or Generally Unfortunate People and Events of 2008."

9. The American 'Tween

Title: Consumer, Arbiter of All Entertainment, Not the One Paying the Goddamned Cell Phone Bill

Big Pharm Recommended Treatment: Ritalin (for the Kid), Xanax (for the Parents)

The Facts: If you're the relatively sane parent of a 13 year old girl, chances are you love the Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus, right? No, of course you don't. What you've done is ceded your own tastes to those of your kids, who robotically inundate you with the same crappy music, movies and TV shows that Disney giddily bombards them with 24/7. This wouldn't be such a big deal were it not for the fact that your children are no longer harmless islands unto themselves; thanks to the internet and cell phone text messaging, they've coalesced into a hive mind and, what's worse, one that's turned them into a giant conduit/amplifier for whatever garbage is being cleverly and cynically marketed in their direction. In our new Wiki-world, those with the loudest voices can dictate what we all see and hear -- they can literally adjust reality to suit their needs and, well, have you ever heard how loud a 'Tween girl screams for the fucking Jonas Brothers? In 2008, the 'Tween demographic asserted its authority in unprecedented ways, forcing the rest of us to endure a seemingly endless cavalcade of Disney "Stepford Teen" entertainment, from High School Musical 3 to Miley and, by extension, her father -- the honest-to-Christ most spectacular douchebag on the planet -- Billy Ray Cyrus. We listened to the music, paid to see the movies and bought every manner of merchandise until our kids became walking billboards for this shit. Parents willingly allowed a million little Veruca Salts to inflict their will on the world, and did nothing to stop it.

Mitigating Factor: Well, they did almost nothing to stop it. David Cook somehow managed to wrestle the American Idol crown away from frumpy, willowy-voiced 'Tween fave David Archuleta. That's gotta be a step in the right direction.

"By This Time Next Year, She'll Be..." More than likely, pregnant. Or a member of the Pussycat Dolls. Or maybe suckered into sex with a guy like Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl, who'll then turn around and post naked pictures of her on the internet so that she can be just like her erstwhile idol, Vanessa Hudgens. But none of this will happen before she drags you kicking and screaming to see The Jonas Brothers: 3D in February.

Related:

DXM: Cyrus the Virus/6.17.08

DXM: Kill Hannah/12.12.07

Stupid Is the New Smart

I love it when I don't really have to do anything -- just put a couple of recent stories side by side.

The New York Times: Turmoil at The National Review Sees Traditional Conservative Intellectualism and Erudition Threatened/11.16.08

The Huffington Post: Billy Ray Cyrus, Charlie Daniels Band to Headline Sean Hannity "Freedom Concerts"/11.18.08

Cyrus the Virus

Back in high school, a friend of mine and I had a kind of litmus test -- an instant and surefire barometer -- used to determine whether someone was a complete fucking idiot.

That test: sunglasses indoors.

I'm not talking about the person who walks inside from a sunny day and happens to leave his glasses on for a few minutes; I'm talking about the one who seems to go out of his way to purposely keep his eyes covered in the hope of, I'd imagine, escaping detection from that flock of adoring fans and the strobing flashes it'll soon be aiming in his direction.

Whenever my friend and I spotted this special brand of clown, one or the other of us would make a point to walk up to him and say something like, "Hey, you know, if it's too bright in here we can have somebody turn the lights down for you."

Sunglasses indoors screams one thing: douchebag.

So it's no surprise that during his interview this morning on the Today show, Billy Ray Cyrus kept his oversized neo-Elvis shades on the entire time.

Which confirms something I've suspected for quite some time but have hesitated in officially declaring.

Billy Ray Cyrus is the world's biggest douchebag.

Seriously.

From the over-the-top Beverly Hillbilly aesthetic -- the blonde highlights, ridiculous soul-patch and Gucci calfskin jacket meets University of Tennessee t-shirt he wears without even the slightest hint of irony; to the preening, ego-laden seriousness with which he takes his role on Nashville Star; to his insistence on spouting trite "country wisdom" every chance he gets -- as if he's still some dumb-ass hick living in Appalachia and not worth a goddamned fortune; to his comical belief that Achy Breaky Heart was actually some sort of cultural touchstone; to the fact that he's the father of America's most virulent social disease -- Miley Cyrus -- and a guy who's managed to shamelessly exploit his daughter merely for the opportunity she's handed him to thrust his own worthless ass back into the spotlight; everything about Billy Ray Cyrus's ill-advisedly inflated sense of his own self-worth makes him a walking joke -- a living, breathing advertisement for the necessity of safe and legal late-term abortions -- the kind of guy that, if you wanted to create a "douchebag army," you'd need only a tiny sample of DNA from.

This morning on Today, Cyrus was in fine form -- which means that he was a pompous idiot. As he adjusted himself on the high stool opposite Meredith Viera, assuming the one-foot-on-floor and the-other-on-rung-of-chair pose common to douchebags everywhere -- as if he were a J. Byron model, circa 1979 -- I waited patiently for him to apologize for his appearance. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he might have recently undergone some sort of eye surgery that had left his pupils dilated and therefore required him to wear sunglasses at all times. But no -- of course not. He was simply wearing them because he's just that cool.

Once again -- douchebag.

Viera began the interview by asking him about the full-length feature film he's now shooting with his retarded daughter and will soon foist on a defenseless American public.

Cyrus did a quick shake of his chemically straightened mane and said, "Yeah, it's gonna be great. We've got a great director, a great script, a great team of folks, and we're shooting in the great state of Tennessee."

I'm kidding about none of this and, as such, would highly recommend that Billy Ray invest some of that money he's making in a fucking thesaurus. And for the record, that "great director" he's talking about is Peter Chelsom, who helmed the forgettable TNT/TBS staple Serendipity and the atrocious Beatty/Keaton/Hawn "comedy" Town & Country, which was released in 2001, making it the second unfunniest thing to happen that year. In Cyrus's defense, I'm not sure that anyone who was raised thinking The Dukes of Hazzard is the height of artistry would be qualified to recognize a decent director when he sees one.

Viera then brought up, of course, the almost baffling success of his kid, Miley Hannah Cyrus Montana.

"Condé Nast says Miley will soon be worth a billion dollars," she enthused.

I held my breath and waited for Billy Ray to respond with an angry, "What'd you call my daughter?!" But no such luck. Instead, he flashed a full row of those perfectly capped teeth and reacted with what I guess was supposed to be pride but what looked eerily lupine. Suddenly, the utility of the sunglasses became obvious, as they were probably hiding the big-ass dollar signs in his eyes.

After awhile, Viera finally got around to the heavily promoted nexus of the interview: Billy Ray Cyrus's supposed "first public comments" regarding the media-driven scandal over his daughter's sexed-up spread in Vanity Fair. At first, she asked Cyrus whether he was even there when the most controversial of the controversial photos was taken -- the one with Miley looking like she'd just woken up after a one-night-stand with the Joker. Billy Ray insisted he wasn't, adopting a sudden air of bullshit humility as he quietly proclaimed that, at the time, he had to get to Washington where his presence was required at a gig honoring U.S. troops returning from Iraq. He dropped the troops at least one more time before the end of the interview.

When asked if he thought another of the photos -- the creepy-as-hell shot of his daughter draped over him while he stared pensively into the distance, presumably at the big bag of money off-camera -- was a little too explicit, as some have suggested, he basically didn't even bat an eye (at least not that I could tell with the sunglasses on).

"Nah, I think it just shows a daddy that loves his daughter a whole lot," he said, then added, apropos of nothing, "We love acting. We love music. We love each other."

"Well, thanks for not making that whole thing any weirder," I said out loud as I sat on my living room couch, munching Funyuns.

Viera then asked why Cyrus didn't fight back against the accusations of those who found the picture offensive. Cyrus, as expected, responded with some good old-fashioned frontier gibberish: "My daddy used to say that the more you stomp in poop, the more it stinks."

It was right about this point that my intestines began moving up through my throat in an effort to mercifully cut off the oxygen to my brain.

The whole thing ended with Cyrus offering one more pearl of wisdom regarding the whole miasma. "You git knocked down, you git back up," he said, smiling with apparent pride at his own profundity.

"Good advice," Viera responded, returning the smile.

I'm pretty sure my jaw went slack, I lost control of my bladder, and the upper part of my body tipped sideways until it plummeted into the couch like a falling redwood.

And all of this was before Today brought out The Clique Girlz -- three bleach-blonde 'tweens named Paris, Destinee and Ariel who look like Hot Topic exploded all over them and whose music is about to "take America by storm."

Wanna guess whose tour they've already opened for?

Congratulations Billy Ray, you pass the test with flying colors.

Flag Hags

From the "Not the Least Bit Surprising" file, there's this:

(ABC: Giant Confederate Flag to Fly Over Tampa/6.2.08)

Gotta love Florida.

Am I the only one who thinks that maybe if the deep South had simply been allowed to successfully secede from the Union, we might be in much better shape these days? What the hell would we have lost: Alabama? Mississippi? Miami? NASCAR? Jesus? Insane apocalyptic ramblings? State and federal laws based on 2,000 year old superstition? Incest? Billy Ray Cyrus?

Does that really sound so bad?

If "Dixie" had gone its own way, within a hundred years the place probably would've looked a lot like the country depicted in Idiocracy.

By the way, do yourself a favor and read the indignant comments after the story above, and be impressed by the rise of internet access in America's trailer parks.

(Of course I'm joking about most of this. Still, countdown to comments from people calling me an "ignorant" asshole in 3... 2... 1...)

American Idiots

I've been trying to find a way to include this in a more substantial piece, but really, about what? What could I possibly say about the larger implications of NBC's hyper-hyped and comically panderous "All American Summer" schedule that hasn't already been considered by anyone with an IQ over 40?

Every time I see another bombastic commercial for Nashville Star -- now inexplicably moved from, ironically, cable's "USA" network to NBC proper -- I have to fight the urge to throw something heavy at my television. If you've been fortunate enough to miss the full ads because all that flashing red, white and blue has caused you to go into an immediate epileptic seizure, they foist the likes of brand new Nashville Star host Billy Ray Cyrus (now with stronger blonde highlights) on you -- calling him "America's Dad," which would apparently make all 300 million of us untalented teenage tramps. Beyond that, NBC's motley collection of smarts-deprived shows includes American Gladiator, America's Got Talent (see a pattern developing here?) The Baby Borrowers -- the premise of which reads like a pro-abstinence counselor's wet dream -- and of course, Celebrity Circus, which stretches the already tenuous definition of "celebrity" in our culture to new lengths by slapping the label on Antonio Sabato Jr., Stacey Dash from Clueless and that idiot Chris Knight (now in his second pop cultural resurrection, the reality of which officially and non-negotiably drops him back six or seven places into the realm of K-list has-beens).

If you're searching for someone to blame for the lowest-common-denominator Foxification of the peacock's once-great primetime lineup, look no further than Ben Silverman, the co-chair of NBC Entertainment and NBC/Universal and the world's most successful overgrown frat-boy douchebag. Silverman is actually the executive producer of Nashville Star, hence why it's being moved up from NBC/Uni's farm league at USA to the majors in what would appear to be a trade for Law & Order: Criminal Intent and, one would imagine, two really shitty shows to be named later. The fact that Silverman is not only successful but has become so via the control of so much NBC programming is all the proof you need of both the existence and virility of pacts with Satan.

Back when I used to work for NBC, we made fun of the network's promotion for its summer rerun schedule; admittedly, the commercials which claimed that "if you haven't seen it, it's new to you" were worthy of a little bit of ribbing.

But I'll take four hours straight of ER reruns every night -- even in the show's present form -- rather than watch NBC resort to relying on Billy Ray Cyrus, Jerry Springer and David Hasselhoff to put asses in front of the TV. Literally.