The Truth About Britney Spears: A Nation Reflects

Britney Spears' performance at Sunday's MTV Video Music Awards show remains the nation's only important topic of conversation. The poor thing was exploited by MTV, says Kanye West, who certainly has no axe to grind with the network even though they haven't given him one of those idiot moonman statuettes for two years. While her performance has been compared to a variety of both natural and man-made disasters, including "a catatonic reenactment of an Ambien overdose," a "partial-birth abortion as performance art," and "The Holocaust," the singer still has some defenders.

[I]t seems that Spears' performance didn't leave all VMA viewers with the same feeling of disgust. Weighing in on a story about Spears and her subpar routine, ABCNEWS.com commenter wheaton1006 remarked, "I'd hit it."

High praise! Also, what the fuck, ABC News?

Speaking of hitting it, some think "it" should be off-limits as a topic of conversation. Writing for the Associated Press, Jocelyn Noveck ponders whether or not comments about Britney's body are fair game.

Did Spears, lest we forget a mother of two, deserve to be held up against the standard of her once fantastically toned abs, sculpted by sessions of 1,000 tummy crunches? Or was she asking for it by choosing that unforgiving black-sequined bikini?

More profoundly, in an age where skinny models and skeletal actresses are under scrutiny for the message they're sending young girls, what does it say that we're excoriating a young woman for a little thickness in her middle?

It's an excellent point, and one that even those who don't consider themselves feminists should give some thought to. Is it proper to judge a young woman—whose success is based solely on the purity of her singing voice and the depth and passion with which she conveys emotions such as "But I thought the old lady dropped it into the ocean in the end"—on her physical appearance, even if she was dressed like a truck-stop hooker after a day-long chicken and waffle binge?

As to the performance itself, rumors are rife concerning its widely-noted awfulness. People suggests that an "embarrassed" Britney may have been agitated and disoriented by comedian Sarah Silverman.

Fan site BreatheHeavy.com and photo agency X17 speculated that Spears was thrown off after hearing Sarah Silverman rehearse her monologue (which ripped Spears and called her kids "mistakes").

But Silverman's rep tells PEOPLE it's untrue: "Sarah never rehearsed her full monologue ahead of time so no one knew what Sarah was going to say except for Sarah."

That theory is easily discounted: As anyone who's seen Silverman's monologue will attest, even Silverman herself clearly had no idea what she was going to say.

Others see a conspiracy by MTV at play. The network, suggests Idolator, fully expected that Spears would deliver an epic mess of a performance, and actually hoped for such an outcome, so that the chaos would keep people buzzing about the astoundingly lackluster show.

If anything, the incessant Internetization of this year's Video Music Awards—the Twittering, the Second Life-ing, the "watch the full performances online!" exhortations—makes this hypothesis completely plausible; MTV has, after all, seemed nothing short of desperate for attention with this installment of the show, and coupling that desperation with the idea that all press is good press could have created quite the toxic stew, if you'll pardon the pun.... It seems pretty cruel, but that's also sort of why it seems plausible—after all, any network that actually put on the shitshow that was last night isn't really feeling altruistic towards its fellow media consumers, is it now.

Finally, people with inside knowledge of the situation offer this explanation: Britney's performance was such a disaster because she is suffering from a mental breakdown, is out of practice at performing live, and showed up drunk and unprepared for the gig.

Furthermore, she's a troubled young woman whose career appears to be on the wane, and the uncertainty over whether she wants to continue to play the game feeds her deep sense of self-loathing, particularly when she gives in to that part of herself that craves the adulation.

In those rare moments of lucidity where she recognizes what a public spectacle she's become, Spears looks down at the Snapple-streaked faces of her two tiny children and weeps at the shocking catastrophe her life has become. Then she knocks back a few margaritas and stuffs herself into two size zero pieces of unyielding fabric and heads out to perform live on national television. Of course that ambivalence is going to reflect itself in the resulting routine.

All good points (we're going with conspiracy), but does it even really matter? It seems that today of all days, when we commemorate the loss of 3000 fellow citizens in the worst terror attack on American soil, should be about the spirit of love, compassion, and forgiveness. Britney Spears, an inbred naïf who coasted to a fame for which she was unprepared through a combination of incredibly short skirts and the decline in critical faculties of the music-buying public, represents everything that America is today, and if we can't give her a pass it says something very sick about us as a society. It's 9/11, people. Never forget. (I mean, forget the performance, but never forget that other thing, with the burning and the crashing and the big hole in the ground.) We love you, Britney: you're still our big fat shining star.

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