Jen to Brad: My Publicist Isn't Angry, She's Just Very Disappointed (In Your Publicist)

Mr. Irresponsible took a few days off last week, if by "off" you mean "holed up with my lawyers plotting revenge on my enemies," while Debbie held the fort here at Irresponsible World HQ. (If by "held the fort" you mean "put her Chuck Taylor high tops up on my desk and ate donuts, and don't try to deny it because there are crumbs in my paper clip tray.") And when I got back and checked the Web, what did I find? One more example of how media and celebrities collude in an awful conspiracy to expunge the remaining traces of decorum from our public life.

Here's a CBS.com story about Jennifer Aniston "breaking her silence on her break-up with Brad Pitt." But wait, before we get into the dish let's pause a second to admire its provenance. In a dazzling example of the echo-chamber effect so often seen in stories like this, the silence-breaking doesn't actually originate with CBS.com, because CBS.com exists largely to repurpose content from the broadcast network, and man, would Mr. Irresponsible like five minutes in a quiet alley with the guy who came up with the word "repurpose." So the Aniston interview took place on CBS's air, right? No, of course not; what are you, new in town? Aniston talked to Vanity Fair, CBS's "The Early Show" did a segment on the article, and a precis of that is what ended up on the web site. And if that isn't a triple-play from Hell, then I don't know baseball.

Okay, now we get to look at what Aniston actually said. "She said she still loves Brad very much," according to VF via "The Early Show" by way of CBS.com, as parsed by People editor and "Early Show" contributor Jess Cagle. (Still with me?) Cagle goes on to opine that "I don't think [Aniston's remarks are] a plea for sympathy." No, of course not, because that would be cheap and showy; this is a good honest plea for publicity, which is totally different. Aniston also thinks Pitt is "missing a sensitivity chip" for appearing in a photo spread that showed him playing house with Angelina Jolie. (This just in: Fading TV star confirms celebs actually robots!) The story continues:

In addition to those photos, Aniston expressed shock over the ones that appeared in tabloid magazines of Pitt and Jolie, and her adopted son Maddox in Africa. Why the surprise, considering all the rumors about the affair? As in so many marriages where this happens, there is an element of denial, Cagle says....

Cagle apparently had time to slip out and get a degree in psychology between segments. So he's got that going for him, which is nice.

It goes on like this for quite a while, but honestly, after a paragraph or two I started to get that bees-living-in-my-head feeling and had to take a break and do something mindless, like vacuuming the donut crumbs from my paper clip tray. And when my vision had cleared I thought: Here we see the unfair balance of power that exists between celebrities and normal people. If you or I go through a divorce we handle the aftermath in the traditional way -- we whisper spiteful half-truths about our exes to friends in the checkout line. There's an appropriateness to that. It's one-to-one. Celebrities, however, have a metaphorical bullhorn in the willing shills and lackeys of the press. (Hmmm. Note to self: Get a bullhorn.) Not only will somebody from Vanity Fair come to Aniston's house and collect her grievances as if they were the precious droppings of a rare and exotic bird, he will then bear them away to be published and broadcast and Web-enabled literally all over the world in a dizzying cycle of endlessly-reciprocating vituperation.

Is there no more proportionality in the world? Does everybody in this seedy little ménage à trois absolutely have to get a spread in Vanity Fair out of it? When my own divorce was finalized some sixteen years ago I didn't take to the public prints to deliver artful little knife-blows to my ex; I did what a man does, which is to say I drank a volume of Captain Morgan's equal to the displacement of my own body every 12 hours for two weeks. Then I got up and went back to work, pausing only to pick an extremely ill-advised bar fight with a guy who turned out to be one of the early practitioners of what would now be called "Ultimate Fighting." Do you see what I'm saying? Where is that kind of dignity today?