"Courtesan"? Try "bimbo"! Or "slut", or "gold-digger", or "floozy", or...

Oh, brother! Someone is in culture-vulture overdrive, here.

Examples have influence over children. I know a couple who've made a career out of helping "wayward" girls at a group home. Their own daughters grew up among them. The couple are the salt of the earth, but children imitate their surroundings as much if not more than their parents. One daughter went badly wrong, and became the proverbial good time that was had by all. She's settled now, hopefully; but her parents honestly didn't do her any favors by bringing her up in that atmosphere.

So, for that reason, some of the editorializing about the death of Anna Nicole Smith is rubbing me the wrong way. Over the weekend, NPR tut-tutted moralizers like me for moralizing. She just "played the cards life dealt her", the mellifluously modulated voice said. No. She succumbed to the ever-present lure of easy money, made a godalmighty ruin of her life and those who loved her (her svengalis and hangers-on are another matter), and put all kinds of wrong ideas into young girls' heads everywhere. Who's going to clean up this mess?

Someone drew a lot of fire years ago, when John Belushi died. For fear that Belushi would become some kind of pop martyr to impressionable youth, he spelled it out: John Belushi died of a drug overdose, naked and covered with his own vomit on his bed. It was necessary, to dispel the aura of a fast life and a cool death. Somebody had to say it.

The Washington Post article linked above is a perfectly ridiculous piece of attempted bigthink, purporting to blame the institution of marriage, post-feminism, and Newt Gingrich for ANS's troubles. "Anna Nicole Smith Stripped Marriage Of Its Illusions", it says. No. She defaced her marriages, certainly. That doesn't invalidate everyone else's--it's silly to even think so.

It's a familiar conundrum for our culture. ANS was famous, so therefore her death must be significant somehow, instead of being the stupid waste it really was. But a stupid waste it was, and people who are inclined to admire people simply for being famous should know it.

It's a great evil to disparage the newly-deceased. But, somebody's gotta say it. "And whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea."

Sidebar: the Post article makes mention of "wealthy Westerners" getting fixed up with nubile Third Worlders. He might be advised that the phenomenon exists in other cultures, too; and that certain sects of Islam even have a special dispensation for it: "temporary marriage".