Mrs. Betty Bowers' Words of Christian Concern:
Is Rehab Replacing Jesus as America's Favorite Vehicle for Instantaneous
Forgiveness?

This hasn't been a particularly good week for crazy people and their
malodorous fluids, has it? First, Astronaut Lisa Nowak is found diapered in
her own filth trying to end a life. Next, Space Cadet Anna Nicole Smith is
found covered in her own vomit after ending her own.

According to the 4,598 breathlessly urgent news reports last night, Anna
Nicole's nurse found her employer unconscious. How she was able to tell is
anyone's guess. Truly, it makes one despair for the state of health care in
this country when a 39 year-old traveling with her own private nurse can't
get a simple heroin dosage right. But we shouldn't be too quick to impugn
the no doubt frazzled nurse's skills. After all, it must have taken a
trained eye to discern that Anna was actually unconscious instead of just
giving another cataleptic interview to Entertainment Tonight.

Between a baby-talking Anna in Hollywood and a diaper-wearing astronaut in
Orlando, Florida has, once again, shown its knack for taking an unfair share
of the available crazy. As my dear Sister-in-Christ Mrs. Patsy Ramsey,
formerly of Boulder, CO., once authoritatively opined:

"A smart killer will take that extra effort to dress up and run a brush
through her hair, lest someone recognize the handwriting on the ransom note
and she winds up stuck with an unflattering mug shot on SmokingGun.com.
That's the type of heat of passion that can make you regret the whole
thing."

I realize that lady astronauts don't tend to dress any snappier than lady
golf pros, but Lisa Nowak (verily the Capt. Alex Forrest of NASA)
inexplicably completed her stalker/killer ensemble with a
very-hard-to-pull-off pair of government-issued diapers. Frankly, I would
never have confronted a younger rival with such an unseemly panty line!

As Laura "Pickles" Bush remarked to me at breakfast this morning:

"The killing? Now, that I can understand. Trust me. But the not stopping
five minutes for a poop and a ciggy? Why, that's a big ole batch of
bug-eyed crazy!"

I find myself reveling in the novelty of agreeing with our First Lady.
While the bathrooms at Texaco stations tend to look like something you might
encounter upstairs at one of Whitney Houston's repossessed homes, you'd
nevertheless think a woman used to peeing in zero gravity would be adroit
enough to navigate her lower lady parts to hover without actually docking
with the filthy cigarette-burned, yellowed-plastic of a public toilet seat.
Instead of even trying such acrobatics, familiar to any Christian lady who
has ever used facilities available to strangers, she wore diapers all the
way from Houston to Orlando. Frankly, outside of Iraq, it's difficult to
imagine a more unnecessary, stinking mess!

After all, if Lisa Nowak had simply sprung for the drugs, cash and constant
media attention it apparently takes to engage the resourceful services of
Howard K. Stern, her rival would now be slumped over a steering wheel in the
cheap parking at Orlando Airport. And Lisa would have been sitting pretty
in her lovely home in Texas instead of sitting soggy in a jail cell in
Florida.

In fact, I told President Bush this morning:

"Instead of sending tens of thousands of new troops to Iraq to kill time --
and, well, them -- until you are out of office, why not just send Howard K.
Stern, the Dr. Kevorkian of the Bar Association? Just tell Howard that he
stands to inherit every mullah's moolah and Muqtada al-Sadr's will be found
on a sidewalk with a needle up his arm by weekend. Besides, what better way
to put a perky spin on a losing war than have Mary Hart giddily reporting on
Howard's latest victim each day from Baghdad?"

Helpful Howard probably needs a new purpose in life anyway -- especially
since he is the only person left in his circle of friends who still has one.
After all, he can't be feeling too secure right now. He must be rather
cognizant of the Ed McMahon Rule of Celebrity: Parasites are at risk once
the host dies. And I'm sure Howard will be no exception. Yes, he might be
able to assuage his grief in that quintessentially 21st century American
way -- by selling video of his loved one's dead body to the tabloids --
but with Anna Nicole gone, he must feel like a ship without a rudder. Or,
rather, a pimp without a whore. At least he can take comfort in the wholly
coincidental convenience of having the only witness to what Howard did
moments before Anna Nicole's son died now gone. But how long before even
the fawning Mark Steines finally asks: Who was supplying these dead people
with their narcotics?

The thing that strikes both Jesus and me about this whole sad mess is this:
Why are all the people who don't need rehab taking up spaces that Anna
Nicole Smith could have used?

Frankly, I'm beginning to think that there is no room left in rehab for
people who actually need it. Mark Foley. Isaiah Washington. Miss USA,
Tara Conner. The Mayor of San Francisco. With press releases replacing
Catholic confessional booths as America's most painless form of pardon,
everyone who gets caught doing something embarrassing makes a perfunctory
pilgrimage to a rehab facility. These are really just lushly landscaped,
deluxe resorts for celebrities who've found yet one more excuse to gather
and talk about themselves. How long before "Rehab!" is the standard reply
to the question: "You've just won the Super Bowl, what are you going to do
now?"

Television's smarmy entertainment hosts nod hosannas when celebrities and
politicians use a quick stay at rehab as a cheap, insincere ploy for secular
absolution, but don't even suggest an involuntary trip to rehab when a
drugged-out celebrity they want to retain access to nods off in the middle
of an interview.

E! and the producers of the voyeuristically enabling "The Anna Nicole Show"
knew Anna Nicole had a drug problem. But it made for good television to
watch her slur her words and be so out of it she hired Bobby Trendy to
festoon her bedroom with tufted pink satin until it looked like the inside
of Barbie's coffin. Similarly, Fox currently knows that Paula Abdul gobbles
down enough OxyContins before each broadcast to make Rush Limbaugh twitch
with covetous envy. But a messy Paula makes for more entertaining American
Idol than an overweight geek atonally caterwauling Barry Manilow. And
judging from the coverage last night, a dead Anna Nicole is a bigger ratings
winner than even the almost-dead one.

Here is an idea: Why don't culpability-avoiding public figures like Isaiah
Washington skip the expensively scripted pantomimes of penance and
rehabilitation to clear up space for people who really need it? Like Paula
Abdul. Or Britney Spears. And the next new surrogate for Anna Nicole Smith
that US Weekly, et al, creates and destroys.

Oh, and save a spot for Reverend Ted Haggard. After the quickest rehab on
record, he's supposedly now "completely heterosexual." But, between us, I
fear he is only a lingering handshake away from a meth-fueled relapse and a
weekend in a sling.

***bettybowers.com