Coyote Confidential: A Taos New Mexico Blog

Get a grip, America.

Meredith Vieira of NBC's Today Show promised this morning to provide parents with assistance in explaining to their children how to cope with the horrors of seeing 15-year-old Miley Cyrus wrapped in a bedsheet in the pages of "Vanity Fair." Yes, quick, not a moment to lose! Meredith Vieira, embodying parental outrage, rushing to deal with those confused little psyches now, before it's too late . . . before tweens and teens everywhere think it's OK to appear in photos with bedhead, smudged lipstick, and bare naked shoulders, before we turn all our children into prosti-tots. Oh, the conclusions those innocent little girls will draw about how that hair got mussed, just who smudged that lipstick, and why, oh why, Miley was so suggestively unexposed.

Get a grip, people.

Want to know what should outrage us? Last week Laura Bush was a guest host on this same Today Show . . . Laura Bush, wife of W., at whose hands hundreds of thousands of innocent people have lost their lives, their homes, their futures. Remember Iraq? No, of course you don't. You're enthralled by Laura Bush's fried oyster po'boy sandwich. At least, Meredith, Matt, Al, and Ann sure were.

Want to know what real obscenity is? The photos the American media doesn't have the guts to publish: dead Iraqi children. Some of them have even had their clothes blown off. Some of them, like Miley Cyrus, are covered with a sheet. If dead children don't prick your conscience, think about this: All those coffins draped with the American flag--dead soldiers coming home. We're not allowed to see those photos, either, our delicate American-way sensibilities protected courtesy of the Bush administration. Nothing makes a war unpopular in the U.S. like dead Americans. So if we can just hide the bodies--the flag-draped coffins--we can blunder on.

But rest easy, America. The Today Show is all over the Miley Cyrus photos, keeping America pure, protecting our values--whatever the hell they are.