A Great Moral Question

As if having sensed how, like AOL years ago, it had burrowed much too far into the Britney Spears Obsession, moments after I mentioned Google News running an item on her sister as well, Google seems to have decided to let the younger Spears become the new chief object of its fascination, by presenting her pregnancy as one of the World's Great Moral Questions.

It turns out that Jamie Lynn Spears is the star of a successful children's show, where she has apparently been idolized as the perfect role model for America's larval set, and so, wouldn't you know!

As, at age 16, the second Empress Spears got into that otherwise heavenly condition in an act of joyful in-bed collaboration with her boyfriend, who is two years older, Google is claming that this development is dominating celebrity news and in so doing has ignited a big debate about the wisdom of consensual sex among teenagers.

Can it be that few have noticed how we live in an era in which each succeeding generation of teenagers, whether spaced apart by decades or by mere days, prides itself at having been the first ever to have discovered the joys of doing sex?

It will be interesting anyway to see how much mileage Google will get out of reporting on this day after day, but the Spears mystique is so unendurably powerful that we can be assured that they will stick to it, and mightily. Never mind that plumbing this issue is exactly like dropping a stone into a sinkhole that reaches so far down into the bowels of the earth that the ears can pick up no sounds of anything hitting the bottom..