This morning I saw a FOX interview with a person that I had only heard of: Kevin (K-Fed) Federline, the white rapper and ex-Mr. Britney Spears. Brian Kilmeade asked if the humorous commercial K-Fed made for the Super Bowl “played into his loser image?” I confuse K-Fed with the hero of Malibu’s Most Wanted. This movie isn’t a masterpiece of humor but it does feature some very funny characters. The white rapper hero of Malibu’s Most Wanted is endearingly innocent and, so, much more sympathetic than K-Fed. Still K-Fed does share one feature with Malibu’s Most Wanted: They are both (as they used to say in Massachusetts) “soft as grapes,” i.e., not overly bright or sane.
My daughter Poppy idolizes K-Fed and regards him as a role model. K-Fed is a person without talent or any kind of appeal who, nevertheless, has complete self-assurance. When K-Fed’s record label was considering whether to fire him or not, he demanded a helicopter to take him from the airport to his home. He is quoted as saying something like “Homie (or K-Fed, referring to himself in the third person) don’t do the freeway.” Here is a person who has a post-doctoral degree in self-esteem.
Poppy, who has the average human amount of self-doubt, envies K-Fed’s total inability to engage in self-criticism. Remember the movie A Beautiful Mind? Think A Beautiful Ego. Poppy’s dictum is “Do only one stupid thing at a time.” For instance, if you are running drugs, don’t speed in a car with anticop bumper stickers. We have “hate crimes” in the United States now; isn’t it time we had “stupidity crimes”? A person who videotapes his own crime should have 2 years added on for “stupidity.” It’s only fair. It may seem that Poppy would condemn K-Fed but he takes self-delusion to another level. If Nirvana is the state of total selflessness, there must be a sort of equal and opposite anti-Nirvana, a state of total self-involvement. K-Fed may have attained this state. Of course, this is probably just a fantasy of Poppy’s. She wishes that such a creature could exist.