The verdict finally came down for the divorce case of Heather Mills and Paul McCartney. Both sides put forth their cases, and most professional pundits gave forth their opinions on the outcome. Of course, those who were familiar with the case knew that Heather didn’t…uh…have a leg to stand on.
Great, now that that’s out of the way, wee may continue. Under normal circumstances, making fun of the handicapped is a reproachable breach of decorum, a tasteless last bastion of the talentless, humorless hack. On the other hand, it is Heather Mills, and being handicapped and being a gold-digging unrepentant whore cancel each other out.
Granted, we still don’t know all the behind-the-scenes information. Nor do I normally really care all that much. My involvement in the lives of the rich and famous has a pretty sharply declining cliff of interest for me. Without an incredibly graphically detailed description of exactly what it is that a drunken, coked-up Lindsay Lohan does in the darkened hallway of a Lisbon discotheque to earn her reputation as one whose knees are not, in fact, in any danger of permanently getting stuck together, I don’t much care all that much. Cest la vie, and all that, they said, as the Titanic crashed into Gomorrah.
And yet this particular story just irritated me to no end. Not irritated in the same sense that knowing that Social Security isn’t getting fixed or that it’s going to snow at the end of March irritates me, but knowing that there are people out there—undeserving people, mind you—that are getting more than they should ever be rewarded. And Heather Mills seemed to embody that exact, specific demographic.
Mills started off as a mere blip on my cultural radar. It’s not exactly unknown to those who know me that while I will concede that while the Beatles are a cultural icon, I put them right up there with Bear Stears and professional baseball as the single most overrated cultural entity of mankind. Partly it’s the songs—I find that their range of their early bubble-gum pop to their later psychedelic let’s-change-the-world-through-music nonsense has only a small overlapping era of a few years where they produced songs I actually enjoy. Granted, I think the Rolling Stones are overrated, too, but at least they don’t make any pretense about art or world peace or other intangible, unattainable things that sell records but also delude fans into thinking any of it matters. They’re officially known as the E*Trade Rolling Stones, for crying out loud, but at least they’re laughing all the way to the bank, which is more than Ringo Starr can say.
So the trials and tribulations of Paul McCartney’s love life weren’t exactly something I pondered over my toast and mango juice in the morning. I usually concentrate more on crafting new and creative ways to get out of doing any work for that day while still getting paid. So when I offhandedly heard about McCartney finally moving past his beloved Linda, a woman who is a saint because while she couldn’t sing and wasn’t very good within the music industry at least she wasn’t Yoko Ono, I kind of registered that in the back of my mind of things to dredge up from the stormy recesses of my brain if it could ever conceivably help me get in some girl’s pants.
The few times I actually saw Heather I wasn’t impressed. Sure, it’s possible it’s because I only saw her on Larry King Live, which is a painful enough process in and of itself, and it’s possibly that it was the first time I had seen Paul in quite some time, probably since “Band on the Run.” Will I still love him when he’s sixty four? Depends on whether all of his face has to be sixty four. Holy cats, did the doctors just paste big chunks of foam rubber on his face and hope he wouldn’t notice? Anyway, the entire process soured me to Heather, who kind of came off as a bossy witch. (Ahem.) I was willing to write it off at the time that it was because I was watching her try to converse with two extraordinarily old men who didn’t quite seem to grasp the fact that they were, in fact, being broadcast live on television.
But over the next few years my opinion did not approve. Again, I was more than willing to write it off to the grumpiness of someone who has gone through extensive physical trauma in their life, though I kind of assumed marrying a freakin’ Beatle would have been enough of a self-esteem boost. And I was also willing to cut her some slack, not being used to being hounded by the press—and not just the press but the British paparazzi, a relationship that is akin to comparing the jug of stale, fetid water sitting in your garage with an Indian typhoon that’s trying to eat your soul.
As the details of the divorce proceedings came out, though, I turned against the woman. I’m an objective person, or I like to pretend that I am, so I incorporate the fact that I’m probably only getting one side of the story. But somehow I doubt it. Mills maintains that she is not a gold digger, which only proves that she apparently does not exactly know what the definition of a gold digger is. (A good reference for her, by the way: any mirror.) And her protestations that $49 million just wasn’t enough to raise their daughter with—saying, in effect, well, I guess she won’t have enough money to fly home to see daddy—is something that would give any PR executive a heart attack. When she fired her lawyers and represented herself, it may have seemed an aggressive and bold move on her end but really just made her look like a deluded, power-hungry amateur former high-class prostitute and pornographic model. (I’m just sayin’.) The last straw, though, is when, after the verdict, she poured water over the head of Paul’s attorney, the last, desperate, childish act of a desperate, childish woman. And that is all the tasteless justification you need to call her Eileen.
Posted by Stephen 
American Lament 