Look, I’m not that old. I’m certainly not out of touch. I watch TV. I read newspapers. I cruise the internet like a hungry shark, eating informational tidbits as I go, each and every day.

But sometimes when I go to the newsstand I look at the enormous rack of magazines and I think, “Who are these people?”

Both People and Us Weekly, for instance, feature dramatic developments into the lives of a couple named Jon and Kate.  I have no idea who these people are.

In People, for instance, there’s a big picture of this blond woman with very professional hair staring dolefully out at us next to a huge headline, WE MIGHT SPLIT UP. “Jon & Kate, A Marriage In Crisis” says the box above it. Then there are a bunch of bullets below the headline. But who the frig ARE they? And why don’t I know? 

In US Weekly, contrariwise, it turns out that Kate has her own bodyguard because Jon threatened to hire a P.I. when she got close to somebody named Steve Neild! Who is Steve Neild? Should I know? Why? Apparently, Kate is a mom of eight and she refused to touch her bleeding son during a press event? Really? Why would she do that? Did she do that? When? What kind of press event?

Have I been spending too much time with Madoff and Geithner and Bernanke and Thain and that whole crowd? Am I out of the culture? Have I lost my mojo? While I’m thinking about TARPs and bailouts and payoffs and pyramids and consumer confidence, have I lost sight of the important issues that are moving our society? Should I be watching more TV? A different kind of TV?

What else don’t I know about? Fill me in! Hurry!

Yesterday I unearthed a little nugget of American history of which I had no prior knowledge. While working on a posting on busyness, I did what I usually do on a lot of subjects: went over to Wikipedia to see what the collective wiki-mind might have to say about it. I typed in the words, “as busy as a chicken with its head cut off wiki.” Up popped the listing on Mike the Headless Chicken, whose picture once again graces our page. 

At first I thought the whole thing was kind of a gag. I mean, a picture of a chicken walking around with his head cut off is pretty amusing, as was the incredible fact that Mike lived for a year and a half in that condition after, you know, his head was separated from his body. 

Then, later in the day, I went back and read the entire wiki on the incident, which took place in the late 1940s and was, in its own way, the Britney Spears saga of its day… or maybe Anna Nicole Smith. It’s the story of a living creature turned by an accident of fate into an object of tragic fascination… and how much the public is willing to pay for the chance to buy a little piece of that tragedy.

The bare outlines are these: Mike’s owner was instructed by his wife to get a chicken for their dinner. He went out back and found Mike, who at that point was a pretty normal chicken, in the sense that he had his head. The owner then botched that operation, leaving Mike in his compromised state. The fact that he lived through what many poultry had not made him suddenly an object of affection and fascination to his handlers.

They nursed him back to a certain kind of health of sorts. He was never quite the same, but he was unaware of his status as a diminished entity, trying at times to crow and strutting around proudly as if he was a normal bird.

The owners came to love Mike and care for him during his tortured remaining time on the planet. The physical realities of his situation were dire. He had respiratory problems. Eventually, he died much the way Jimi Hendrix did. Before doing so, however, he had become a national sensation earning, in 2005 dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for the people who cared for him and marketed his unique ability to appear in his headless state.

Today, in a small city in Colorado, they still have Mike the Headless Chicken Day, sixty years after the decease of the celebrity, and there’s a whole website dedicated to Mike – his life, his career, his untimely passing. 

In an era that has seen the death of hundreds of once-loved brands throughout our culture, and total amnesia of the populace on a wide variety of famous figures and events, Mike the Headless Chicken remains a legendary presence, along with names like James Dean, Judy Garland, and now Heath Ledger, individuals who were doomed by the very thing that made them infinitely fascinating and marketable.

Perhaps, he didn’t have the talent these icons possessed. But he sure had a lot of pluck.

1. If Paris Hilton had been a short, fat, bald, male mogul with glasses too big for his head, would she be going through all this?

2. Why can’t Paris Hilton wear her blue contact lenses in prison? Why did one outlet, when reporting on that fact, offer the amusing headline, “Don’t It Make My Blue Eyes Brown”? Is that funny? Or just mean? Can we tell the difference anymore?

3. Why are people happy over the fact that Paris Hilton would be denied the use of her hair extensions in prison? Didn’t we all like her with her hair extensions? Do you want to be seen without your hair extensions?

4. Why did people at a recent awards show laugh and hoot at Paris Hilton, who was in attendance, when host Sarah Silverman made fun of her? Why did most people, including the media, express giggly satisfaction when the camera then focused on her impassive face, trembling on the verge of tears? Would we all have been even more pleased if she had run sobbing from the room then? Or was it better that we had to wait a couple more days for that?

5. Does anybody really doubt that Paris Hilton is on some kind of medication that helps her maintain the weird, Mona Lisa smile that has become her trademark? Are people aware of what it’s like to stop medication like that cold turkey?

6. Does anybody really doubt that, when freed by the Sheriff and confined to her home, Paris Hilton truly believed, for some reason, that she would be permitted to attend the hearing by telephone? Was it really necessary to send policemen to drag her out into the sunlight, throw her in a vehicle and drag her down to the court with hundreds of vicious paparazzi, helicopters, etc., in attendance? Why were there so many photographers there? How did they know to be there at exactly the right time? Or are they just there ALL the time?

7. What’s with this judge? Doesn’t he seem like he’s on a jihad of some kind? If you were in trouble, would you want to be confronted with somebody so implacable, cruel, jealous of his power, obviously emotional, who appears to take your situation very personally and is determined to see you punished to the full extent of the law? If you or one of your friends screw up, do you want to be punished to the full extent of the law? Is anybody in this whole society, come to think of it, punished to the full extent of the law? Why is everybody so pleased with this guy?

8. And why is everybody so mad at the Sheriff who got Paris Hilton temporarily sprung? Because he’s standing in the way of justice? Or because, in treating Paris Hilton like a young, sick celebrity in need of certain kinds of help, he’s being, like, a total party pooper?

9. Is this really about equal treatment under the law? Or is it possibly about some kind of ritual punishment? For what?

10. Aren’t we all having way too much fun with this? And why?