I Love Me More Than Brangelina

Here is a picture of me you can have for free.

While I am completely and utterly in favor of gay marriage, and in fact almost any marriage between two people who love one another, I am unequivocally against the marriage of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, who just this week announced their engagement. For starters they have like a dozen kids already, so naturally I thought they had married long ago. But recently their stunning news started creeping into my intentionally well-insulated life: At the surpermarket checkout the twosome is on all the magazine covers, except of course for O where, as usual, the cover shows Queen Oprah (not to be confused with Queen Latifah, although that's hard for obvious reasons) who this month is seen standing with her arm around herself at age 21. (Apparently Oprah's conceit springs from a bottomless well.) Then too, it's all over the Internet about Brad and Angie, so when I check my email it seeps into my consciousness; recently I even caught wind of it on the TV news. The word on the street is that their wedding pictures will go for very big bucks, considering some of their baby pictures sold to People, that bastion of sophistication, for $14 million.

Which leads to one question: Why can't people be their own superstars? Maybe Oprah is right: If we love ourselves as much as some people love Angie and Brad and the rest of the Hollywood elite, we'd all have more self-esteem and they'd all have fewer cars, swimming pools, houses and yachts. That would certainly impact our economic situation, at least as much--if not more--than Cash for Clunkers did.