Jenna, Jenna, Jenna, you’re so grown up. Why it seems like only a few years ago — back in the days when I was a reporter — you were sticking your tongue out at me and the rest of the media entourage after attending Easter Services at Fort Hood. Oh wait, it was just a few years ago. A little more than three I believe, but I could be wrong. For that matter, it might not have even been at Fort Hood. These things all run together nowadays.
Now, at 25, you have a teaching job, you’re engaged and you are hawking a new book you’ve (at least somewhat, I’d hope) written.
It must be stressed that I bear no ill will toward Jenna, her sister or any of her family including her pin-headed father. Actually, I don’t think Gee Dubya is a pin head. He just acts like one, or so I sort of hope, because even I can’t bear the thought that “ma fella Amercans” could elect (well, at least elect for one-term)a president like George Herbert Walker Texas Ranger Chuck Norris Magillacudy McDougall Sanchez O’Henry Bush. And besides, back to Jenna again, I always kind of felt a kinship with her at least in the respect that she liked to party and raise hell.
Whatever Jenna can get out of life, I advise her to take it and run with it because tomorrow whatever it is might no longer exist. Which is really to say I wish her well on her book. I even find it admirable that if the president’s daughter is going to use her celebrity to sell books at least they are publications with such important topics such as HIV and AIDS.
What does irritate me about Jenna’s new book isn’t Jenna. No, my antipathy stems from however many other struggling writers must feel when yet another celebrity’s book is even considered for publication, much less published.
Now certainly it doesn’t take much to be published these days, especially on what Jenna’s paw calls “The Internets.” But to see your work published somewhere in which its publication both means something and pays more than free copies is much more difficult.
Books which are published ahead of the line of the great unwashed writers by offspring of the rich and famous is nothing new. Just think of some of the names: John F. Kennedy, Caroline Kennedy Whatever Her Married Name is Now (who is actually a very good author) are just a couple of people who come to mind. Oh yeah, Paris Hilton. Paris Freaking Hilton. And I should point out that it is not just these celebs who have books published while the rest of us live on ramen noodles that ticketh me off. It is relatively easy to publish your own book these days. It is selling those books which is the trick. It is there where the rich and famous and their kids really jump in front of the line. They get book tours while Homer sells his memoirs of the great Stray Cats concert that never happened at a flea market if he is lucky.
So no Jenna, I don’t hate you because you are beautiful or famous or whatever. I don’t hate you at all. It is just disheartening to once again think of having to work even harder to get something you have written to one day bring some reasonable critical success and/or adequate compensation.
When your daddy isn’t president you have to try just that much harder. So that I will do — right after I take a little nap.