Madonna's kids more important than yours

I walked into the house in a good mood, but when I went into the living room my wife had Oprah on TV, and Madonna was the guest. Being lauded for corresponding with a terminally ill fan, Madonna was called "the greatest person ever" by an audience member and friend of that fan. Applause erupted, the clapping interrupted slightly by the interjected sound of Mother Teresa clearing her throat from on high.

At first, I was openly thankful that Maya Angelou wasn't Oprah's guest yet again – her face etched with the pain and hardship of carrying the burden of a difficult childhood and how lousy the meals in first-class have become. Articulating stories of personal and global agony, anguish and oppression that can only take on greater meaning when verbally forged at the blast furnace of misery by a millionaire poet. That much said, by the time the Madonna interview was over and Oprah had finished sucking up like a five-foot-seven Oreck XL, I was wishing Angelou were back on.

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Madonna has become a superhero of sorts. Not because of great abilities or powers, but for her transformational prowess. She can be in full "normal mother with spiritual depth" mode one minute – sort of like Donna Reed after a weekend of brainwashing at the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram – then jump into a phone booth and quickly change into "Super-Slut, the Caped Cluelessader," saving the world from sexual inhibition and general decency while hipping us to other uses for vegetables and modeling bras that will poke the eyes out of those who dare venture too close.

One thing that Madonna has admitted to doing is hiding her children from what she does for a living, or perhaps more importantly, how she does it. We can give her credit for that, but that credit is taken back after she has the audacity to not have a care in the world if our children are exposed to what she does.

At one time, Madonna ruled the world of pop music. She was riding high atop the charts, along with several athletes and actors. Her album "Like a Virgin" has sold around 20 million copies, half of which were purchased by collectors who knew it could be the last time the world would ever see Madonna and the word "virgin" in the same photo.

She then married Sean Penn, a man with a head more cavernous and helium-filled than a blimp hangar, stayed in the news by continuing to release hit singles and strip, and because her husband treated tabloid photographers the way they deserve to be treated. Realizing that, in the celebrity industry, you have to flow with the tides if your career is to survive – Madonna did just that, and flowed away from Penn. Sean later went on a "fact-finding" mission to Baghdad, where the word "Penn" is now an Arabic term meaning "the dumbest guy in Iraq."

Madonna has since "reinvented" herself a couple hundred times – each reinvention a little filthier than the next until the day she realized that the only way she could get nastier would be to engage in Internet porn with six circus clowns and a pack mule. She then put the brakes on (couldn't find a pack mule), had kids and made a couple of movies that were the celluloid equivalent of a root canal.

She now lives in England, where she badmouths the United States and comes here only often enough to pick up sacks full of money, have her rump smooched on the Oprah Winfrey show and make headlines by quivering the cargo pants of teen-age boys everywhere via a make-out session with Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears on the MTV video music awards show. The old pop star open-mouthing the new pop stars. It was like a "passing of the bimbo torch" ceremony for bleach-blonde doofus diva skanks.

Now come children's books written by Madonna. It's only a natural progression, or in this case regression. She released a picture book in the early '90s called "Sex," so this all fits into her backward slide away from a scene she helped create. I won't let my kids look at any of her children's books for fear of chapter titles like "If it doesn't fit, don't force it," "No, you won't go blind," or "Why is Mommy's 'flashlight' buzzing?"

I will, however, use her as an example of somebody who claims to care about children so much, yet must shield her own from a world that she and her like-minded music and film-industry shock dealers helped build.

This "greatest person ever" is anything but.