Living...In Prison

After her simply grueling five-month prison term in Alderson minimum security prison in West Virginia, which involved cleaning the administration building and making cucumber sandwiches for former mayors, Martha Stewart has been released back into her natural habitat. She will still be under house arrest for the next five months and will be tagged with a bright orange identifier so all of the Martha-watchers can easily locate her and track her migratory patterns throughout the year. Actually, she will have to wear an ankle bracelet for the next five months, it's just that an orange tag permanently stapled to her ear is more amusing. It would also make color coordination efforts for her wardrobe much more difficult.

I was surprised to learn that most people (now) think that her sentence was too harsh. What a crock of shit. When everyone learned about her little insider trading incident a couple of years ago we were all mad as hell and would have probably marched straight to her house, pitchforks and torches in hand, and burnt it to the ground while she scrambled to save her life's collection of doilies and Tupperware if we hadn't been pre-occupied with marching to Iraq instead. Now it appears that Martha has won the sympathy vote from nearly everyone around as people gush about how she's become a new woman.

Human beings are amazing as individuals and terrifying as a nation. The only thing we enjoy better than tearing someone down is building them back up again. It's true, we love stories of triumph in the face of adversity and the media only serves to supercharge our sentiment, by turning villainess into victim. I have no doubt that Martha will, in fact, bounce back easily from her losses and her company will be stronger than ever. For now some would say she has "paid her dues" and is forgiven her former indiscretions, but has she learned anything from this experience? I can only hope that Martha realizes she's not infallible and should drop the holier-than-thou attitude. If it means she will no longer have an orgasm every time she bakes a cake or plants a petunia I think it's worth it. Her new outlook on life is sure to be addressed in her inevitable book about living in prison, which will include topics like "Bars of soap on a budget", "101 uses for toilet tissue rolls" and "How Martha put the POT back in potpourri".

Yes, Martha is off the hook, until we find someone else to hate temporarily. Hey, who's this Michael Jackson person? Well, Pepsi already tried torching him years ago and that didn't work, better pull out the big guns. I've got it! Martha could find redemption by riding a nuke straight into the Ferris Wheel at Neverland Ranch and finally rid us of three things that plague America today: a crappy amusement park, a celebrity pedophile and an old woman with a better-than-you attitude. Now THAT would be "A good thing".