Will You People Get a Grip?

Lately, I’m starting to feel a faint pang of sympathy for Kevin Federline. That skeeves me out almost as much as feeling a faint hint of lust for Britney, but the controversy over his Superbowl commercial is getting way beyond ridiculous. After FedEx went some distance toward redeeming his public image by starring in a reasonably witty, self-mocking ad, the National Restaurant Association issued a bed-wetting statement charging that the ad was “a strong and direct insult to the 12.8 million Americans who work in the restaurant industry.â€? (I worked fast food in high school, but somehow the insult slid right past me. Apparently I haven’t fully embraced my cultural identity as a Taco Time-American.) Now Federline has issued his own statement defending the ad, and claiming his own piece of the fast food heritage:

It was nothing towards nobody. I actually used to work in fries. That was my first job. Everybody came from that. A lot of people slung hash.

There. Glad that’s settled. Now we can all move on, provided people like Steven Anderson, President and CEO of the National Restaurant Association, will stop being so fucking sensitive. There are more important things to think about, like the War on Terror and a whole smorgasbord of fatal illnesses. Hell, we as a nation could more fruitfully focus on the tragedy of persistent hangnails than on this crock of drivel.