Why did photo ace Annie Leibovitz get a bum rap?

Will all the 15-year-old teeny-bopper girls who read Vanity Fair magazine please stand up? Oh, no one. Then how about all you younguns, the future mothers of our future leaders, whoever heard of the magazine, raise your hands?

Still no takers. Than I leave it with you that the unbelievable, insane media fuss over starlet “Hannah Banana� (Yes, I know her real stage name) appearing in Vanity Fair with her bare shoulder and back is another example of nutty media madness.

In all fairness to the real media (like this newspaper for example), the alleged media that follow and record every blip by 15-year-old kids like Miley Cyrus — that’s Hannah’s real name — are not members of the media of Edward R. Murrow and his crew of real news reporters of real events that meant something to real people.

This sleazy bunch, with their obtrusive cameras and microphones, who follow around the alleged newsmaker entertainers of our day, should be banned from public streets, public buildings and television studios.

No reasonable real person of talent, e.g. Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Tom Sawyer et al, should ever be charged with aggravated assault if they break a camera or shove a microphone into the kingdom come of a  paparazzi or two. Rather, President Bush, who thinks running this big country of ours is so easy, and is never at his desk in the White House, should fashion a new medal to honor celebrities who crack open the heads of a few blood suckers with cameras and recorders.

u           u           u

I visited friends in a nearby town recently and, after supper, their 15-year-old daughter was asked to show off the dress her mother bought for the upcoming senior prom. Senior prom, the kid is a freshman and shouldn’t be going to high school proms until she is a senior. Why not? Because the mother who has slim means of support, had to buy her wildly expensive pointy-toe high-heel shoes that are wildly uncomfortable and a gown that was equally expensive.

When the youngster put on the gown to  show us how she looked, I was shocked, shocked. Her back is bare to the midriff and when I looked at her from the side, I shouted: “Annie, Annie Leibovitz, get your camera, I have another half-naked living doll.â€�

u           u           u

Hard to believe how much the media have stopped reporting on the latest setback to the surge in Iraq to spend time talking about Hannah Banana.

One talking head has said it was her parents’ fault, trying to package the teenster so she would be able to make the transition to adult stardom. So far, only one of this ilk has made it, Brooke Shields, and she had a Princeton education before returning to entertaining us on the silver screen.

But back to Vanity Fair. One reporter said Miley and her parents and grandmother were on the set, and that she and her father draped themselves together in a pose that was even more disturbing than the harmless one that appeared.

Another report said her mother and father had left and only grandma and a friend were around when Annie shot the shot that sent a media tsunami roiling around the Van Allen radiation belt.

One pundit wants to blame Annie, who incidentally is a Waterbury native, because she has been known to work hard to pose folks she is photographing in interesting poses. Is that new news? Is there a news photographer in the whole wide world who hasn’t at one time or another posed his subjects?

u           u           u

And as far as the risqué culture of our time, fat chance that the morals of the country’s 15-year-olds are going to be changed one whit by this photograph. They already have Lindsay Lohan, Britney Bimbo, Donald Dump’s ex-wives and a stack of other babes who appear half-naked in print and on the tube to corrupt their morals.

As I once noted in this hallowed column, I see more half-naked girls in Dunkin’ Donuts than most 15- year-olds see in a month.

Another argument has been made that Vanity Fair and Annie should know that most of the country doesn’t approve of child porn. Then why do they watch it on TV and why don’t they write to their local papers and shout they are going to stop their subscriptions unless the editors drop the so-called “people� feature that more often than not looks like a page of commercials for Victoria’s Secret. (What secret, that big breasts are in, flat chests are out?)

That’s enough, I’m going to take a nap and dream of Ingrid Bergman, an actress whose beautiful face was what real women looked like in the good old days, or further back when the young Cleopatra, queen of the Nile, took off her clothes for the aging Julius Caesar, or going back even further, when Salome flung off seven veils whilst dancing for the lecherous King Herod.

Freelance writer Barnett Laschever, the curmudgeon of Goshen, thinks Brittany is a province of France and shouldn’t be foisted on young girls. He is co-author of “Connecticut, An Explorer’s Guide,� in its sixth edition.