NEVA CHONIN | Opinion The 21st century needs old icons

"I'll be back." -- Martha Stewart.
Like everyone else, I've been following Martha Stewart's legal drama. I followed it through her July 16 conviction, and I'll probably continue following it through the next appeal and the one after that. Funny thing is, I didn't care about Martha until she hit the skids. Now I am addicted. I am lost in her spin cycle of woe. I have become a Martha collaborationist, and I echo the sentiments of Magnet community center in the Castro section of San Francisco, whose July 16 marquee summed things up nicely: Free Martha!
That's right, forget about the five months in prison and skip the house arrest. Fine her, give her community service and let her walk. We all know Enron's Ken Lay is going to get off with a slap on the hand after defrauding millions, so why not spread some corporate American love to Martha and her measly $45,000 malfeasance? At least she didn't clean out her investors' retirement funds.
Contrasting icons
Call me immoral, but them's my apples. Here are some more, with a worm thrown in for good measure: When I ponder Martha's fall from grace, my thoughts inevitably turn to Courtney Love, another blonde entrepreneur whose life has recently hit the skids.
Why do I make this connection? Because Martha and Courtney were twin bookends in the '90s: One, a bleached careerist who personified rock 'n' roll chaos and delighted in twisting traditional femininity into something tough and dangerous; the other, a dry-iced professional who created order from chaos and transformed feminine domesticity into a power tool. Both women created their own personae and became self-made icons; both were as ruthless as any man. Properly applied, ruthlessness is not necessarily a bad trait.
The 21st century has not been kind to self-created women like Martha and Courtney -- or self-made men, for that matter. We are in the age of the manufactured mouthpieces -- the Britneys, the Jessicas, the Dubyas -- whose idiosyncratic ambitions are subsumed into a larger corporate agenda. Their Pinocchio-like attempts to express agency (see Britney and her perpetual marriage plans) are, shall I say, weak.
Face it
Depressing? A sign of the times, nonetheless. When medics and cops dragged a handcuffed and raving Courtney from her Manhattan loft on her 40th birthday to ship her off to Bellevue, I couldn't help identifying with her parting words: "Why?" she shrieked before the ambulance doors shut. Then, "Help!"
I look at the world these days, from Abu Ghraib to Mogadishu to Washington, D.C., and those two words, roared in despair by a 20th century rebel undone by the new world, say it all.
"I want to focus on my salad" doesn't have the same anthemic quality, but it does speak to more than lettuce and dressing. Like Courtney's fractured rant, Martha's oft-cited 2002 protest carries a universal resonance. All any of us want these days is to turn down the terror alerts and focus on our salads. When we can't do that simple thing, we want to know why. When we realize there's no answer, we freak and scream to the cosmos for help. The cosmos yawns, rolls over and goes to sleep.
We need them
We could use some of Courtney's slapstick rage right now. We could use Martha's mad skill for making darling little purses from sows' ears. We could use the inspiration and, let's face it, the escapism. As commentator Laura Lorson put it on NPR's "All Things Considered," Martha's world "was kind of like house porn for the middle class. ... Watching a Martha Stewart show was like taking a short vacation from my own haphazard life."
So enough with the schadenfreude. Corruption is as human as hangnails, and on the scale of atrocities, Martha and Courtney barely chart. Too many people want Martha to go down simply because her orderliness makes them feel messier, and it makes them feel better to know she's no saint. Many others celebrate Courtney's crash because it makes them feel a little less uncool about their dull, too-tidy lives.
As a consummate slob and underachiever, I resent both these wenches. I also relish their monumental egos and their kitsch bitchiness. Martha is our Athena of the Kmart; Courtney is our trailer-park Venus. And I think that, at a time when Stepford housewives are again creeping into the national psyche, we need all the flawed goddesses we can get.
XChonin writes for the San Francisco Chronicle. The On the Scene column by Vindicator Entertainment Editor Debora Shaulis will return next week.