Cool Cleveland contributing writer Lyz Bly examines politics, current events, art, and popular culture with an unabashedly feminist lens in her Skirting the Issue column, thereby "skirting" contemporary issues. Her latest installment Love.Moore.Bush examines male double standards, the media's ploy to distract audiences from relevant issues, and American culture's fixation with the absurd.

On Friday, June 25 as I sat in the waiting room of my doctor's office, I picked up an issue of People magazine. On the rare occasion that I look at People or any of the other star rags, I find that I've never seen most of the people on the pages. This time, however, I was momentarily entertained, or perhaps disgusted, by a two-page spread on Courtney Love's latest escapades. All of her newest dramas were illustrated with "outrageous" photos of Courtney drinking whiskey with members of her band, Courtney standing on David Letterman's desk, facing him with her shirt raised, Courtney being passed through a crowd during an impromptu performance at an LA nightclub, and Courtney in court for assault and drug charges.

The editors of People are not the only people who are fixated with the actress/rock star's lifestyle. Over the past several months, her image has been plastered on web sites, newspapers, and on television news and entertainment programs. And bring up Courtney Love to those outside of the media – particularly average white males – and you will hear a litany of criticisms of her lifestyle and character; most of them say, "She's a slut," "She's a greedy bitch [for suing for rights to Nirvana's material]," "She killed her husband," "She abandoned her daughter." There is no doubt that Courtney Love has led a troubled life, but most of the damage she's done has been to her self. And if she's a "slut," if she's greedy, so what? Why do these alleged character traits piss people off? Sexual promiscuity and greed are the American way (especially if you are white and male). Tales of the sexual adventures of most male rock, pop, or rap stars – Mike Jagger, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent – are not only de rigueur, they are applauded, glamorized. And in the 1960s, when Jim Morrison exposed himself on stage, the act only added to his status as a cult hero and a "genius."

Unfortunately, the greed issue extends beyond the music industry, to much higher, and more socially influential realms. Later on that same Friday, my husband and I headed to the Cedar-Lee Theater to view one of the first screenings of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. If even ten percent of what Moore uncovered about Bush and his family's connections to oil and the Middle East is true, the man should be impeached immediately. You want to talk greed – think of the more than 850 killed and 5,270 wounded U.S. troops in Iraq, and the thousands of Iraqi civilian causalities (U.S. citizens will most likely never know the civilian death toll) all for the sake of oil and the profits involved in "rebuilding" Iraq. The 97 percent of us who are not lining our pockets with oil and reconstruction profits should be completely outraged to the point of revolution. If they want real scandal, readers of People magazine should be reading articles on how Bush and his cronies plan to spend the profits that they are, or will be, reaping in Iraq. Instead, people are poised to stand in judgment of Courtney Love for taking off her shirt, abusing prescription drugs, and feuding with surviving members of Nirvana for rights to the band's unreleased material.

Of course, this is a double standard; for centuries, men have been given the cultural license to behave in ways that are deemed inappropriate for women. But in this case, it is obviously so much more than that. Bush's greed has hurt people and the war itself is based on lies. Courtney Love is mostly hurting herself, and she is transparent about her flaws and mistakes – as the matriarch of Generation X, she's made a career out of singing about female angst and self-loathing. What Moore's film demonstrates is that there is nothing transparent about Bush's agenda. This is why Republicans and those in Bush's circle tried to stop the film from being distributed during an election year.

A therapy veteran, ex-boyfriend of mine once said, "Hurt people hurt people." As trite as this saying is, it always made some sense to me. It explains Courtney Love's chaotic life, but what about George W. Bush? What is his excuse for hurting thousands of people? How "hurt" can this man, born with a 24-karat spoon in his mouth, be? As Moore's film demonstrates, the only group he truly cares about, and doesn't want to "hurt" are, as Bush himself refers to them, "…the haves and the have mores."

As a culture, it's time that we take our eyes off of the sins of the Courtney Loves of the world and start looking at those people whose decisions truly impact the lives and futures of millions of people. In his presciently trenchant 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, French writer Guy Debord theorized on the subversively distractive power of images, celebrity, and political propaganda in societies where citizens enjoy the privilege of "leisure." Debord contends that spectacle serves those in power as it is, "…a permanent war waged to make it impossible to distinguish…satisfaction from…survival." Simply put: as long as we let celebrities and the media distract us from what those in power are up to, we'll never truly know what's going on in the board rooms of major corporations, or in the clandestine chambers of the White House and the Pentagon. As long as we're alienated from the truth, we are only surviving, not living to our fullest potential.

So, go a head, stay on your couch and pass judgment on Courtney Love's lifestyle, obsess over Nicole Kidman's dress size, or ponder Britney Spears' wedding plans. Somewhere out there an able-bodied woman with three kids just lost her job. Or, even worse, thousands of families are living with the fact that their spouses, sons or daughters are not coming home from Iraq, or that they are coming home, but they will return transformed: missing limbs, missing their innocence, or their sanity. from Cool Cleveland contributor Lyz Bly (:divend:)