Only Sherri and Barbara escaped unscathed!

Apparently drama works in daytime. E-Poll Market Research has released a study (unscientific, it would seem) of the most politically divisive celebrities--those preferred disproportionately by either Republicans or Democrats. Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the conservative voice on The View, is the most disproportionately loved by GOP members--with a difference of 51 percent in her approval by right- and left-wingers. Other celebrities appealing more to Republicans, in order: Hank Williams Jr., Tim Tebow, Ted Nugent, and Amy Grant. Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg, her couch counterparts in the kaffeeklatsch, are the third and fifth most disproportionately Democrat-beloved among celebrities, respectively. They are only less divisive than Spike Lee, Mo'Nique and, in fourth place, Forest Whitaker. (While Mr. Whitaker may seem anodyne, here's a fun fact: 7 of the 10 celebrities found to be most disproportionately appealing to Democrats are nonwhite, including who-knew-people-cared picks like Malcolm Jamal Warner!)

Last night, at what is widely hyped as the best night in New York fashion, the attendees of the annual gala benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute did not disappoint. Patterns, we saw a few: a lot of black, a lot of neon, a lot of feathers, and a lot of sheer. And Beyonce's dress? We still don't know what to think. See our picks for best and most bewildering are in this slideshow, and read our rundown from the red carpet here.

A new Christian in focus.

What’s the saying? March goes in like a lion, out like a lamb? Whoever coined that turn of phrase must have been talking about frozen mutton: we’ll be leaving March in some of the coldest weather we’ve felt all year.

Still, we can almost taste summer on our tongue—or is that the waft of “Linsanity” still lingering over the West Coast, where several medical marijuana dispensaries have been forced to rebrand their newest strain of weed named after the Knicks’ point guard? (People in California care about the Knicks?)

Of course, Jeremy Lin (despite his recent lins—er, wins—oh, forget it) might be last week’s news in the face of the Jets’ new acquisition, Tim Tebow. We’re not sure how New Yorkers will react to having a religious moment every time he feels the spirit, but let’s be honest: for the Jets, Mr. Tebow is a gift from heaven. General manager Mike Tannenbaum would have designed the “t” to look like Christ on the cross if that’s what it took to get the 250-pound devotee over to Manhattan. Well, to New Jersey. Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly may be praying for this cold weather to continue. At least it could keep Occupy Wall Street demonstrators from marching around the city. Zuccotti Park, Union Square, 42nd Street ... the protesters have shown up in full-force in the past two weeks, newly galvanized by the tragic death of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teen who was shot for the preposterous reason that he was purportedly looking suspicious by virtue of wearing a hoodie. (If that’s all it takes, look out, Mark Zuckerberg.) America is outraged, and if there’s one good thing to take away from this (no, it’s not popularity and unbiquitousness of hoodies, Mr. Charney), it’s that the issue of racial profiling is re-emerging at the forefront of American politics. Six Democratic senators from New York showed up to work wearing hoodies in protest.

While the Republican majority have yet to comment on this act, at least we know where Geraldo Rivera stands—in the dummy corner, after reinforcing on Fox News the idiotic notion that Trayvon Martin was killed because the way he was dressed legitimately provoked suspicion. Maybe someone should tell Mr. Rivera that his mustache is just asking for trouble. Eventually, someone is going to confuse him for a creepy, overly touchy bad uncle. Really, what did he expect, running around in public with that ’stash? The whole thing just leaves us, well, cold.

Before you know it, they'll be going shot for shot. (Getty)

So we've been toying with the idea of putting together one of those clever, linkbaity where-should-Tim-Tebow-move stories, but it turns out the exercise would be moot. Just as Jeremy Lin wound up in Westchester like so many of his teammates—but not all of them—the pigskin Jesus will almost certainly move to Jersey. Somewhere like Alpine or Short Hills or just maybe next door to his new intercity rival in Hoboken.

And that is exactly where the New York Jets—despite the team name—want him, according to a rather zany report from Fox News. Because New York is basically Sodom and Gomorrah in Rex Ryan's eyes.

Jets officials are strongly encouraging new recruit Tim Tebow to live in New Jersey to keep him as far away as possible from the temptations of New York's nightlife, a source close to the team has said.

While believing the quarterback will be a great asset on the field, off it they think Tebow — a teetotaler and virgin who is saving himself for marriage — will need to have his hand held.

"The team will encourage Tebow to live in New Jersey near the practice facility," the source said. "They are not going to want him to be influenced and distracted in the city."

Broadway Joe he ain't.

To be fair, it would make absolutely no sense to move to Manhattan anyway. As Chris Christie likes to point out, the Jets practice in New Jersey, play in New Jersey and, as far as we can tell, all live in New Jersey. Can you blame them? Who would want to battle bridge and tunnel traffic after a long day on the field.

Though maybe if Mr. Tebow can walk on water, he can bypass the trans-Hudson traffic.

Update: We forgot that Mr. Lin also is renting a place in the Financial District, so perhaps there is still hope for us godless mortals to live next door to a (non-Tennessee) titan.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

image via USA Today

The Statue of Liberty is Tebowing on the back cover of today's New York Daily News.

The tabloid has swiftly transferred its hype-mongering efforts from Knicks phenomenon Jeremy Lin to the newest New York Jet, Tim Tebow, promising "Timsanity."

Yesterday's trade of the Denver Broncos quarterback was also splashed on The News' front cover, as well as that of  rival New York Post. The News went with a simple "Amen," while The Post has Mr. Tebow taking a knee in Times Square.

The Post headline is "God Him!"--an apparent reference to the "Got Him!" cover the paper published the morning after Osama bin Laden was killed.

We'll call the curious equation of these two events "Osama Binsanity."

Quite a few New York fans we not particularly welcoming of Mr. Tebow:

[MORE: STEINBRENNER SYNDROME, THE DISEASE OF NEW YORK CITY SPORTS FANS]

New York Times Arts writer Dave Itzkoff wondered how the Jesus Christ Superstar premiere on Broadway will be altered by these events:

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

In the span of a few months,

1. New York City's very own Archbishop Dolan becomes a Vatican-ordained Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

2. New York City's Jeremy Lin, the biggest breakout of the 2012 NBA season, is deemed The New Tim Tebow.

and now...

3. Tim Tebow, friend of Jeremy Lin, professional sports' most notoriously devout Christian, is coming to play for the New York Jets. ESPN Reports:

Unusually quiet in recent weeks, the New York Jets shattered the calm Wednesday by completing a trade for polarizing quarterback Tim Tebow, the team confirmed. The Jets will send a fourth-round pick to the Denver Broncos, a source said. Tebow, a former first-round pick, went on the trading block Monday when the Broncos secured free agent Peyton Manning, who signed a five-year, $96 million contract.

In other news, the New Testament is having quite a year in the five boroughs. While bookies have yet to set odds on the Jets' potential success with Tebow on the team, needless to say, watching the interactions between New York Jets coach Rex "Let's Go Get a Goddamned Snack" Ryan and one of the most popular figures of Good Christianity in the Western World will be nothing short of phenomenal.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Hilary Swank, at a Santa Monica Cirque Du Soleil performance (Getty Images)

A selection of celebrities who have recently attended Cirque Du Soleil and been summarily featured in press on People or Us Weekly's web sites or PerezHilton.com, placed in ascending order of desperation for publicity:

• Christian Bale
• Halle Berry and Olivier Martinez
• Tim Tebow
• Pitbull
• Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, and Maddox Jolie-Pitt et al.
• Kylie Minogue
• "Pregnant Beyonce and hubby Jay-Z"
• Kristin Cavallari and Jay Cutler
• Perez Hilton

Beyonce wearing Babyonce. (Getty)

How can you tell 2012 has begun with a bang? Just log onto Twitter: the hot topics since Jan. 1 are a Venn diagram of American life—from pop culture to politics, to sports and even race relations. It’s beginning to feel an awful lot like looking into a microcosm not too dissimilar to those sea monkey kits we cried enough about to have Mom and Dad buy one, only to have it sitting in garage next to whatever Santa had brought us the year before. In fact, Twitter has morphed into This American Life. Well, again, for sea monkeys. At least there’s a community spirit in the barrage of 140-character thought bubblettes: it’s one of the few times that you’ll find New Yorkers venturing outside their insular world and joining in the national dialogue ­… even if it’s only online and it turns out that our sea monkeys are just brine shrimp with great marketing.

So here was your week on Twitter.

Sunday night (New Year’s Day), 60 percent of your social network updates were composed of armchair commentary on the Giants-Cowboys game, while the remaining 40 percent debated whether Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich would win the Iowa caucus. (Here’s a scary fact: Tim Tebow had the second most tweets per second about his 80-yard overtime touchdown pass, with 9,420 messages going up almost simultaneously.) Then whatever percentage of people who didn’t care about football or politics traded gossip about whether or not Beyoncé had secretly given birth already.

Monday evening was a 50-50 split between up-to-the-nanosecond reactions to the Iowa polls and equally fervent up-to-the-nanosecond reactions to The Bachelor.

Wednesday saw Twittersphere explode with the triple-whammy of dark-horse Rick Santorum tying for first place in Iowa and two celebrities activating (or in one case, reactivating) their accounts. Kanye West, who quit the social networking service several months back, hopped back on to give the world the gift of whatever crazy thing popped into his head. For example, iPhones! “Instead of kicking kids out of schools for using there iPhones … why not promote it? Allow kids to use search engines to do test … like the real WORLD!!! Give kids the amount of test they would have in a year in one day but they have to get everything perfect …” Steve Jobs in iHeaven, are you listening?

Joy to the world’s satirists, who now have that much more material to work with. Also joining Twitter on humpday was media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who quickly amassed 100,000 followers in one day (but chose to follow only six people himself, one of whom was The Observer’s editor, who was promptly unfollowed the following day—possibly because Mr. Murdoch didn’t like being direct messaged questions by curious journalists). Currently his list counts him following four of his own publications, former Village Voice intern Esther Zuckerman, Mark Pincus, Radiolab’s Jad Aumrad, economist Nouriel Roubini, Peggy Noonan, Eric Cantor, Jack Dorsey, a director of MOBY as well as the accounts for AllThingsD and the conservative group Ricochet. Sea monkeys, all around. But maybe Mr. Murdoch is just in a shopping mood and looking to buy a possibly overvalued social networking platform. Again. (Remember MySpace? Barely? Us, neither.)

Thursday Nick Cannon tweeted that his kidneys were shutting down and he was going to the hospital. Jon Huntsman tried to win voters Obama-style by using “new media,’ creating a user account and hashtags for #jonhuntsman, but he really needs to update his social media strategists, since his use of the service could actually be considered spam in the eyes of the all-mighty Twitter. (That’s the beauty of the Twitter policy: it doesn’t matter if you’re selling a free iPad or four years in office. If you’re bothering account members while they’re trying to discuss Downtown Abbey’s latest episode, you’re out of there.)

Saturday, of course, was officially Beyoncé Baby Day, when, for several hours, we all believed the child’s name to be Ivy Blue Carter. Thankfully, Gwyneth Paltrow took to Twitter and corrected us: It was Blue Ivy, Twitter. Phew, thanks for clearing that up! Then Alec Baldwin pulled a Kanye and returned to his 140-character fan base just in time to promote the 30 Rock premiere this week.
And then it was Sunday again, a clean slate where we can look forward to a whole new week of Bachelor commentary, Tim Tebow touchdowns, outrage over Rick Santorum’s latest round of homophobic statements and hashtags for #stuffgirlssay.

God bless America, the Internet and sea monkeys.

Illustration by Fred Harper.

“You will surely make noise when I take you deep,” texted Representative Anthony Weiner, the great BlackBerry lover, to his virtual inamorata, Lisa Weiss, the famous dissident, aviatrix and Vegas blackjack dealer.

“Yes I will,” she texted back. “I will be sore for days.”

This past year took the world deep, and the world made noise, but unlike Ms. Weiss, it had, in its soreness, no luxury of bed rest. We started with Middle Eastern uprisings and a Japanese nuclear meltdown, either of which might have filled a whole decade in some simpler era but in ours soon became back-page news. And yet, for all its careering, history could seem to stand ominously still. Writing in Vanity Fair at year’s end, Kurt Andersen rightly described the moment as creatively stagnant, perhaps exhausted, a late imperial Gaga-ing of high empire forms.

But as algorithms make consciousness a built environment, perception itself becomes in some way designed, in which sense 2011 wasn’t totally stuck in the past—it offered a new sensation-of-being: Drudge’s report on Trump’s quest for Obama’s birth certificate sends you clicking Facebook pictures of a lost love’s fat children as prelude to a brief viewing of the Muammar el-Qaddafi snuff film, Tim Tebow chatting-up Yahweh on the 50-yard line or, attention span permitting, Fukushima’s “heroes” streaming across your iPhone in frog masks and body suits, their solemn death-trudge naturally interrupted by a billing reminder from Verizon Wireless.

“It’s nice to have moments that are real,” said Ashton Kutcher to the young girl, sharing a little postcoital wisdom.

The real and the unreal, the historic, the mundane—this year they all rushed together, passing through the absurd en route to the grotesque.

Europe’s debt crisis festered until, by November, Poland—Poland—was begging Germany for salvation. The uncertainty frustrated America’s recovery; we saw the true unemployment rate at 17 percent, reports of gun-hoarding and ammunition shortages, and a national debt that in November passed the $15 trillion mark—a number that defies fathoming by minds made for counting mastodon.

In simpler times you might dose up on Prozac and just ride the shit out, but even that escape was lost. Writing in The New York Review of Books this summer, Harvard Medical School’s Marcia Angell described how the life-tenderizing antidepressants required by more and more Americans to endure their lifestyle paradise—including an estimated 500,000 toddlers on antipsychotics—didn’t beat their placebos once studies were controlled for side-effects. The vast majority of contributors to the DSM, psychiatry’s gospel, were receiving money from pharmaceutical companies, making it at best a brochure, and at worst proof that the age of fraud had compromised even our own self-understanding.

We buried two business legends, Steve Jobs and Jon Corzine. Jobs died gaunt and hollow-eyed, uttering the final words “Oh wow, Oh wow, Oh wow,” suggesting that the magic he brought into this world saw him out of it. Corzine expired somewhat less gracefully: under his leadership MF Global used $700 million in clients’ money to cover its own losses, an act of shameless, vile theft. The former Goldman CEO then went before the once-mighty U.S. Senate, which he’d joined years before as a short-lived retirement gig. “Senator, unfortunately I do not know where the money is,” said the Wall Street lion-turned-hyena, searching for impunity within stupidity.

The God-death extended into celebrity: 2010 offered the prescription-killing of Michael Jackson, tabloid pictures of Gary Coleman’s morbid intubation—the end-stage of a demystification of celebrity that started in the 1990s, and in 2011 seemed to tire even of itself, offering Charlie Sheen as a toothless maniac, and Lindsay Lohan, once compared to Marilyn Monroe, sneaking cigarette breaks from her court-ordered real-death experience changing the blood- and fluid-stained cadaver sheets at the L.A. County morgue.

We made new idols, hastily, brutally: Rebecca Black became a new, demented form of celebrity when, in the space of a few days, her unwitting tribute to the nihilistic-mundane, Friday, registered 60 million hits on YouTube. There was no ideal here, no message, no skill, just the freak-appeal of a meme sputtering out of control along with everything else. Later in the year, Penn State, which has one of America’s most storied college football programs, was revealed as a self-aware child sex ring focusing on the unprivileged and disempowered.

People sought escape in near and distant pasts.

The Tea Party longed for the moral purity of Eisenhower’s America, when gays responsibly took electroshock therapy, the military vaporized Pacific atolls as light recreation, and little black girls showed respect for German shepherds. Pot-bellied in nylon powdered wigs, they blamed Barack Hussein Obama—the obvious product of a Kenyan-Indonesian-Hawaiian-Ivy League conspiracy to do exactly what was never clear—for everyone’s troubles, demanding a return to a “pure” capitalism that had never existed, and which, as the they pushed America toward default, felt increasingly like Hobbes’s state of nature.

Occupy Wall Street evoked 1960s protest culture while failing to learn its lessons—that the police always win because they have the guns, and that the Flower Children became the Manson Family.

A tent city can be made to disappear, but Occupy’s unanswered questions won’t: How is no one in jail for the mortgage catastrophe? How can anyone preach “pure” capitalist gospel after the 2009 bailouts? How does a society that claims exceptionalism tolerate such staggering income inequality, and the awful loss of promise that is its greatest cost?

Filling the silence was a primal howl that had been building in America even during the boom. By 2006 reality shows like Top Chef and Project Runway, which promised to make you a better consumer, shared cultural space with Man vs. Wild, which taught you how to trap and eat lizards in primordial jungles, offering the fantasy of the stronger, more capable and fulfilled person you might become if magically delivered from everything around you that was making you miserable.

This year we went deeper into antisocial dreams. In 2010 The Colony succeeded as apocalyptic reality show simulating viral apocalypse. In its finale, one contestant, an increasingly paranoid carpenter, hid in a patch of tall weeds when simulated government agents offered help, assuming that their incompetence had been translated into the story line. It drew 2.3 million to the Discovery Channel at 10 o’clock on a Tuesday night, only to be outdone this year by The Walking Dead, whose pilot drew 5.7 million to AMC with a vision of apocalypse as pure cliché—the Sheriff, the Rich Elitist, the Crotchety Old Man, the Token Black Guy—all bickering before a legion of hopelessly dehumanized zombies in stunning anticipation of the Republican debates.

There were biological rites. Bin Laden’s assassination was pure death ritual, Delta Force-like spider monkeys on a primal raid. The web demanded pictures of a corpse, and when none were released people simply Photoshopped their own, mutilating an eye here, bruising flesh there, mouse clicks crushing human skull. They went viral—not exactly real or unreal, more the feeling of the one thing rubbing against the other.

The Royal Wedding was a fantasy-fertility spectacle in which Kate Middleton, the gifted AIDS researcher, finally succeeded in her long struggle to escape the upper middle class. Twenty-four million people watched, ratings so good that Kim Kardashian pretended her own marriage six months later. She drew 4.4 million viewers, made $17 million, then filed for separation, at which point a minor miracle occurred: after a decade of abuses and betrayals by elites, there was still, somehow, enough American capacity for belief that people claimed outrage at Ms. Kardashian’s disregard for the sanctity of marriage. But she was soon forgiven. And why not? With Kim’s Fairytale Wedding: A Kardashian Event, she’d let people abandon themselves for a two-part, four-hour E! stupor, and that was worth something, because in 2011, mainly, there was no escaping the present: there was way too much of it coming way too fast, conning, pleading, plotting, perverting even alpha into omega.

Wild monkeys will soon be joining the ranks of Fukushima’s heroes. The monkeys will be unleashed to test radiation in the site’s forbidden areas. One assumes they’ll be strapped with Chinese-made HD cameras, in the spirit of the day. The footage will be shaky, but that will let us know it’s real. We’ll watch as they go yapping, loping, hooting, meeting modern horror with primal awe. And maybe a few will pause in their heroism to find each other in the isotopic wreck, to mount and caress and conceive in naked assertion of life over death—

They’re up to the 92nd floor of One World Trade Center, which will replace the twin towers, whose destruction a decade ago began this whole regrettable era. They added 40 new stories this year, almost one a week. What everyone knows but won’t say is that we loved the old buildings only in the negative, as shafts of light on summer nights. They were violent in their homogeneity, in their Bauhaus rejection of history, “a pair of fangs” at the end of Manhattan, as Norman Mailer put it when arguing against them ever being built, rightly predicting that if they did go up, they’d be working for the devil.

But the new structure keeps surprising with its beauty. You’ll be downtown at night and you’ll look south and see its light-dotted form, fragile but determined—like a flower coming up through the snow.

editorial@observer.com