By Derek Lipkin
Managing Editor

When I think of popular culture today, I have to go to my friend Mary J. Blidge for a quote that perfectly explains my feelings.

“No more drama.”

Enough is enough. Enough Paris Hilton, enough Michael Jackson and enough Reverend Jesse Jackson. I could list hundreds more names, but I’d die.

Every day, mine and countless other families are pumped full of drama. It is in newsstands across America, on every popular television channel and plastered over every Internet news site. Drama. And I am tired of it.

I’d like a week. A week for me to relax, for me to be free from the “he said she said.”

I do not want any more Michael Jackson news. Never have I seen so much made over any celebrity. Every day, there is something new about his previous run-ins with the law or what gender he was yesterday and which he will be deciding on before tomorrow’s operation.

I do not want any more Paris Hilton news. She was in one sex tape and only three minutes were released. She was 19 years old. People make mistakes. You wouldn’t like it if everyone saw you being sodomized in night vision now, would you?

And don’t ever get me started on supermarket tabloids. It is a crime they are even on the newsstand. I don’t care what the First Amendment says, those are ridiculous. I don’t know how many times I have seen Hiliary Clinton having sensual sex with space aliens on the magazine covers, but it is disturbingly high. I mean, if I was the alien race, I would be starting the destructive invasion of Earth right away. Who in their right mind would have sex with Hillary Clinton? I mean, her own husband decided against it.

When people fight “bad influences,” like porn shops and big tobacco, they only encourage those influences. Shows like “Entertainment Tonight,” “Inside Edition” and the entire channel of “E!” are filled with skinny, fashionable, attractive women (that is, except Anna Nicole Smith), who walk on red carpets with Prada bags, have “True Hollywood Stories” of drinking and doing drugs constantly, get major facial reconstruction and then blame all their stress on the fame.

And little kids are smart; they will pick up on this stuff when they see it. If you think children can watch “Wild On Cabo San Lucas” and “Howard Stern” without wondering, at the very least, where babies come from, I’d say you were either from Amsterdam or Vegas.

So I have had enough. Enough Paris Hilton sex tapes and enough Pee-Wee Herman public masturbation and enough FOX-News-“this is why Democrats cause cancer” and enough R. Kelly peed on a couple of dumb teenagers.

Sure, all those subjects make great jokes, so I shouldn’t complain.