First Shiloh, now Suri: Enough with these celebrity babies already!

I feel obliged to preface today’s whinging by declaring that I’m not one of those cultural snobs who look down their noses at people who enjoy a little celebrity gossip. And, my previous articles on Lil’ Kim, Whitney Houston and Kevin Costner will attest to this fact.

That said; here goes:

The look of a pregnant woman or a girl who’s retaining too much water and just needs to pee really badly

Given the $5 million Angelina Jolie bartered in exchange for the first publicity photos of her “African” baby Shiloh, Tom Cruise should be able to demand more for pictures of his Scientology baby Suri than he’s ever negotiated for one of his motion pictures. But where I understand why these celebrities are perfectly happy to pimp their celebrity spawn for a handsome fee, I am simply stupefied that responsible news media would help propagate public interest in their babies who, after all, are completely indistinguishable from any other baby.

Therefore, jeers to ABC News for reporting a story yesterday about Cruise’s baby that one might have expected to appear only in tabloids that are notorious for their headlines about alien babies; no pun about Scientology intended….

In fact, to read the ABC report, one might get the impression that Cruise’s baby is either a UCO (unidentified cradle object) or a pawn in the most perverse publicity stunt in Hollywood history.

Under its “Where’s Suri?…” headline, ABC added innuendo to rank speculation about the reason why Cruise (and what’s her name) have yet to cash-in on Suri’s close-up. And instead of questioning this unseemly interest in Suri, it blithely followed the prurient lead of the appropriately named gossip website Defamer.com in actually questioning Suri’s existence.

The essence of the story is that enquiring minds find Cruise’s refusal to satisfy the public’s lust for a Suri sighting “profoundly strange” and a “riddle that would make the Sphinx incontinent.” Perhaps.

But where it’s relatively harmless to engage in idle gossip about whether Cruise is straight or gay, or what may have prompted him to jump like a chimpanzee all over Oprah’s couch; it’s cruel and mean-spirited to suggest that his baby is just a figment of his imagination. And, really, so what if he has yet to present Suri to John Travolta and Will Smith!

NOTE: Alas, inexplicable irregularities that have shown up on Suri’s official birth certificate have only fueled irresponsible gossip about her existence.

Tom Cruise, Suri