I find your lack of faith refreshing...

The utter lack of a sense of reverence for anything at all is one of the things I love most about geeks... and often, it’s the things we love most that are the greatest butts of our snark.

That is not the case, however, with The Curious Incident of Tom Cruise’s Celebrity Meltdown Over Katie Holmes. We might have to claim Cruise as a Generation Xer, just barely (he was born in 1962... and I am going to get around to creating a working definition of what exactly "Generation X" is soon, I promise), but he’s certainly no geek. But the multiple layers of derision and intellectually superior condescension that come together in the Free Katie movement -- as typified by FreeKatie.net -- warm the cockles of my cold, cynical, desperate-for-amusement geek heart.

Scary. [image snatched from FreeKatie.net, which snatched it from Defamer]

Everyone absolutely knows that the Cruise/Holmes’s "love affair" is mere publicity grab for the new movies both of them have opening this month, right? He’s in Spielberg’s updating of War of the Worlds, she’s in the Christian Bale/Christopher Nolan Batman revival -- all of which makes the entire thing so stupid, because it’s not like a new Spielberg SF flick and a new comic-book flick were going to have any trouble at all attracting audiences... unless the PR flacks who clearly engineered this bizarre "relationship" are looking to pull in everyone’s mom who watched Cruise behave like he’d gone off his meds on Oprah’s show, jumping on the couches and howling like a crazy person about how not gay he is. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Anyway, the Free Katie people are seeking to get the poor girl out of the Scientological clutches of Cruise, who honestly believes 70-million-year-old aliens infect his brain. And you can buy a T-shirt to support this worthy cause.

The wags behind the campaign are funny and clever, of course, but they’re more than that: they’re right on the frontlines of Generation X, proving that we are no mere consumers of Hollywood’s pabulum -- we can throw it right back in their faces and laugh. And make a coupla bucks in the process, too.