MILLIONS OF AMERICANS along the eastern seaboard are hunkered down in fear, weathering the effects and aftermath of Hurricane Isabel. Millions more are rending their garments, collapsing in sustained crying jags, and cursing their Maker over the untimely demises of John Ritter, Johnny Cash, and the Women’s United Soccer Association. Still, amidst so much devastation, the fates have kindly given us a ray of hope, a candle in the darkness, a chocolate on our pillow. They have brought an end to the world’s single most annoying couple: Jen and Ben. It seems like more than a fair trade. For the last year, even casual television-watchers and newspaper-readers have been afflicted by Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, the PDA-committing beast with two backs and one very prodigious behind, that gossip wags simply shorthand as “Bennifer.” Apart, they were merely two over-hyped and overexposed mediocrities. Together, they resembled a blight, or even an unnatural disaster, two insatiable termites eating their way through the cultural rot of front-porch America.
Among other crimes against humanity, Bennifer has, in the parlance of Page Six, committed oodles of canoodles, and subjected us to constant public declarations of eternal devotion. In 2002, while J. Lo was still saddled with her back-up dancer/second husband Chris Judd, Affleck, seemed almost feverish to get in her knickers, taking out a full-page ad in The Hollywood Reporter. Contrary to the conventional wisdom on Lopez, he extolled her “graciousness of spirit, beauty in courage, great empathy, astonishing talent, real poise and true grace.” By this point, Affleck, a self-admitted alcoholic, was supposed to have won his battle with the booze. He’d obviously suffered a relapse.
