It’s open season on rehab, finally. Rehab has been nigh onto sacred, at least in popular culture, for years now. As one with more than a little familiarity with 12-step meetings myself, I come from a place of complete respect  — but am often disappointed by the humorless, sanctimonious and often just plain bizarre treatment treatment has received.

There have been cracks in the facade all along, of course. In Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) Peter Gallagher confesses he goes to meetings not because he has a problem but because he does business there. And in both The Sopranos and Rachel Getting Married (2008), AA meetings were shown to be places to have sex with hot strangers right after the serenity prayer. (As if.)

Always it was the person who was at fault, who was not literally with the program. Gallagher’s producer was a tool; Michael Imperioli’s Christopher relapsed and was killed by Tony Soprano for his sins; and in Rachel, Anne Hathaway’s addict gives one of the most embarrassing wedding toasts ever captured on film, presumably a result of not working the steps herself.

Now we have the spectacle of drug dealers trying to sell meth to addicts in the final weeks of AMC’s Breaking Bad, and Russell Brand’s rock star Aldous Snow running from his ginormous joneses to greatly comic effect in Get Him To the Greek. (“When life slips you a Jeffrey, stroke the furry wall.”) Could Bill W finally be getting a pie in the face?

Not that he would have minded, I think. As Susan Cheever’s biography of the AA founder revealed, Bill was complicated — one of the reasons the Big Book is so forgiving of sexual infidelity is because Bill himself was a man of legendary sexual appetites, and took a keen interest in LSD late in life. Killing Buddhas is way of life in recovery.

Meanwhile, Marshall Mathers ask Eminem has a new album out entitled (yep) Rehab, recounting his adventures in same. It’s hard being famous in recovery, it turns out. “I felt like I was Bugs Bunny in rehab,” he told the NY Times’s Deborah Solomon. “People at rehab were stealing my hats and pens and notebooks and asking for autographs. I couldn’t concentrate on my problem.”

If Ahab had been in rehab he might never have lost  his ship (spoiler alert!). The captain had a whale of a problem. But then Ishmael wouldn’t have survived to tell the tale, and where would be?

I admit, I’m addicted to the news alerts the NY Times and the Washington Post send out. (I know other papers do as well, but I can only be alerted to so much news.) And it’s fun when it’s a political story to see which paper gets into my Blackberry first. Remember when Time and Newsweek competed, on a weekly basis? Remember Newsweek?

But usually the news is worth little more than a glance, perhaps a follow up later on the paper’s website or even (hey!) its paper edition. Last night was different. The alert I got from the NYT at 9:22 EST slugged “US Discovers $1 Trillion in Afghan Military Deposits” was enough to send me to the Times’ site. (Or send my wife, actually; I was chewing my nails, expecting Boston to blow its 15-point lead.)

Maybe it was that one-trillion number; in the days of billion-dollar bail-outs, it takes a figure that size to get my attention. Or maybe it was just the realization, trumpeted right there in the lede, that this could “fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself.” The scenarios spun out in the article itself included a more corrupt Karzai government; renewed Chinese (as well as US) interest in the region; and a more-determined, high-stakes Taliban, fighting it out with whoever until the bitter end.

Consider the phrase “the Saudi Arabia of lithium”; I may never reach for my Blackberry again without thinking of Afghanistan, and who provided the minerals that make that little gadget go. It’s kind of like the Beverly Hillbillies, or the Bel-Airabs, that ancient SNL parody about some Arabs who found “Kuwait Koolaid” in accidental fashion like, Jed Clampett (“And then one day he was shootin’ at some Jews…”).

It’s amazing to me that this was not the number one story on every news site today. It doesn’t even get a mention on CNN, or Drudge (is it because the Times broke the story?) though Foreign Policy does add a note of caution, if not downright skepticism, about the revelation. (Though the skepticism is reserved more for the timing of the news and Afghanistan’s ability to handle the wealth, though that to me seems much of the the news value…) Still, it could be a game-changer – depending on which game you’re watching.

It’s that time of the year again, when parents boast proudly of their graduating senior’s success and matriculation to the next fabulous institute of higher learning. This used to be a game confined to the upper classes, old Ivy League alums bragging to each other about their legacy offspring, but now all kinds of parents get in on the act.

Last week I got a group email from a fellow I know, boasting about his son’s high school accomplishments and his college destination. Theirs is not a conventional household (whatever that is) and the school he’d headed for is a well-regarded small liberal arts school, but not one of these impossible-to-get-into places. Still, he took the occasion to trumpet his kid’s academic standing (dean’s list!), extracurricular activities (chorus and ultimate frisbee champ!), political activism (name a war and he opposed it) as well as his contributions to curing cancer in his spare time.

“I got it, Dad,” my daughter said when I made the mistake of reading the email to her off of my Blackberry. It had just come in, causing that thrum in my pocket at the breakfast table, and I don’t think I was trying to impart anything — at least I hope I wasn’t. She is just completing her junior year, has done quite well, and is already freaking herself out over colleges etc. I’m quite proud of her and never meant to imply otherwise. So why was I telling her about the accomplishments of a boy neither of us hardly knows?

The Times magazine ran a piece on the semiotics of bumper stickers yesterday; “’My Child Is an Honors Student’” turns out to be one message that ticks off a surprising number of people,” Rob Walker learned, and is it any wonder? What if your kid is scholastically average, or worse, learning-disabled (or whatever the PC term is today)? Should you bow to the honor student’s parents, or try and run them off the road?

Of course, if your kid gets into, say, NYU, you both get to hear a commencement speech from a noted academic like Alec Baldwin. Personally, I preferred the speech he gave in Glengarry Glen Ross. Remember, second  prize is a set of steak knives. And coffee is for closers.

Senator Jeff Sessions famously hoped that health care reform would be Obama’s Waterloo. That didn’t work out so well for the GOP blockade bunch, who had hoped pure obstructionism might yield political benefits. And Wall Street reform, such as it is, has not provided much more traction for the naysayers.

With the growing oil spill, Obama-haters clearly hoped the president had met his disaster — “This will be the president’s Katrina!” they thundered, which is kind of funny given that a lot of this came from the same people who maintained Bush was doing a heckuva job with Katrina at the time. Until the flood from the hurricane swamped their party and left them all sitting on top of their houses, waiting for rescue.

At his press conference yesterday Obama may have stopped the water from rising (if I may extend the metaphor), even if he can’t stop that oil from gushing a mile below the surface, just by uttering the words “I was wrong.” Few men, let alone standing presidents, have made this admission before (just as the number of women, heads of state or not, who have said “I am sorry” can be counted on Jerry Garcia’s skeletal right hand) and just by admitting to have been slow on the response he may have bought himself and his administration some time.

Besides, there will be plenty more disasters to handle or botch between now and 2012. To repeat Robert Altman’s favorite joke (which he heard from Harry Belafonte): Two jazz musicians are on an ocean cruise. Between sets they go out on deck, smoke a joint and contemplate the ocean.

“Man, look at all that water,” says one.

“Yeah,” says his friend. “And that’s just the top.”

It was depressing to read yesterday that the majority of Britons now believe that global warming is no big deal — or not as big a deal as they thought it was just a year or so ago. My wife was just in London, in the middle of a bizarre heat wave — but don’t call it climate change!

Meanwhile, over in Pakistan, the majority of Pakistanis believe that the bomb that did not go off in Times Square was not the handiwork, if you can call it that, of their friendly neighborhood Al Qaeda branch. It, along with most of the bad things that happen here and seemingly there, are the result of American “think tanks.” Who mans these think tanks, and what are they thinking?  “You must know, you are from America,” a Pakistani lawyer told a Times reporter.

Nothing new in the international assessment that everything is our fault (and some wars, for instance, certainly are); but the time spent blaming America for everything is time that FUBAR nation could be dwelling on its own predicament. “It’s deny, deny, deny,” a columnist for an English-language paper in Pakistan is quoted saying. “It’s become second nature, like an instinct.”

Here at home, of course, we have bigger things to worry about — like what the hell the Lost finale was all about? The fact that the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is now headed for Florida and the East Coast is a little less pressing than what’s happening with Lindsey Lohan (who remains a top news story despite having not made a movie anyone has seen in years).

If the world ends thanks to, I don’t know, climate change, or some other kind of self-inflicted wound we have visited on the planet, at least you can say we’ll go out entertained. If you call Justin Bieber entertainment. (“Anything that’s not Bieber dies.”)

See you at the beach.