“I’m sorry, but your child suffers from chronic nepotism. It’s a potentially crippling condition, as of yet, there is no known cure.”

I know, nepotism isn’t a disease per se, but when you really think about it, it is pervasive, often debilitating, and it does make me sick.

It’s the product of dynasties after all, wherein you don’t necessarily need talent or drive, just the right last name and enough backing from Mom’s and Dad’s end. We’ve all come up against the boss’s kid who really believes that he or she got where they are because of merit, and my primal Id’s response is to slap the bitch up — palm first, then back with the knuckles for making me go to the trouble.

Every culture has it, but America has a special sort: a flash-the-cash, suffer-the-brat, pull-the-strings kind of fail-forwardism that’s permeated every sector where prestige abounds, from business and the military, to Hollywood and the Presidency itself. For those who have skill and may’ve coasted on the family rep just a little, I’ll forgive your trespasses. For the rest — the hapless, the helpless, the hopeless — it’s a testament to humans’ too-secure position on the food chain that you haven’t been picked off from the herd by now.

Nepotism has blessed us with some incredibly self-deluding douchebags throughout the years. Tori Spelling auditioned for Beverly Hills 90210 under an alias and nailed it! with no one recognizing her — despite the fact that the bulk of her acting experience came courtesy of guest spots on (count ‘em!) six of her father’s productions! Where would we be without the likes of drunken, whoring second generation enfants terribles like Charlie Sheen and Kiefer Sutherland to remind us that success and dignity can’t be found in the vaginas of every stripper, escort, and model in Hollywood?

Why, if Gwyneth Paltrow hadn’t experienced gang turf wars at the exclusive all-girls Spence School in Manhattan, and later, fought crime by night in Santa Barbara, would she have ever known that becoming a pretentious Anglophile émigré was the way to go? And only a Trump — in this case, Ivanka, not the clearly neglected elder son on the brink of pulling a Patrick Bateman — could make an all-inclusive, life-affirming statement like “We’ve all been dealt a winning hand, and it is up to each of us to play it right and smart,” whilst overseeing her daddy’s construction empire at a mere 27.

At least someone like a Dick Smothers, Jr. (right) finally quit the pretense of a legit Tinseltown career — realizing he was christened with the perfect nom de porn — and opted to do fuck flicks, something nine tenths of the shiftless gene pool of Hollywood Kids should rightly be doing were it not for connections that allowed them to be dilettantes.

When it comes to wealthy, privileged women, I frankly expect an excess of coddling; it’s inbred into money culture for rich bitches to be overly fragile and needy, and they’re prone to suffering all manner of hysterical illnesses and foibles the rest of us have no time for. It’s like an evolutionary flaw in their makeup. With men…it’s especially snidely and effete to be trailing after Mommy and Daddy for a lifeline.

Indeed, what is Dubya if not the ultimate feckless Daddy’s Boy propelled through life by family money and ties. Even with a network of consigliari, the GOP’s blank-eyed devotion, hand-picked audiences, softball questions from gay escorts planted as reporters, and the presence of a conservative media machine whose mission statement was to bolster his rep full-time, there was never a single moment where he appeared remotely competent or presidential. Instead, he was what he is: a ne’er-do-well manchild with an obsession for living up to his father’s standards while face-planting at every turn.

Hell, if you need proof that merit is moot in the face of name brand recognition, you have only to look at the likes of well-employed Jenna Bush, Jonah Goldberg, Liz Cheney, Chelsea Clinton, Luke Russert, Lisa Murkowski, and Meghan McCain — whose wildly overestimated skills as a pundit deflated instantly and embarrassingly thanks to an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher that found her annoyingly playing with her hair, whining about being too young and blonde, acting like a petulant twat, and requiring Maher to act as a human shield for her — to know that some paths in life are more well-paved than others.

Just look at someone like Brody Jenner. I can’t even figure what this guy does. He flits from staged reality show to staged reality show, eats at expensive restaurants, struts on the beach, has fights at clubs, kind of models, and has lavish sponsored birthday parties. For a man to be the latter-day male socialite (a term I assumed was reserved for women) equivalent of Edie Sedgwick is beyond weak, and like the rest of his too-documented extended brood, he’s a complete cipher who lives like a pampered, desultory zoo animal: well-taken care of in a tidy, penned-in life as he’s maintained by his handlers and photographed by outsiders looking in with bemusement.

I guess actors like Scott Caan or Scott Eastwood (opening image, second) — who valiantly tried the acting under a stage name for a spell before reverting back to his surname and garnering parts in multiple features helmed by his daddy Clint — are good-looking and charismatic enough to pass muster, but so are any number of Corbin Fisher models. If looks and a certain presence are enough to justify big breaks, how can that account for a Colin Hanks, who’s short on both?

Even something as comparatively low-key like being a movie critic now just must have a youthful, nepotistic spin to make it more palatable. A collective national groan was raised recently when Cody Gifford (opening image, third) somehow managed to nab a movie reviewer gig on The Today Show, all this given he’s a mere 20 and still in college.

Mother Kathie Lee Gifford‘s tireless pursuit of turning precious young Cody into a somebody ever since he descended to earth on a cloud is today still the stuff of nightmares akin to childhood flashbacks of repressed abuse in a basement full of model trains. Brimming-with-star-quality Cody became an author at four and-a-half, astounding the world. Reads one Amazon review of the pair’s co-penned Listen To My Heart: “Poor Kathie Lee. Her book is designed to show us that she is such a sweet, kind, loving, attentive mother. If you read the book with any degree of attention, you will see that she is a very disturbed woman, and that dear little Cody is well on his way to serial-killerdom.” Who cares if the Little Prince can’t stammer out a complete sentence and utters profundities like “I’m, you know, like all scholarly about it!” Wook at his cute wittle face!

Even worse — yup, it’s possible — is “critic” Ben Lyons (opening image, fourth), whose journalistic/cinematic qualifications are deservedly placed in the most ironic of quotations. Son of NBC critic Jeffrey Lyons, young Ben joined the other Ben, Ben Mankiewicz — who’s never even met anyone who isn’t famous, much less not been related to them — to take over At The Movies for an ailing Roger Ebert and a kicked-to-the-curb Richard Roeper. You see, ABC and Disney wanted a more hip pairing. Enter Mankiewicz and celebrity bootlicker “entertainment journalist” Lyons, and if by “hip” the network meant fractured and lame, then they delivered.

Immediately becoming a lightning rod for viewers, Lyons proved epically devoid of any critical perspective or elementary ability to articulate, gracing us with such ruminations as “It’s really important to tell people to go out and see W. so they can talk about it and have an opinion about it and this freedom of speech of course that allows us to go and talk about a film about a current sitting president.” Opining of Xbox’s Scene It?: Box Office Smash as an essential tool for honing his craft, Lyons revealed: “It helps me improve my movie knowledge, and it’s a lot of fun to play either alone or with some of the homies when they come over.” Assuming the mantle of the most reviled movie critic in America is no mere feat, but Ben did it with beaming aplomb, so much so that network execs finally woke up after much viewer pressure and happily fired both hosts’ freshly-powdered baby asses.

The lesson learned?: when your last name has pull, there’s no such thing as failure. Oh yes, you may suck hard, but unlike us no-names walking the tightrope, you’re always working with a net.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com