Mike Celizic

Hey, kids! Tired of listening to your parents lecture you about the virtues of civilized behavior? Had it with necktie-wearing adults telling you that you’ll never amount to anything if you keep dressing the way you do and acting stupid?

I’ve got good news for you. Tell them to eat your shorts, because good behavior won’t get you anywhere. And if they ask you what makes you so sure, point to No. 7 on the Philadelphia Eagles.

Yeah, Michael Vick. Just a few months removed from a halfway house and more than a year in prison, he’s been rewarded with his own reality show.

It’s going to be on BET, and its working title is “The Michael Vick Project.” The network is calling it a “docu-series” and says it will chronicle the paroled felon’s return to the NFL. It also will also delve into his childhood.

That last bit makes sense for Vick. It will give him a chance to blame his disgusting adult behavior on his lousy upbringing. Kids, take notes on how awful your own lives are. You’ll need them when you get your own reality show.

I’m sure you kids have noticed what makes money in the world we grownups have created for you. Despite what your parents tell you about being polite, it’s loud and obnoxious behavior that pays the bills.

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First, Terrell Owens got a reality show. Nobody watched it, but it got renewed anyway, and it’s not because T.O. is a nice guy. It’s because he’s a narcissistic jerk. Now Vick, who killed dogs in horrible and disgusting ways — he hanged them from clotheslines and electrocuted them — not only has a job in the NFL, he’s got a reality show, too. Oh, and his jerseys are selling like hotcakes.

Where would Vick be if he’d been a nice guy from the get-go? Probably nowhere. Or at least not with his own reality show.

Don’t let your parents try to point out how the people making the most money are athletes like the Manning brothers and Tiger Woods. It’s true that they rake in tons of endorsement loot at least partly because they are so colossally boring, but you have to look at the degree of difficulty involved. It’s easier to be a scuzz-bucket than it is to be Mr. Perfect. If being perfect were so darned easy — and profitable — every celebrity would be that way.

But very few celebrities are that way, and with good reason. To be a celebrity, you have to be noticed, and it’s hard to get noticed when you never do anything that would bring attention to yourself.

Even the decent people in the celebrity business act like jerks. Look at Simon Cowell. Word is he’s a decent human being, but he gets the big bucks for being a snide and sarcastic lout given to making grown women — and men, too — cry in shame on national TV.

Take a good look at ESPN. Is there anybody on air who acts calm and rational? Anyone whose primary goal before going on the air is to maintain his or her dignity?

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Heck, it even works in publishing. Glenn Beck, who is to rational behavior what the Duggars are to family planning, writes incoherent screeds in crayon that end up on top the best-seller list. Right now, one of the most rational and intelligent men on the planet, Richard Dawkins, is seeing his latest book on Darwinian evolution being blown away by Sarah Palin’s ode to random nonsense. Palin can’t even construct a simple declarative sentence, but her book — which isn’t even published yet — is on top the best-seller list, and all because she shoots moose while staring intently at Russia.

Palin certainly didn’t let anybody, including her campaign staff, to tell her how to behave and what to say. A bunch of pouty old McCain staffers are blaming her for losing the election, but do any of them have $7-million book deals? Well, do they?

So don’t listen to any of them, kids. You do it your way. Be a jackass. Dress any way you please. And if you get in trouble, say you’re sorry, then sign up for that reality show.

It works for everybody else. Why not you?

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