...But you just can't make a good outcast like you used to.

Remember “third-party endorsements?" Getting influential people to pronounce their approve of a client was once thought to be the absolute brass ring in the PR biz. No more. Nowadays, if a junior account executive comes into your office with a scheme to get a client endorsed by some notable, well forget it. You've got no choice. It's obvious they're hopelessly clueless and you've got to let them go.

“You just don’t get it Jennifer. We're paid to get our clients market attention. No one gives a damn about Bambi anymore, Sweet Cheeks. Look at Paris Hilton! Look at Lindsay Lohan! Look at the Dixie Chicks for Christ's sake. It's all about creating controversy. Sex sells!!”

Today, the Dixie Chicks are more famous for being despised than they are for their songs. Given their new rep as brave and vocal soldiers of the First Amendment, the Chicks’ music is curiously pedestrian. Excuse me but they're more Dolly Parton than Marilyn Manson. But when country-music DJs and Republican politicians denounced them for dising President Bush, the Chicks immediately became one of the hottest acts in the country.

This was all recently documented by acclaimed filmmaker Barbara Kopple in her latest, "Shut Up and Sing." Kopple, who's won an Oscar portraying the downtrodden coalminers of Harlan County, Ky., knows virtuous martyrs when she sees them, even quadruple-platinum-record ones.

Unfortunately for the movie distributors, the Dixie Chicks’ CONTROVERSY was way back in 2003. Somehow, in the intervening three years, the gals have curiously avoided deportation and imprisonment. They weren't even reduced to playing seedy nightclubs or doing parking-lot tricks for 2 bits a throw. Nothing. Well today, hugely mundane turns out to be a huge PR problem.