Jenice Armstrong | Anna Nicole: Ghetto queen

IF

ANNA NICOLE Smith

wasn't ghetto, I don't know who is.

All those men claiming to be her baby's daddy. A pus-filled infection on her backside where she had been injecting herself. Pink hair extensions. Her rampant drug use. The tattoos. (For an accounting of just how many she had on her body, read her gory autopsy report on www.thesmokinggun.com.)

To those who might quibble about my characterization of Smith as "ghetto," be aware that the term has morphed to the point that it defies race and finances. It's not about where someone is from, but about where someone has arrived. It's a mental state that has nothing to do with the amount of money someone has in the bank - or whether he or she relies on the check-cashing joint on the corner.

Ghetto is mainstream.

All you have to do is to turn on "MTV Cribs" to see that Smith was far from alone in her choice of lifestyle. There're a whole lot of people who don't fall into the stereotypical definition of the term but still fit the word to a T.

I recently came across a book that attempts to explain what's happening. In "Ghettonation: A Journey Into the Land of Bling and the Home of the Shameless" (Doubleday, $23.95), Cora Daniels, a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Fortune and the New York Times among other major publications, explores the decline of traditional values such as marriage.

"For me, ghetto is a mindset. It's no longer where you live. It's how you live," Daniels said. "It's a mindset that embraces the lowest common demoninator.

"We're ghetto for taking it all in," Daniels said of the media circus following Smith's death from an accidental drug overdose in a Florida hotel room on Feb. 8, leaving behind her 5-month-old daughter Dannielynn. "The situation is ghetto, that you could have all these different men claiming to be the poor child's father. There's no shame at all," she added.

Daniels got the idea to write "Ghettonation" while watching an episode of "The Simple Life." As Paris Hilton tried to start an old truck. Failing, the multi-millionairess declared, "This truck is so ghetto."

"I heard Paris say 'ghetto' as I was sitting in my home in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where sometimes I have to struggle to hear the TV over the constant bounce-your-head beat, pssssst of the corner, mamas cursing at their babies, and even the occasional gunshot outside my door," Daniels wrote in the book's introduction. "It was at that moment that I realized that ghetto was something larger than I thought."

But on a serious level, Daniels goes on in the book to aptly describe ghetto as the absence of self-respect.

"We are at a the point where it seems there is no understanding anymore that certain behavior is unacceptable for people who truly love themselves," she wrote.

Maybe it was depression over the drug-overdose death of her son Daniel, 20, but Smith was clearly a woman given to self-abuse. At the time of her death, the pole dancer-turned-Playboy Playmate-turned multi-millionaire wife had nine prescription drugs in her system, including a powerful sleeping aid, chloral hydrate, that she had been known to swig straight out of the bottle.

The next big cliffhanger in the long-running Anna Nicole saga is which former suitor winds up with custody of Dannielynn, who could inherit millions from her mother's estate.

Will it be former boyfriend Larry Birkhead ? Will it be Smith's fiance, Howard K. Stern? Or Zsa Zsa Gabor's husband, Prince Frederick von Anhalt?

It's going to have to come down to a Maury Povich-style DNA test. And if that's not ghetto, then you're going to have to tell me what is. *