I use the space on this blog more often than not to beat up on celebrities when they're being absurd, which roughly comprises 90% of their waking lives. That said, I still have standards. I'll be as cruel as I can to the likes of abhorrent attention-seekers like Kate Gosselin and I'll take pot shots at hilariously disconnected folks like Our Secular Savior Angelina Jolie, but I try to stay away from the pitiful likes of tragic former child stars and clearly troubled individuals who happen to be famous. I can't say I've never written a mean-spirited joke about, say, Lindsay Lohan, but I've more or less stayed clear of her sad but not funny downward spiral. In fact, if there's one celebrity presence I truly want to see come out the other side and triumph, it's Lohan.

There are three points in my thesis concerning the defense of Lindsay Lohan as a person and as a performer.

1. A bad beginning that was no fault of her own
2. Glimmers of talent beneath a flood of awfulness
3. Mercy for the young

Lindsay Lohan has never not been in the lifestyle of the intermittently rich and famous. These days, the stage mom antics of Dina Lohan are legendary and young Ms. Lohan found herself coaxed into a career with Disney at the tender age of 11. Let's be clear about one thing; 11-year-old children don't know what it means to work for the likes of Disney. That's an age when The Mouse is still a benevolent purveyor of innocent entertainment and not the verified mega-machine of pure corporate cynicism any right-minded individual sees. Ah, but Dina Lohan, a showbusiness vet herself, had to have been aware of what it meant to join the dark Disney family. There's a reason why performers like Lohan and Britney Spears are drug-addled wrecks while Anna Paquin and Natalie Portman are stable and successful. The former began their careers with greedy dreck-mongers like Disney while the latter two began with Roman Polanski and Luc Besson, respectively.

But that fateful contract with Disney didn't completely squash Lohan's career. In 2006, she appeared in Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, giving a performance I'm not afraid to call nuanced, self-aware and even artful. Not long after, she appeared in Bobby and even won a SAG Award as a part of the film's ensemble. It's not that Lindsay Lohan can't perform outside of terrible films and ill-advised albums, it's that for whatever reason she frequently chooses or is convinced not to.

Finally, I'd like to appeal to a somewhat less rational but at least respectably ethical perspective. Lindsay Lohan is 23. Or I should rather say, Lindsay Lohan is only 23. That's old enough to be considered an adult, but not old enough to condemn for life. Very few people in this world manage to make it to 23 without making at least a few major mistakes. The only difference between most 23-year-old screw-ups and those perpetrated by Lohan is that average people don't have fame and fortune to magnify the mistakes. Yeah, the girl needs help. She needs to get clean, she needs to get a proper agent and she needs to cut ties with her insane parents. Let's not revel in a kid's suffering.

Being a creature of hope, I believe that there's a version of the future in which Lindsay Lohan escapes her current cycle of self-destruction and achieves a personal and professional balance that better reflects her talents than her current state. The screen would gain a star and history would be spared another pointless celebrity tragedy.