Miley Cyrus WAS pop culture in 2013 - Long Beach Press-Telegram

Time magazine wimped out and Barbara Walters blew her chance, so we’ll say it: Miley Cyrus was the top thing to happen to pop culture in 2013.

Notice we said top, not best. There wasn’t much you would call aesthetically satisfying about the now 21-year-old’s twerkariffic MTV Video Music Awards performance, pretending (?) to smoke pot on some other fake awards show from Amsterdam, touching herself (if no one else) in her just-leaked “Adore You” video and getting unsanitary with the title device in the video for her thick-as-lead power ballad “Wrecking Ball.”

One thing you can say about those and other Cyrus antics, though, is that they were as purely vulgar as anything we could have possibly imagined. And while I doubt there was a smidgeon of intentional satire behind them, they exemplified the crass direction mainstream pop culture has been heading in since at least the turn of the century.

For the most part, Cyrus simply sexualized the much more pervasive crudeness she — and many, many others — has been peddling for most of her career.

I know it was popular with preteen girls, but has anyone else who’s ever tried to watch “Hannah Montana” been able to make it through a half hour of that braying, superficial style of acting Disney Channel forces its young stars to affect? It’s more disgusting than anything Cyrus did with a foam finger.

And more dangerous than twerking. It can ruin a young actress for life, and it’s kind of a miracle that Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens grew out of it well enough to effectively play bikini-clad drunks in “Spring Breakers.”

Much of the outcry after the VMAs boiled down to “How could Hannah Montana behave like that?” as if either the basic-cable character or anything Cyrus did to Robin Thicke were something other than an act. That also got blurred, in this age of 140-character insights, into crocodile concern for Cyrus’ mental health, because surely her performing in ways that Madonna, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Rihanna and countless others have essentially done before is a sign of emotional instability.

Until Cyrus pulls a full Amanda Bynes, no one who doesn’t actually know her has any idea whether or not she’s got real issues or is just a brilliant self-marketer. That still didn’t stop what passes for television news these days from endless hand-wringing over what it all could mean for her — and for the impressionable youth who saw it.

Media pundits should look more at what they dish out as discourse if they want to locate real damage to society. A banal precedent was set when a young woman dancing suggestively became a long-running topic for pointless examination.

And it’s just getting worse. Last week Albert Brooks tweeted “That Phil Robertson is setting the tone for discussion in America is a lot scarier than anything he’s saying.” Which, OK, proves that in the right hands, 140 characters can actually say something perceptive.

But that’s not how things are generally trending. Robertson’s show, “Duck Dynasty,” is a popular reality series (that, like most of them, feels very staged) on the A&E cable channel. Back in the day, its official name was Arts & Entertainment Network. I looked up A&E’s schedule, and it has other shows about wars over storage and shipping and rodeo cowgirls in bikinis.

I’ll stipulate that some of that stuff might be entertaining, but where the hell are the arts? Replaced, I’d say, by anything you can just gossip about, whether it’s teen queens growing out of one crass fantasy and into another or spurious arguments that pit free speech against prejudice. Of course, it is a free country where anyone has the right to get upset about Cyrus’ provocations. But we also can look a little deeper whenever she exposes herself. We might find a mirror held up to us all.