For the uninitiated, a quick primer: Hannah Montana began as a show on the Disney Channel, which portrays the life and times of a character named Miley Stewart. On the surface, Miley leads a pretty normal life with her single dad, her brother, and a coterie of giggling friends. In secret, however, she stalks the stage as teen-pop sensation Hannah Montana, much to the delight of her aforementioned inner circle, who are all in on the joke. As one might expect, a lot of the show revolves around the complications of having a double life, multiplied by the complications of being in junior high school.

Then it gets weird. Miley “Stewart” is portrayed by Miley Cyrus, the real-life daughter of be-mulleted “Achy Breaky Heart” hitmaker Billy Ray Cyrus, who also plays her dad on the show. With three different personas to juggle, the premise becomes a little complicated. Hannah Montana becomes the thinly disguised alter-ego of a thinly disguised alter-ego, and somewhere, in the Matrix, the Architect laughs smugly to himself.

It’s also hard not to raise a quizzical eyebrow at the show’s staggering opening-night ratings, or at least easy to be flabbergasted by the hammerlock Disney apparently has on the remote-manipulating digits of America’s children. Hannah Montana debuted to an audience of 5.4 million people, people who had never seen the show before, but were fully prepared to love the shit out of it. By way of comparison, that’s about half as many viewers as last year’s average World Series game.

Since its debut in March 2006, the Hannah Montana Empire has churned out nearly two seasons of television, two soundtrack albums, and three video games, in addition to Disney’s patented panoply of merchandise, which (obviously?) includes a “Hannah Montana musical toothbrush.” This fall, the bubblegum behemoth will embark on the next phase of Disney’s “ram it down the children’s throats and have their parents pay for it” assault, a High School Musical-approved combination of scorched earth marketing and exploitative taste-making. You guessed it: Hannah Montana went on tour.

Cyrus’ 54-date US trek will expand on the show’s tortured premise and be divided into two sets, one performed as her “Miley Stewart” character, and the other by the character’s alternate Hannah Montana identity. For those of you keeping track, this means that half of the concert will feature the TV-star daughter of a pop star pretending to be a normal girl who is also a pop star, in front of 10,000-odd people. This is confusing to me, and I’m not a 12-year-old girl.

The tour is provoking outrage across the country, and not just because it undermines the show’s fictional continuity. Any show with about 4 million weekly viewers is sure to be a hot ticket live, and every single date in the country sold out in approximately two seconds (which is also coincidentally the attention span of the average Hannah Montana fan). Despite enlisting the help of relatives and friends to bombard the nation’s Ticketmaster offices with frantic latte-fueled entreaties, many parents found themselves out in the cold, trying to figure out how to explain their failure to their disappointed and Hannah-obsessed crotchfruit.

With no more box office tickets available, these same parents began looking elsewhere, and waded into the seedy world of big-money ticket scalping with high-minded expectations of fairness. It was in this world that they learned a harsh lesson in the realities of market economics: demand was huge, supply was limited, and a variety of online “ticket brokers” had seized the opportunity, buying up swathes of tickets and reselling them at staggering prices.

Cue the outrage. Soccer moms across the country were shocked, shocked by the mercenary tactics of institutionalized scalping, and they immediately began petitioning anyone who would listen for redress of their perceived grievances. Apparently, it worked: Arkansas, Missouri and Pennsylvania have launched state-level investigations into the ticket brokers’ conduct, and the state of Florida has considered doing the same. As the tour wends its way across the country, it is perfectly mirrored by a slew of hand-wringing human interest stories in the concerts’ corresponding local papers, chronicling the futile attempts of parents to wrangle tickets to the season’s hottest tour.

“Wait,” you might say. “Aren’t these ticket brokers using the same market driven tactics to make money off every popular tour?” The answer, of course, is “yes.” Fans of U2, the Rolling Stones, Madonna, or the Police have had to contend with the unscrupulous tactics of scalpers for decades, often buying their tickets at two or three times face value, just as many Hannah Montana parents did. Nevertheless, it took the magic of Disney to get anyone to do anything about it: After looking the other way every other time, Ticketmaster finally filed a lawsuit against a company that produces the broker-abetting software used to snatch up so many early tickets.

The whole Hannah Montana saga, in other words, is microcosm of our country. It reinforces truisms about the fucked-up way this place works that are nearly aphoristic. Here they are, in no particular order.

I. Anything done “for the children” is inherently more urgent, useful, and noble. If you’re a parent of a 10-year-old, the state Attorney General takes your call. If you’re a 55-year-old Rolling Stones fan, just bend over and take what’s coming to you.

II. It’s not a problem until it’s my problem. As I’ve pointed out above, scalpers have been ripping people off since the beginning of time. The good seats at the Coliseum probably cost an exorbitant amount of drachmas. Suddenly, however, it’s the parents of Hannah Montana fans who are getting screwed, and everyone in charge is expected to drop everything and fix the problem.

III. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. This is related to (II), but it bears mention at the risk of redundancy. Presumably this is not the first time someone has complained about how well-moneyed ticket brokers exploit the system. This is just the first time anyone has complained in a sufficiently annoying way.

IV. Soccer moms can be really fucking squeaky. Self-explanatory.