It has not been a great year for the elder Cyrus. In October, he filed for divorce from his wife, Tish. Less than a week later, video of his daughter enthusiastically enjoying a bongful of what was later reported to be salvia surfaced. She turned 18 in November, ended her “Hannah Montana” Disney series to record-breaking ratings in January, and is now, by her father’s account, living a life that’s “a train wreck.”

Cyrus isn’t your typical showbiz dad. Long before his daughter became the biggest non-rodent in Disney history, he was already a hugely successful — and widely loathed — pop star in his own right. In 1992, the same year that Pavement released “Slanted and Enchanted,” the Beastie Boys released “Check Your Head,” and Dr. Dre released “The Chronic,” Cyrus and his achy breaky heart had the top-selling album. In the intervening years, his star went on the descent, partly, he says, because he was focusing on his family and perhaps partly because the public taste for his homespun shtick wore thin. Flash forward to a Disney comedy about an ordinary teenager with a secret life, and the rest of the story is written on your second-grader’s Hannah Montana backpack.

But as Miley, the young woman, started to outgrow Hannah, the tween idol, there were inevitable — and very public — bumps and grinds along the way.  Every parent has to deal with the drama of adolescence, the mistake making that goes along with it, and the bittersweet process of letting go. Few, however, have to negotiate their own celebrity while raising a child with massive fame. And no one but Billy Ray knows what it’s like to live with all that and face the consequences of a seemingly Faustian bargain with the powerful forces of the music industry, one that now has control over his daughter in a way that he does not. “The business was driving a wedge between us,” he claims.

And “this business” is big. Even as she awkwardly transitions from teen queen to full-blown adult star, Miley Cyrus remains a money-making machine. Her movies alone have made over $300 million.  And like a dispiriting number of other young Disney stars, she’s been on a grueling treadmill half her life, a teenager who represents the livelihoods of a slew of individuals with an entertainment machine. Billy Ray says that when news of Miley’s bong video broke, he called one of her handlers and was told “it was none of my business.” And in return for the snub, he now appears quite willing to bite the white-gloved hand that fed him so long.

Billy Ray is now working on his own new album, a collection of patriotic songs with the straightforward title “I’m American.” He claims he “never made a dime off of Miley,” of which he is proud. He’s getting on with the next phase of his own life, separate from the Hannah machine. But as a newly minted empty nester, he sees a daughter who sings that she “can’t be tamed” and knows he has no authority to even try.

“I should have said, ‘Enough is enough — it’s getting dangerous and somebody’s going to get hurt,’” he now says. “I should have, but I didn’t. Honestly, I didn’t know the ball was out of bounds until it was way up in the stands somewhere.”

How far, exactly, is the ball out of bounds now? To hear Cyrus, it sounds like his daughter’s problems are well beyond adolescent partying. He hints repeatedly that she’s in real danger, and that the industry that feeds on her fame is only encouraging her peril. Of course, a man who popularized the mullet may not always have the best judgment, and until the day Miley is getting all interventioned by Dr. Drew, it’s impossible to say how deep her private demons go. But her father’s pain is clearly as real as it is uncomfortably public. “Hannah Montana,” he says, “destroyed my family. I’ll tell you right now — the damn show destroyed my family. I’d take it back in a second. For my family to be here and just be everybody okay, safe and sound and happy and normal, would have been fantastic. Heck, yeah. I’d erase it all in a second if I could.” But he can’t. Hannah is gone and Miley has moved on, and all that remains in the remnants of their ashes is a man who drove his little girl straight into the best of both worlds and wound up in neither himself.

Cyrus, she of the occasional over-the-line booty shaking and Selena Gomez dissing, is certainly no stranger to the self-incriminating video. And yet, because a nation of little girls bear her face on their lunchboxes, the public outrage whenever she behaves like, well, an 18-year-old just never quits. 

New York’s pop radio station 92.3 has already referred to her as “every parent’s nightmare”  and E! more tactfully called the incident “reputation-damaging.” Adding fuel to the fire, Cyrus’ childhood friend Nicole Mullen-Holm Monday gave an interview to Radar online in which she referred to her former pal as “a liar who bullied girls and was a real b*tch to everyone.”

But Cyrus herself has been conspicuously mum about it all. She’s back at work filming a new movie with Kelly Osbourne and generally getting on with her life. She is not using the incident as an opportunity to make a statement to kids about responsible behavior. She could, but as an 18-year-old woman whose main crime has been smoking a legal substance, she doesn’t have to. She could tweet a public statement of remorse, but after a brief flirtation with Twitter, she quit over a year ago and hasn’t looked back.

Yet Gawker’s dry observation Monday that perhaps “early and repeat exposure to scandal shut off the part of her brain responsible for shame” suggests Cyrus’ silence is somehow unusual, and reveals a strangely presumptuous expectation of contrition. It speaks to a cultural assumption that our celebrities, when they do something screwy, owe us something. Oh please, heroine to America’s tweens, say something to satisfy the outrage of a concerned populace! Preferably something random trolls on the Internet can tear you down for!

The footage of Cyrus sighing, “I’m having a little bit of a bad trip,” and OMGing about a fellow partygoer’s resemblance to her boyfriend — all while a friend devours Frosted Flakes straight out of the box — isn’t exactly a family values Hannah Montana-in-3-D affair. And as a parent I’d be none too pleased if that was my daughter guffawing helplessly for all the world to see. But since when did Gawker or E! or anybody else get to decide what Miley Cyrus should be ashamed of?

Sure, the relentless chronicling and disseminating of every action — whether it’s from a celebrity or one’s Facebook friends — gets off-putting fast. And I believe if you’re doing something you don’t want shared with the world, you should consider not recording it. That’s why I give credit to Cyrus, who, for all her consistently typically adolescent behavior, at least knows when to pull back and use a little restraint. She may have let her antics be filmed, but at least now she’s not commenting, she’s not apologizing, and she’s not doing some insincere public walk of shame. Unlike her dad and a whole lot of other commenters, she’s moving on. She lives in the spotlight, but she knows she doesn’t have to explain or answer for or express public shame for her every move. And that makes her more than just the chick with the big bong and the giggle fits. It makes that 18-year-old party girl — surprise — pretty damn mature. You might even call her a role model.

Entertainment Weekly’s Whitney Pastorek writes about the potential fallout, Reuters picked the picture up, too, and FOX News was appalled. The Vancouver Sun has a piece detailing Miley’s transition from Disney to “pop tart” and a review of her Toronto performance. Check out her “Party in the USA:”

On Sunday, she continued her streak of commanding our attention while baffling the bejezus out of us with her performances at Toronto’s MuchMusic Video Awards. First, there was a midriff-baring, booty rocking, strangely street cred-attempting rendering of “Party in the USA,” wherein she and her troupe appeared to channel vintage Salt n’ Pepa, replete with big earrings, bandannas and flannel.  Represent!

But in case you thought the performance was just a sweet “Yo! MTV Raps” throwback and not a weird moment in racial appropriation, her version of “I Can’t Be Tamed” was even more of a head-scratcher.

Appearing in angelic pure white, Cyrus writhed around a tribe of the strangest bunch of face-painted dancers since that aboriginal ice-dancing routine at the Olympics.  There were bare feet. Torches. And lots of savage hair flipping. Her multiracial troupe tried to lock her up, to prod her with spears, even carry her off like a missionary on a spit. It was to no avail, of course, for she cannot be tamed.

It’s a mash-up world, and if Katy Perry can collaborate with Snoop, why shouldn’t the most famous teen in the world borrow a bit from other cultures too? And Cyrus may not be delving too deeply into the semiotics of her recent performances herself.

She’s clearly trying to spread her impressive, expensive wings, and kudos to her for attempting new styles and her refusal to lip-sync.  But coming so soon after her other recent miscalculations, her MuchMusic performances have a vibe of a desperate, borderline insulting assumption that being “urban” or “tribal” makes one authentically badass. And maybe it’s time for her to stop singing about Jay-Z and start working with him instead.