Just a Bump in the Beltway

Paris isn't free -- and neither are we

Paris Hilton's strange celebrity hits a new nadir after Friday's chaotic perp walk. Will we ever be free from her now?

By Heather Havrilesky and Rebecca Traister

June 9, 2007 | Resistance is futile. You can avert your eyes, cover your ears, change the channel and close your browser, but you can't escape the truth: Paris Hilton has become an omnipresent cultural icon, a symbol of the depravity of our times, and thanks to Friday's sobbing, O.J.-level arrest spectacle, she's destined to remain at the forefront of that rushing flow of global news until we're all old and gray.

Earlier this week, though, there was a glimmer of hope: As Hilton began her 23-day stint in a Los Angeles jail (a sentence that had already been reduced by half), a nation joined hands and solemnly prayed that prison might be the one thing that could convince Hilton to put away the party dresses, close the cellphone, retire the baby-doll voice, put down the apple martini and go home. Together, we dared to dream that the dark realities of life in the big house would teach Hilton, once and for all, not only that drinking while driving isn't just bad publicity, it's a crime that endangers innocent people, but that we're tired of her face, and we want her to finally have the good taste to do what so many criminals and porn stars and flashers have done before, once they've had their comeuppance: disappear. Surely, Paris Hilton had the money and the resources and the good sense, at long sweet last, to finally make herself scarce!
....
Let's just pray that those bad prison sheets scratch her tender white ass enough to get her out of our faces for good. Because we certainly didn't ask for this, either. No matter how the talking heads and pundits have tried to convince us that Paris is a reflection of our shallowness and stupidity as a culture, most of us have never wanted her to be a symbol of anything. Is the crotch flash an act of subversion, in which Hilton channels the paparazzi to put her image on every cover, from tabloids to respected newspapers alike? Is Hilton, like her understudies Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, just a frightened child, overwhelmed and intoxicated by all of the attention the media gives her?

We don't care anymore. And now she's become a symbol of something that bestrides her like a colossus, the inherent inequality and corruptibility of the criminal justice system -- which only means that the insanity will never, ever end. Paris Hilton's image will appear everywhere, across the globe, her every word will be broadcast to millions, this person who never did anything, who never had a marketable skill or talent to show for any of it, and who's never, in her short life, had a single interesting thing to say.

Even pointing that out has become hopelessly clichéd, infinitely repeated, until no one remembers what's real and what isn't. The most outraged protest will only melt into a hopeless morass of punditry and reactionary pronouncements, floating into the digital abyss with the rest of the pop cultural detritus: a TMZ headline, a mug shot from the Smoking Gun, a pilfered phone list, a nasty exchange transcribed for Gawker.

We are powerless. All we can do is pray that one day, Paris Hilton will show mercy on us all, and go away.

Or, you can do what I did: MSNBC and CNN both received scathing emails from me yesterday speaking to the fact that the utter contempt with which they treat us, the news consumer, does not endear their advertisers to us. We have plenty of other ways of finding information these days and if you do not clean up your act, you will be abandoned by your most well informed and affluent audience. The news channel's behavior this week was nothing more than scandalous and they are largely responsible for driving this utter non-story which should have been left to the likes of E!.