I'm Ashamed of Myself, But Apparently Not Enough

Without even adding buffer posts between this post and the previous, I decided to address the media's current narrative fascination, the Paris Hilton Story - another meaningless sensation I have wavered between adamantly ignoring and briefly railing against, as recently as the previous post. So yeah, I recognize the hypocrisy. So I do regret adding another chunk of the Internet to this nonsense, but I'm hoping it's a better chunk of nonsense than others, a chunk of commentary on nonsense, if you will.

Originally I had planned to post the most recent CNN story about Hilton followed by a quote from Henry David Thoreau and then leave it at that.

Here's Thoreau, around 1854, in regard to all the hoopla over increased communications technology, and how he predicted it would mostly be a harbinger of world-wide trivialities and technology for the sake of technology.

From Walden:

"We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."



While discussing the situation with a friend of mine at the bar yesterday, he told me that he kind of felt sorry for her. In a way, I agree with his sentiment - she certainly has more attention paid to her than she may or may not desire, and no one can say how much of this being in the spotlight all her life has led to her (awful) personality. I understand that it's also not fair to judge celebrities, anyone you don't know - except, most talk of her and other celebrities as if they know them. So, I'm aware of that argument - that she gets shit on by people who don't know her.

And here's my rebuttal: If I did get to know her, I'm 99% sure that I would find her completely unbearable - the kind of idiot sorority girl at Texas Tech that never learns to avoid actions with negative, often financial, consequences, shrugging it off with a mention of how their dad will pay for it.

I'm also aware that I may be projecting personal aggression toward the idiots I have to deal with, on to a celebrity, on to Paris Hilton. She basically helps me feel better, in a vengeful sort of way, because she serves as a symbol of idiocy, the complete embodiment of the awful personality traits I despise in people in my own life.

So, in that regard, she is a tragic figure. A sort of pop-culture Atlas, bearing the weight of a world of grievances accrued by the frustrated common man, castrated and incapable of exacting his fantasized revenge. She's a symbol. And so when she wails "Mom, Mom. It's not right," as she's led out of the courtoom, we, (hmm, or is it just me?) feel a twinge of satisfaction. We feel that finally, justice has been served.

I have another social theory that attempts to explain the success of reality shows about the rich and famous, but that too may be a projection of mine. I'll go into more at a later date, but suffice to say that seeing rich people do stupid shit and commit morally questionable acts justifies middle-class Americans' class warrior attitudes, that rich people are in fact no better than anyone else - they just have more money. But it's not quite developed, so I probably should not have even mentioned it. Ah well.

But if you are tired of reading about Paris Hilton, and you damn well should be, I can confidently say that it's going to require responsiblity on the part of both the media, and ourselves. Individual responsibility in the form of refraining from reading that shit. Don't click the story. Web masters can follow that, and the most visited stories move up on the Web site and become the head story. Which is preposterous considering the other news out there. So next time you're tempted to read that story, take the initiative to read something about the Alberto Gonzales tomfoolery, policy positions of the less publicized presidential candidates, or, ANTHING that would promote democracy's most important necessity - an informed citizenry.


All right then - I'm removing my badge of moral superiority now - I'm just going to lay it down on top of my stack of US Weeklys for a minute.