Sex, Money, & Ignorance

Nearing the end of Paris Hilton's jail term for VIOLATING PROBATION (no, apologists, she was NOT sent to jail "just" for drunken driving), I have an admission to make. As I watched the news footage of her that Friday, sitting in the back of that police cruiser, sobbing her eyes out, I felt, for a moment, the merest twinge of sympathy. It passed quickly, but it proved one thing to me: Even schadenfreude has its limits.

There are reasons to hate Paris Hilton, and they are many. She is moronic. She is talentless. She is ubiquitous. She is, by most accounts, promiscuous. She is likely a racist and a homophobe. And, as a person born to wealth that she did not earn, she feels entitled to do as she pleases.

All of these are valid reasons. But I think, for me, things are a little more complex. Because I feel that Hilton typifies America's three obsessions in the 00's: Sex, Money, and Ignorance. When I say sex, I mean sex stripped of all subtlety and meaning and rendered in its cheapest, most base aspect. Like, say, suggestively eating a hamburger in a bathing suit while washing a car. When I say money, I mean the pursuit of lucre not through honest effort, but through cheap, cynical dodges like seeking to charge a nightclub for the privilege of hosting your Get Out of Jail Party. And when I say ignorance, I mean giggling vacantly while you're being videotaped dancing at a party, and comparing yourself to a "n****r from Englewood."

While Hilton's been serving her time, we've heard two different accounts of how it's been going. In the first, she is totally losing her shit, freaking out because, even under the comparatively cushy administrative segregation she's under in jail, she's living in a cell that could fit in her walk-in closet. In the second, she's taking calls from Baba Wawa, waxing reflectively about how she's tired of allowing herself to be portrayed in the media as a vapid idiot. Let me clear my throat. BWA-HAH-HAH.

A person as hooked on sex, money, and ignorance as Paris Hilton is is gonna take a lot more than a couple weeks in jail to turn herself around. At the very least, she'll need a couple more weeks. But more likely, we'll see her before Independence Day, openly smoking weed in front of papparazzi, snickering like Muttley behind some greasy pig like Brandon Davis, promoting some crap to people deserving of nothing more than crap. If we were serious about changing her life, she'd just go away for a while and spare us her presence. But you know we could never be that lucky.