I have only a very vague idea of who Paris Hilton is or what she does, but even I know she's famous, rich, likes drugs and seems able to absorb punishment almost as well as Mick Jagger. So I was able to enjoy a witty, funny and vastly entertaining essay in Salon ...
We'll always hate Paris - Clintra Wilson -Salon Life
If Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana were "candles in the wind," and Anna Nicole Smith was a bonfire in a hailstorm, Paris Hilton, for all her frailness and vulnerability, is a huge, flaming meteor that can penetrate the Earth's atmosphere, bypass all weather completely and destroy millions of lives wherever she happens to feel like plummeting...
...Paris Hilton charges $200,000 to show up at a party for 20 minutes...
... (Just to give this price tag some sense of proportion, in 2004 the average per capita annual income in Iraq was $422. So it would take the average Iraqi over 20 years to earn one minute with Paris Hilton, or around 24 Iraqis one year to divide and share that one minute with Paris between them -- which would just be a complete waste of money unless they could use that one minute to swallow all her jewelry and handbag and shoes.)
Paris has come to embody the angst of our increasing sense of powerlessness -- she's the blonde whom we punish, because we understand her crimes. We don't really understand all the crimes of the administration -- congressional bribes, organized mass deceit via domestic propaganda, policy fixing, violations of privacy and human rights.
Those are too legally complicated. While we were busy ogling Lindsay's drug binges, Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" and Britney's shaved head, our leaders larded us with misinformation, illegally invaded another country, murdered we-don't-even-have-any-idea-how-many innocent civilians (not to mention independent journalists), stole a nation's oil, tortured enemy prisoners, quietly bankrupted our economy and our international moral standing in service to the short con of military Keynesianism, effectively built Dick Cheney his own private Praetorian Guard, and ushered in the most serious threat to American freedom in our history: the very real threat of despotism.
God, that is depressing. Hooker! Where's the hooker?
Which leads to the Krugman connection:
... Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit...
...Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”...
So you see, Krugman and Hilton are together. Ok, sort of connected - by their inverse relationships to a dysfunctional media serving a disinterested populace.
Ok, so my morals are declining ...
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