Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Yes please, go away! She should pay the price for her lawlessness like any other citizen and maybe, just maybe a little extra for being Paris. I'll be certain to cry her a river every evening as I wipe away the moisture from my eye and fail to remember what the hell I was crying about.
"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."
Actually, Paris sells...page hits, magazines, etc. When people stop buying, that's when she'll fade. We buy what the media feeds us. People say they don't want war in Iraq, but they'd rather watch American Idol than protest in the streets. You can blame the media for making us stupid sheeple who "pay for Paris," but the fact is we get exactly what we "want": trendy glammer that we then go buy on the cheap at Walmart. And then we all say that we want to stop global warming.
Stop needless consumption, I say. Starting with Paris Hilton. The only way to change the media is to show the media we'd like to be fed a different diet.
Once and for all, she didn't get a DUI. She was convicted of reckless driving, A MISDEMEANOR!!!!! Basically a traffic violation. This is all happening in fricken TRAFFIC COURT!!!!!
1) As others have pointed out, this article is totally disingenuous. If the authors really want Hilton to go away, then they shouldn't write about her. Hilton is above all a media phenomenon. "Commentary" on the phenomenon is just the way more "upscale" publications pretend they're not tabloids. So either Hilton is relevant to out culture, which would justify writing about her, but not justify this article's position. Or Hilton is irrelevant and then this article is just as much shameless tabloid pap as the phenomenon it critiques. It would certainly be perfectly respectable for Salon to not cover Hilton at all (doesn't she get enough press elsewhere? what's not getting covered because its writers are spending time on Hilton?). Why not have some guts and opt out if they feel so strongly.
2) I also didn't pay much attention to Hilton until I got sucked into the whole jail debacle. But this article is just kind of vicious and mean. I don't want to say "go away" so vituperatively to anyone. It's really pretty easy to ignore this stuff, if the authors really aren't interested. It seems more like the authors have a very complicated guilty relationship to and lurid interest in the whole thing. Just look at the photo they lead with. Pure sensationalism. I also do not really want to glory in the possible suffering of another person in jail, like these authors do. Clearly Hilton was getting special treatment when she was released, but I still feel sorry for her. Maybe what this situation shows is not that she deserves to suffer, for her real crime (which of course she should be punished for in some way), but that American jails are a scary place and anyone is in their right mind to be freaked out about even a short stay in one. Just because a lot of other people get treated badly and don't get special treatment, doesn't mean that Hilton deserves it because she's rich and famous. I just can't get into the mean spirit of this article.
Celebrity and wealth has something to do with it.
The reason she went to jail was a plea bargain -- she was pulled for drunk driving in September, and had her license suspended by the CA DMV as a result (or for some other drunk driving incident.) In any event her lawyers managed to get her to plead it down to reckless driving, for which she was paroled. Her parol had a number of conditions (14+ I think), including inter alia that she would not drive without a valid license and that she would attend an alcohol awareness course (for what that is worth.) now a plea is a deal with the court -- "judge I'm very sorry, I'll be good in future and I wont do this list a bad things and this one or two good things." When you make a plea deal you are supposed to keep it.
After the plea deal she did not attend over a period of 9 months the promised alcohol awareness class. one top of that she was pulled in by the police driving -- that time they warned her that she was not to drive and made a friend drive her home. Obviously, she though she was special because she went out, got a brand new Bentley (retail price say $250000-$500,000) and drove it at night, with the headlights off and was pulled in by the police doing 70 mph in a 35 mph zone.
Now any way you see it, this is an "up yours" three times to the court. And when someone effectively does that to a judge, they tend to get kinda peeved. So Paris was not in jail for drunk driving, she was in jail for violating the terms of her parol.
Is she in jail because she is a rich celebrity -- well yes, probably. First, because she is surrounded by sycophants who presumably were unwilling to say "nope, you can't do that" and "Ms. Hilton, you have to take the class and sit in the plastic seats at the unpleasant ed place." More to the point, she had a good lawyer who got her a deal that other DUIs probably would not have got, but it involved probation -- the deal with the court, and probably she had that lawyer because she was a rich celebrity.
But it is also because she is a rich celebrity that things went wrong. I would not be the least bit surprised to discover that what here lawyers managed to do -- spring her to home detention -- is something they pull off regularly, for those who can pay their fees (and since I am possibly more expensive I won't criticize that.) And usually it works because the judge does not find out, or is disinclined to get into a turf war with the Sheriff about it -- but because we are dealing with the celebrity trollop, the press saw what happened and it became public. Ensue the disaster.
But I suppose in the end a lot of this comes down to her and her family being so rich and spoiled that they simply lack any judgment or sense, and are unwilling to listen to people who had to learn and work for a living. I have no doubt that Ms. Hilton was repeatedly warned by her lawyers that she was going to get into trouble, but though it could not happen to her.
One last point on wealth -- this is a young woman who could easily have afforded a car service 24/7 while her license was suspended . . . why the hell did she drive. I would have more sympathy if this was someone who needed to drive to do their job and could not afford a car service or cab . . .
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
