The International Writers Magazine: Comment: Reality Check

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Free Paris Hilton • James Campion "TV is both beautiful and malignant, restricting reality to a small gray tube -- we are spectators -- metamorphosed from a mad body dancing on the hillside to a pair of eyes staring in the dark." - Jim Morrison Paris Hilton is being railroaded. Period. She deserves to be in prison as much we do for putting her there. What the hell is the point of making a ton of cash in this god-forsaken society if you can't get your wretched progeny off? If I'm a Hilton right now, I'm furious.

This is a capitalist republic built on slush funds for the guilty, not a two-dimensional breeding ground for vindictive celebrity witch-hunts. If we put every rich asshole in prison for flouting our conventions we'd have none of them left, and then what would we aspire to? And what if we didn't have celebrities? God forbid. Do we even exist without gawking at images of youth, money, beauty and its innocent stupidity to sustain us?
    I think not.
    Be careful what kind of icons you imprison. They reek of your worship and curiosity and their hides reveal many of your fingerprints.

    The law is bullshit. Anyone with money and celebrity gets off. The list is long, with its most renowned heroes being O.J. Simpson and Richard Nixon, both of whom should have rotted in jail, but did not. Simpson brutally massacred innocent people on a street in a major American city and Nixon tried like hell to obliterate the very fabric of this government. Paris Hilton? She is merely dim and famous -- a dangerous combination.
    Martha Stewart is dim and famous and look where it got her.

    Paris Hilton is being crucified for a minor crime because she doesn't appear real. She is an invention of television; a cartoon heiress, Internet slut, a party minx straight out of Melrose Place. She's a soap opera villain, who weeps on cue. We want her to hurt. It makes us feel superior, or at least not inferior.

    In reality, Hilton is merely a scapegoat for our outrage, like that vacuous uproar a few months back over a disc jockey's mumbling gaff. "We've had it!" we shout, echoing the fabricated indignation of those sanctimonious hypocrites over at teenage-boy central, ESPN, who deride the abuses of hockey fights and macho taunting and the antics of dumb-ass jocks, while displaying them over and over and over and over and over.
    We have made a messiah of cheap whores and goofs and then decry their notoriety. It's Greek tragedy: "Who did these horrible things to me...? Oops, it was I!"

    We love our victims, though. Our media-created victims especially. Shelley's monster, like Michael Jackson. It's enough we ogle him like a circus freak. His credit is good and his reach wide. He is either framed or predatory. Who cares? NEXT! Yes, and what about the culture urchins who brandish guns with posse thugs rambling though our underbelly beyond reproach, lauded for a violent nature infused in their veins since childhood. Ah, and the poor rock stars -- in and out of rehab -- phony martyrs with mawkish constitutions, begging for forgiveness from Jesus.

    I'd take Jim Morrison any day. Jim went down like a man, gobbling ungodly fistfuls of hallucinogens with a preternatural glee; a real Neanderthal wit, our clown gypsy -- jacking off on stage, calling his audience slaves and idiots. He knew the score. And he apologized for none of it. A true American original, an icon of substance.

    Now we have front-page squalor of young millionaires drunk and loud, flashing their muffs into snapping cameras. What's left? "THE TRIAL OF LINDSEY LOHAN -- Guilty For Being 21 With Cash". Who among us would be alive today with that type of scratch and celebrity? I wager none. I would have been a corpse by 1985 with half that chick's cash.

    I await the next Britney Spears meltdown, don't you? This just in: Kids don't meltdown, they're confused jesters begging to be smacked (not physically, symbolically, we do not advocate hitting children -- well, maybe Spears, but that's it).

    Truth is I dig Paris Hilton. She reminds me of immortality, strutting over the bones of the vanquished, sporting an impish shit-eating grin, as if she's hiding Egyptian secrets. Our Boy President has that grin. He was also once damaged goods, but now his secrets come with big guns and consequences. His parents kept him from war and prison, so why can't the Hiltons keep poor, misguided Paris from our vengeance?

    Another truth is our prisons are over-crowded as it is. What part of society is this woman harming? Our sensibilities? Are you shitting me? Have you seen what you people love? What I love? It's barely coherent. It's sickening. It's gorgeous in its wasted mirth. I marvel at our recycled pop sewage. It fills line and lines of this space weekly. Locking it up is no answer. I guess it's an answer, just not THE answer.

    I drank Saturday night with more dangerous outlaws than Paris Hilton, and I'm one of them.
    That's why I always say: Just give me the money, jack. You can keep fame. Fame is for suckers and suckers pay the freight.

    Free Paris Hilton.

© James Campion June 14th 2007
realitycheck@jamescampion.com
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