This picture, finally, is the money shot America has been waiting for since her sex tape. America used to take comfort in rags-to-riches stories. Now we revel in riches-to-rags implosions.
I'm trying to figure out why and it's been bothering me. The whole Horatio Alger narrative was so enchanting because we (Americans) told ourselves, "this can happen to us!" And then somewhere along the way, we all became jaded, and we were convinced (perhaps justifiably) that it hadn't happened to us, and that the whole thing had been a sham to keep us quiet and content all along. So it got flipped, and we began rooting for our own ideological loss to be inflicted--on a physical level--upon the people for whom the ideal had come true. "This (success) can happen to us!" became "This (failure) will happen to you too." That's why we're so insistent that Paris be treated exactly like any other person would be, even as our attempts to show that Justice Is Blind only prove how much of a joke that notion really is (one of the standard lines used by defenders of Paris on cable news--which must be taken with a grain of salt, I think, but for the sake of argument we'll assume it's at least true in theory--is that the average person who does what Paris did only serves about 10% of their sentence behind bars; but it is unthinkable to the American public that Paris serve anything less than 100%, because we don't want anything inherent to the system to be mistaken for special treatment).
The sad thing about this is that it was written into the Paris Hilton narrative from the start. For years we've been building her up and paying attention to her and pretending we didn't despise her, waiting for just this day when we could take her down in a blaze of glory. We even sprung her early so that she and everyone else could think that she was getting special treatment so that we could throw her back in jail again and we watch her life become even more miserable. I have my sneaking suspicions this Sheriff was on "our side" the whole time. Maybe the therapist too, someone had to give her this idea. Imagine if this doctor's note had never existed and she just quietly served her term. What fun would that have been?
I like the idea that he whole releasing-her-to-put-her-back-in-jail does seem like some sort of poetic "justice", as if it was all generated to create a personal hell for Paris in the form of a media circus that turns on her every move, but which has now literally turned on her. This hell is made worse by the (over)reaction to her plight, a cacophony of outraged souls taking immense delight in her torture. If I fancied being extreme I would compare it to a medieval burning of the witch, where instead of a baying mob screaming for blood in the flesh, we have people posting comments on TMZ demanding her humiliation and death.
2 comments:
This picture, finally, is the money shot America has been waiting for since her sex tape. America used to take comfort in rags-to-riches stories. Now we revel in riches-to-rags implosions.
I'm trying to figure out why and it's been bothering me. The whole Horatio Alger narrative was so enchanting because we (Americans) told ourselves, "this can happen to us!" And then somewhere along the way, we all became jaded, and we were convinced (perhaps justifiably) that it hadn't happened to us, and that the whole thing had been a sham to keep us quiet and content all along. So it got flipped, and we began rooting for our own ideological loss to be inflicted--on a physical level--upon the people for whom the ideal had come true. "This (success) can happen to us!" became "This (failure) will happen to you too." That's why we're so insistent that Paris be treated exactly like any other person would be, even as our attempts to show that Justice Is Blind only prove how much of a joke that notion really is (one of the standard lines used by defenders of Paris on cable news--which must be taken with a grain of salt, I think, but for the sake of argument we'll assume it's at least true in theory--is that the average person who does what Paris did only serves about 10% of their sentence behind bars; but it is unthinkable to the American public that Paris serve anything less than 100%, because we don't want anything inherent to the system to be mistaken for special treatment).
The sad thing about this is that it was written into the Paris Hilton narrative from the start. For years we've been building her up and paying attention to her and pretending we didn't despise her, waiting for just this day when we could take her down in a blaze of glory. We even sprung her early so that she and everyone else could think that she was getting special treatment so that we could throw her back in jail again and we watch her life become even more miserable. I have my sneaking suspicions this Sheriff was on "our side" the whole time. Maybe the therapist too, someone had to give her this idea. Imagine if this doctor's note had never existed and she just quietly served her term. What fun would that have been?
I like the idea that he whole releasing-her-to-put-her-back-in-jail does seem like some sort of poetic "justice", as if it was all generated to create a personal hell for Paris in the form of a media circus that turns on her every move, but which has now literally turned on her.
This hell is made worse by the (over)reaction to her plight, a cacophony of outraged souls taking immense delight in her torture. If I fancied being extreme I would compare it to a medieval burning of the witch, where instead of a baying mob screaming for blood in the flesh, we have people posting comments on TMZ demanding her humiliation and death.
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