At some point yesterday, after TMZ got its "money shot" of Paris Hilton crying in the back of a police car, it all started to make sense.
We can’t get Bush. We can’t get Cheney. We can’t get Rove.
We can’t get the Chinese who are poisoning our food, or the oil companies destroying our finances, or the Wall Street executives making off with our pensions, polluting our air and destroying our planet.
We The People demand a sacrifice, and a DUI sentence against an air-headed child heiress will have to do.
The Right is perfectly willing to throw Paris Hilton under the bus because, in their eyes, she’s a proto-hippie, a skank, a druggie, a lush. The Left demands we make her cry because she’s rich, and Clueless, and somehow we fear her Presidency — which might start as early as 2021. Maybe if we’d had a picture of George W. Bush in such shame back in 1972 we wouldn’t be in this mess.
It’s unanimous.
And so we have the ritual. We have the torture by media, of a child who had come to symbolize all the wretched excesses of the Bush Age. There was a lynch mob mentality brewing on Thursday — even my wife and daughter were outraged, demanding justice (vengeance).
Both the victim and the punishment were proxies. She a proxy for 8 years of Republicanism, her sentence a proxy for the hard time we feel powerless to mete out. And for Republicans, it was like throwing us a bone.
It’s not like she was running a hedge fund, or a private equity
firm. Her parents are as much wastrels as she is, only
great-grandfather Conrad was really one of "them." Them being the
Masters of the Universe, the CEOs of the Fortunate 500, the self-styled
"builders" and "developers" who have, as a class, made themselves our
owners and above the law these last six years.
She wasn’t one of them, so let her be the sacrifice. Let everyone
obsess about her. Let them poke her and abuse her and make her cry. In the end, to all of us (including TMZ) she’s like a tissue, disposable. She never knew that until yesterday. Maybe that’s why she’s crying.
The rest of us, the real criminals, we’ll all go off scot-free, we’ll continue to prey on the
economy, on the environment, on the laws. Look over there. Paris is
crying. Don’t you feel sorry you were so mean to her now, just a
little? No? You have to gloat a little more, laugh at her a little
more, throw a little more verbal excrement on her? OK.
She’s just a proxy.
