http://reason.com/news/show/120857.html
I Loathe Paris in the Slammer
The sacrificial heiress
by Jesse Walker
Reason, June 18, 2007
"The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless
beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague,
drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these
outcasts as scapegoats." --Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough
Each version of the scapegoat ritual has its own peculiarities, but the
essential structure is constant. A person or group is chosen to bear a
society's sins or sufferings, and then is killed or exiled, leaving the
community purified. In Uganda, Frazer writes, the victims were "maimed
and left to die." In Siam, "a woman broken down by debauchery" would be
publicly insulted, showered with soil, then thrown "on a dunghill or a
hedge of thorns outside the ramparts, forbidding her ever to enter the
walls again."
In the United States, by contrast, Paris Hilton received just a few
weeks in jail and a few dozen media cycles of personal humiliation.
Compared to people who committed commensurate infractions, that's a
travesty of justice. But compared to those poor Ugandans, she's getting
off easy.
Hilton was sentenced to 45 days' imprisonment for driving with a
suspended license. When the local sheriff did something that has been
done for thousands of other nonviolent offenders in L.A. County's
overcrowded jails, releasing her early to serve her term under house
arrest, the cry went up that this was unconscionable, and a tearful,
hysterical Hilton was hustled back to a cell. After L.A.'s city attorney
joined the chorus calling for her reimprisonment, it came out that his
wife had gotten off with a fine after committing a similar offense. He
insisted the situations were not comparable, and indeed they weren't:
When his spouse got in trouble, no mob was baying for her blood.
Hilton, by contrast, is almost universally hated. I'm not setting myself
above everyone else here--I can't stand her either. She plays a very
specific public role: the *bad girl*, spoiled and stupid, privileged and
irresponsible, hedonistic in the most dull and predictable ways.
Different viewers have different reactions to this, but the typical
response is extremely negative. Like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears,
Hilton lets her tabloid audience feel both resentful and superior.
Unlike Lohan or Spears, Hilton hasn't accomplished anything that might
offset that contempt. Lohan and Spears became famous for acting and
singing, respectively, and only then spilled into the more open-ended
entertainment of the gossip press; millions of fans have a residual
affection for their work that keeps them from being as despised as they
could be. But Hilton *debuted* in the gossip columns. She has appeared
in movies and has made an album, but those came later: She isn't a
celebrity because she recorded a CD, she recorded a CD because she's a
celebrity. And she's a celebrity because people like to loathe her.
Being a scapegoat is part of her job.
I assume she knows that. "In ancient Greece," my handy Funk & Wagnalls
Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend informs me, "the
scapegoat was often a volunteer." So it is in America today. I suspect
that Hilton isn't really dumb, any more than she's really a blonde--that
she not only understands the role she's playing, but deliberately chose
to play it. It's telling that her most notable non-pornographic
performance, on the "reality" series The Simple Life, painted her as a
rich twit unable to function in the real world. Hilton not only signed
up for a show that was sure to portray her that way, but she kept coming
back to shoot more seasons even after the program's direction was
obvious. Either she's *preternaturally* stupid, or she's in on the joke.
In the gossip press, as in reality TV and celebrity sex tapes, it's
unclear where artifice ends and authenticity begins. But if Hilton
understands that she's the butt of the joke on her television show, she
probably understands the same dynamics are at work in the rest of her
media appearances, including the ones dubbed "news." And if she does
understand that, and milks it, I'm not sure how willing I am to believe
her tears at her sentencing. Is she really upset, or is she just doing
what the trite script demands? Does she resent these headlines, or does
she love any headline she appears in? Is she worried about what she'll
face in jail, or is she looking forward to what comes afterward?
Yes, afterward. Traditionally the scapegoat was killed or exiled for
good, but the modern celebrity cycle won't let someone go so easily.
After her fall, the victim begins a redemption process, or as it is
known in our medicalized age, a rehabilitation process. She loudly
reforms herself, begs our forgiveness, appears on talk shows, pitches a
product. Paris is prepared: Last week she called Barbara Walters to
announce that she had found God, intends to clean up her act, and has
started thinking of what's best for "the young girls who looked up to
me."
There is historical precedent for this as well. There are religious
traditions, most notably Christianity, in which a god takes on the sins
of the world, is duly sacrificed, and then comes back. Some medieval
Christians applied the same idea to their human scapegoats. Frazer
describes a German town that began Lent each year by turning a selected
parishioner out of the church. For 40 days he would walk the city,
"barefoot, neither entering the churches nor speaking to any one." The
day before Good Friday, "he was readmitted to the church and absolved of
all sins. The people gave him money. He was called Adam, and was now
believed to be in a state of innocence."
No one will ever mistake Paris Hilton for an innocent. But they will
re-admit her to her old haunts, and oh, how they'll give her money. This
woman has already become a celebrity without doing anything worth
celebrating, a sex symbol without exuding any sex appeal, a world-famous
criminal without committing a notable crime. Now she can be a scapegoat
who never gets sacrificed: the victim of a barbaric ritual who emerges
somehow with everything she wants.
--
regards , Peter B. P.
http://titancity.com/blog ,
http://macplanet.dk
"We don't dial 911 - we dial .357".