Bacon Nation

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Elementary and Rather Mean-Spirited Punditry


I'm not saying that Mike Bloomberg's apparently incipient run at an independent presidential candidacy is doomed. But I will tell you the one thing I know about him, other than that he is rich. And that is that he is shorter than I am. I know this because I have met him. I have a photo of myself, elbow to elbow with him, grinning down on him from above. I am 5'4" tall. Whatever else you want to make of this information, it certainly demonstrates that '08 is shaping up to be a year of incredible diversity. Except for the Republicans, of course.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

The Idiot's Guide to Paris and Porn, Wherein Christopher Hitchens Is The Aforementioned Idiot


Apparently, there hasn't been enough coverage of the Paris Hilton jail break/jail un-break episode. You probably think I'm being ironic. You think I don't mean it, I can't mean it, because there have been dozens of hours of television coverage, and endless reports on the internet, and a tracking helicopter recording her final goodbye to her mother on the patio of the Hollywood Hills estate, or whatever the hell one of her mansions she was hiding out in. So you think I'm joking around, but I'm not. I have evidence that this nation needs a more complete brief on Paris Hilton. And I say this because no less an intellectual luminary than the mighty Christopher Hitchens has been paid -- PAID -- in, I presume, American dollars, to write a column for Slate in which he gets every single little fact about this fairly self-explanatory incident in the annals of the American justice system absolutely, unequivocally, wrong.

So, let's clear this up. No doubt Hitch will be checking in here any minute, and I wouldn't want him to miss the opportunity to correct his misapprehensions.

First, Hitch says:
Those gloating and jeering headlines, showing a tearful child being hauled back to jail, had the effect of making me feel sick. So, you finally got the kid to weep on camera? Are you happy now?
Um, Hitch. The bitch is 26 years old. She is less than a decade younger than I am, and I feel ancient. My knees creak, and my back is killing me. And when I drink red wine, I get a splitting headache. When I was her age, I was already in my fourth year of grad school. She is no one's idea of a child. She is everyone's idea of a dumb slut, an image which she has avidly, even maniacally, cultivated. Need proof? That's her, in the photo above. Such a sweet little girl.

Second, she has in large part cultivated this image by being, in actual fact as well as public image, a slut. Which brings us to Hitch's admission -- which comes across as pride -- that he's seen the famous Paris sex tape. Know what? Parental fearmongering aside, it's actually not that easy to see porn on the internet. You won't see it by accident. I've never seen any, to tell the truth, because I don't click on those spam links, and I don't google things like "Paris Hilton sex tape free to non-subscribers". And if Hitchens really believed that Hilton was a "tearful child," and if he really was so horrified by the sight of this child crying in a police car after repeated deliberate and ridiculously entitled parole violations following on the heals of a DUI, when, to add insult to injury, she could bloody well afford to PAY a designated driver rather than suffering the indignity of bumming rides off of reluctant friends, and certainly rather than driving herself while intoxicated -- and given that Hitch says of this poor child's performance in the sex tape, "I could almost have believed that she was drugged" -- well, then, didn't he have an obligation to at least hit the stop button, and better yet to have called the police and turned himself in for having willingly viewed child pornography, possibly involving illegal use of controlled substances? If he actually believed any of what he says, that is. If.

Oh, I could go on all day. But let's just do one more, shall we? Hitch sums it all up with this gem:
First, the trivial doings of Paris Hilton are of no importance to me, or anyone else, and I should not be forced to contemplate them. Second, she should be left alone to lead such a life as has been left to her.
Uh huh. First, if Hitch so resents contemplating this shit, maybe he just shouldn't -- and certainly he shouldn't force us to, particularly if he's planning on getting all of his facts wrong. Second, the notion that you could ever leave Paris Hilton alone is preposterous on its face. How the hell do you leave alone a woman who has carefully manufactured a career of being famous for ... being famous? Do I really have to point out that Paris Hilton has no skills, no job, no talents, no claim to fame whatsoever other than wealth, and fame itself? And she seeks this out -- she loves every second of it -- and she does so for the obvious reason that if she didn't, she wouldn't be famous, because she has no fucking reason to be famous in the first place. Good God, you'd almost think Hitchens didn't really understand America. Oh, wait.

For Hitchens' and anyone else's information, the reason we're all happy Paris went down is not because we're a bunch of child pornographers, but because she's an obviously entitled rich bitch who has an intensely inflated idea of her own beauty and importance, and we're all fucking sick of her forcing us to look at her squinty eye and scrawny nudity, and hear her inane comments, and risk our lives sharing the freeway with her drunk ass. That's why.

And I realize taking down Hitchens is like shooting fish in a barrel. But it's not so much that he pisses me off; it's that, as with Maureen Dowd, he gets paid good money to write this nonsense for supposedly reputable publications, while I get paid very poor money to educate the youth of America in, you know, actual facts. And that makes me furious.

By the way, I spent 10 days redoing my kitchen, but now I'm back. With a vengeance.