[By Martin Wisse, X-posted from Wis[s]e Words, pic added by me]
By all reports Paris Hilton is a despicable human being: shallow, vain, racist, spiteful and crude. Rich from the day she was born, she never has had to lift a finger to get what she wanted, she never had to work on anything she didn’t want to and she never had to struggle for the kind of opportunities most of us would be lucky to get only once in our lifes. She’s the walking proof that those who have can only get more. Yet what has she ever done to deserve the hatred unleashed on her, especially after she got sentenced to fortyfive days in jail for driving without a license? Compared to other members of her class she’s practically a saint. She hasn’t bought up perfectly sound companies and gutted them for a profit, destroying thousands of jobs in the process, she hasn’t started any wars or profited from them, she wasn’t responsible for Enron or Worldcom, had nothing to do with Katrina or any of the thousands of disasters normal members of her class leave in their wake.
Which is why she, According to David Walsh at the World Socialist Web Site, makes for such a good scapegoat. Because she may be rich, but she isn’t powerful; an outsider not connected to the real powers in the land, the people running the US government and the US businesses. As Walsh puts it:
To help retard the development of a rational opposition to the current political and social state of affairs, the media cultivates an artificial hostility toward much easier targets. A seething but politically confused population is fed victims, sacrificial lambs, so to speak, while the real criminals go about their business.
The aim, conscious or otherwise, is to make sorting out what is actually taking place in the country more difficult by encouraging a facile and undemanding (and perhaps temporarily cathartic) outrage against a Paris Hilton or some other such figure. The population is intended to feel, falsely, that its cause has been served and blows have been delivered against the rich and powerful, when all that’s happened is a young woman guilty of a misdemeanor has gone to jail for a month or more.
By offering Paris Hilton as a figure to hate, attention is deferred from the systemic failures of capitalism unto the moral failings of an individual. If we believe that the problem with Paris Hitlon and others like her having personal fortunes the size of a small country’s annual budget while thousands of others have to sleep under bridges and eat out of garbage cans is not that a system which allows such gross inequalities is wrong and immoral, but only that some people cannot handle wealth well, then we will accept that others with great wealth but the tact not to flaunt it so much, do deserve their wealth and we accept that the system as it exists is right and proper.
