It seems a good time to ask this question, since it's only about a week until she has to report to jail to serve out her sentence for violating the terms of her probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case. (I couldn't help but notice that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department reduced her sentence from 45 days to 23 days. 23. Spooky eh?... all you RAW fans out there.) And the newspapers and web are full of the usual hatred and jokes about what they'll hopefully do to her in jail, etc., etc.
OK everyone; let's just establish some basic facts here. If you're a girl, Paris Hilton is someone who is almost certainly prettier than you, unimaginably richer than you and, unlike you, has millions of guys dying to fuck her. End of story. If you're a guy, she's prettier than your girlfriend, unimaginably richer than both of you put together and you will never get to mess around with her in a million years.
Whew! Now don't we all feel so much better for getting that out in the open? So what does this all translate into? You guessed it. Hate. Bucket loads of the stuff. Everyone in the world, it seems, hates Paris Hilton except, of course, her close circle of friends who barely tolerate her.
Today, it's completely respectable - no, almost mandatory - to hate Paris Hilton within a certain strata of what passes for the intelligentsia. It seems to be the only thing that the political left and right can agree on. Not just nutters but respected columnists devote column yards to venting their spleen.
I decided to do a simple bit of research to try and quantify just how much we hate Paris Hilton, compared to other infamous characters. Somewhat randomly, I picked the following cast of villains:
Adolf Hitler:
Architect of World War II and the ‘Final Solution' which resulted in the murder of up to 6 million Jews, gypsies' and other ‘undesirables' in the concentration campsRobert Mugabe:
Current dictator of Zimbabwe who holds onto power through electoral fraud and violence against any political opposition. Has managed to completely bankrupt his own country.Joseph Stalin:
Dictator of Russia who slaughtered an estimated 20 million of his own countrymen- Idi Amin: Brutal dictator of Uganda who from 1971 to 1979 slaughtered around 500,000 Ugandans.
Saddam Hussein:
The ‘Butcher of Baghdad', responsible for the repression, torture and murder of his own countrymen, as well as the gassing of 5,000 Kurdish civilians.- Seung-Hui Cho: mass murderer responsible for the Virginia State massacre in which 32 students lost their lives, and 25 others were wounded. Officially the worst multiple murderer in US history.
And last but not least...
I simply typed "hate [name of villain]" into Google and then counted the number of results. In fairness to the villains, I used both their full name and the commonly accepted abbreviation (usually their surname). So, for example, with Hitler I would search ‘hate Adolf Hitler' and also ‘hate Hitler'. Saddam Hussein required a unique approach, since his first name is the common abbreviation. Therefore I simply searched for ‘hate Saddam' which, obviously, would also catch ‘hate Saddam Hussein'. The only person this doesn't work with is Paris Hilton herself, who's name is irreducible. It simply has to be ‘hate Paris Hilton'.
Yes, I know, there are so many ways in which this is not scientific, but here are the results anyway:
Paris Hilton 32,100
Saddam Hussein 25,100
Adolf Hitler 21,190
Seung-Hui Cho 4,433
Joseph Stalin 1,536
Robert Mugabe 1,104
Idi Amin 91
The clear winner is Paris Hilton with Adolf Hitler in third place. Idi Amin wasn't even in the race.
So, why would we hate Paris Hilton more than Hitler? Paris Hilton's only crime is to conspicuously be what we can never be or have. Paris Hilton is the Marie Antoinette of our times. Having said "let them eat ... whatever" one too many times she now generates this level of online venom. Given the chance, we would gladly see her on that trundle, as it lumbered its way up to the guillotine. We'd jeer and spit and punch the air and scream "die bitch" but, instead of knitting like guilotine hags of yore, we'd snap the whole thing on our shiny new cellphones and beam it out to a hundred million cheering bars, clubs and parties dotted around this sad little grain of sand, circling a dying candle, lost in a vast expanding blackness.
