Sympathy for Paris

I swore I wasn't going to do this.

Paris Hilton is a foolish pampered young woman with arrested development, half lidded, medicated eyes, the best cosmetic surgery that money can buy and a grotesque and entirely unearned sense of entitlement.

The latter explains what some have decried as unseemly schadenfreude over her recent travails, justly I think. This silly spoiled little girl doesn't deserve the reputedly hellish conditions of LA's horrific jail system.

Nobody deserves them, but thousands of people spend time there every year, the overwhelming majority of them permanently trapped at the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum from Ms Hilton.

The case of the aristocratic Ms Hilton is instructive as an object lesson, both that the rich think that they are above the law and that they currently still aren't. There as been a surprisingly thin sliver of human history where this has been the case, it shows every sign of drawing to a close again but I would argue it's worth preserving.

Remember the root of the word privilege is simply 'private law'. Law for the rich and law for the rest of us.

That a spoiled, heavily medicated young heiress should suffer an unspeakably traumatic experience in order that the message be delivered that the law applies to everybody may be just the price you pay so that the blind equality of justice and the rule of law itself continue.

I'm feeling far more schadenfreude about the jailing of Scooter Libby and the hopefully impending conviction of Conrad Black than I am over the perils of Paris, but she makes an effectively populist symbol of the very concept of privileged immunity.

The American public appears to have gone into one of their soured vengeful moods towards privilege. Other celebrities may want to consider the benefits of a low profile or the expatriate life.

This is the mood that sent Marie Antoinette to the guillotine.