Christopher Hitchens’ hesitant foray into the low-brow affair of Paris Hilton’s incarceration for parole violation represented something of an excuse for serious-minded individuals to comment upon the latest in tabloid news.
Declaring any sympathies for the “besieged” heiress to be misplaced, Adrasteia highlights Paris’ canny and ongoing manipulation of the press (or in Iconoclast’s words, her timeless art of self-promotion):
Paris Hilton has made a very good living out of being in the press. When she says she works hard she is not lying. She works constantly to be in media. She comes from a a family of marketers and to say she is some poor little girl who had all her privacy stripped from her is at best naive, at worst stupid. She is a master marketer. And she is not a girl but a woman. No the “majesty” of the law did not give her a break nor would it give me one in the same situation. Perhaps the law is tired of those who feel they are entitled.
In a sarcastically titled Pauvre Paris, Alia also rails against the narrative of victimhood that Hitchens has crafted:
Consequences are often good things. Consider the people - her self included - that might be inadvertently helped by such harsh sentencing. Consider the inherent self-centeredness and carelessness in those who drink & drive, one that is only bound to escalate and generally doesn’t stop until it is stopped. If 43 days in jail, rather than a genuine tragedy stops it, maybe we all come out ahead. You might also consider the social tensions in this country that would only be exasperated had she “gotten-off” (not in the video mind you). Perhaps that played a role in the judge’s decision to send her back to jail. It may be wrong, but as Paris proves everyday, life isn’t fair.
bsdetector441 reads the recent events as a morality tale of “duly earned punishments for chosen ills, asking “should we not follow her descent into personal responsibility as we have been invited to celebrate her snobbery” particularly after Paris “has rubbed our collective noses in her ascendancy”?
lucabrasi argues for why Paris is consequential. Among the reasons:
1. She is a popular icon of this era, a quick-check means of ascertaining what society is about right now. Soulless, clueless, narcissists? (Oh, not all of us. Just Paris and me.)2. She has FANS. Young ones, I assume. (This testimonial by a schoolteacher would seem to confirm the assumption.) Persons who are willing to spend their hard-earned money (or their parents’) to make Paris richer. Honestly, I don’t know what all of her products are, but I assume books, perfume, clothing. She has a TV show, once highly watched. One has to shift the attention from Paris back to the people who love her and spend money on her. Why?3. With guys, perhaps this is why: She’s attractive and knows how to project sex in a burger commercial wearing a swimsuit washing a car. Sex symbols are made, not born. She demonstrably did this right – though there is something to her face that lacks true beauty.4. She’s just like the moral of “The Sopranos”: Life isn’t fair. Some people get away with everything. Get used to it (the jail time is a mere blip versus this theme.)5. She’s of an “idle rich community of beautiful people” that have been with us for centuries. Generally, they live apart from us poorer, uglier people, and travel in globe-trotting circles which we could never afford. Paris’ parents are a trust-fund hotel heir and his gorgeous airhead wife, who met her husband while a bikini extra on “The Love Boat.” To the good, Paris broke free from total rich-kid apathy and actually pursued a public career of sorts. To the bad (for her) Paris stumbled into the “real world” of the LA justice system, and thus left her bubble of careless privilege. Oops.
Whether this column becomes an extension of the media phenomenon surrounding Paris Hilton, as Hitchens might claim, or a mere reflection of it is up for debate in Fighting Words Fray. AC … 3:34pm PDT
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Children were having a ball. They were fascinated by the constantly changing view […]. The feeling was of moving into another room every time a corner was turned. It was a massive game of “peek-a-boo” that they discovered almost instinctively. Parents were either unnerved that they couldn’t lay eyes on their progeny every second or joined in with gusto.
Some were uneasy. Many of the works, especially those rendered in lead, appear to by very precariously balanced. The obvious weight of each one appeared to lead some to visualize the fact that if one fell, it would be a disaster. […] The sense of motion can be slightly dizzying. At the entrance is a massive visual joke - a slab of steel suspended from the ceiling.
However, we spent an hour or so outdoors eating ice cream and watching people walk […]. Those that had the audio tour were marching like soldiers, dutifully examining what they were told to. Others moved slowly around, then through, mostly looking up, but periodically sideways, as though to assure themselves that the walls didn’t go on forever.
The only fly in the ointment is that there are signs everywhere telling people not to touch anything, and large docents who reinforced the dictum vigorously. […]
It’s hard to describe. On entering the room, all you’re conscious of is size. These things are massive and designed, in part, to make the viewer feel small. Stay for a moment though, and it starts to make sense.
There’s a feeling of rightness to the arrangement, no matter how visually chaotic it seems on the surface. There are places where all you seem to see is a massive wall of rusted steel, but when a person appears, apparently from nowhere, you can see the spaces between the walls. It’s as much about the negative space as the positive.
Our reaction to the New Fray’s First Day? Not quite. The post above is actually museum commentary from Frayster MessyONE, describing her experience of MoMA’s Serra exhibit, featured in yesterday’s slide show.
Though Fraywatch is still settling into our new cyberdigs, Fraysters are already back to business as normal. Beyond the Art Forum, great discussion is raging in our TV Club Fray—a perfect supplement for you Sopranos fans who can’t get enough discussion of the show’s looming finale.
If your interests run towards new frontiers, you might want to follow PhysicsGirlinto quantum space or join William Saletan as he ventures into virtual space.
David Plotz’s Blogging the Bible has been receiving a touching send-off on its way to the Great Beyond. Meanwhile, our chief political correspondent, John Dickerson, has made a classy entrance into the Politics Department’s Fray.
We Fray Editors now have our own place, too. You can track our recommendations in real time (aka, our “job performance”). So, maybe not everything about the New Fray is worthy of love. Still… if you’re stuck at a desk job, bookmark this link to keep tabs on the daily Editor’s Choice Awards.
Overall, the Fray’s face-lift has received a very warm welcome. We’re still working out the bugs and open to suggestions, so please keep the input coming in our Fix the Fray Forum. On several issues, we’ve heard you loud and clear: (1) something is seriously off with the view-counter; (2) it’s difficult to track replies to your posts; and (3) the central column is too narrow. We’re compiling a list of bugs and complaints, and our developers are working night and day to redress them all. Your supportiveness and patience have been overwhelming—thank you.
The lots apparently fell on Gregor_Samsa, grizzled Fray veteran, to fuse Fray assessment with performance art in his masterful post, “Utopia: A Postmodernist Hell:”
We live in difficult times. In the western world, compared to a century ago, the average person lives thirty years longer. Infant mortality and contagious diseases have nearly disappeared, violent crimes are lower and the work week has shrunk to almost half. Any schmuck living today can enjoy comforts, travel the world, appreciate the arts and wine and dine in a way that was possible only for the aristocracy not so long ago. Add to this the fact that haircuts are a lot cheaper nowadays and free porn is available everywhere, and things begin to look very gloomy indeed. If everything continues to improve at this rate, we could soon face an epidemic of severe depression, and possibly, mass suicide.Jerome K. Jerome writes about the time he was having some minor symptoms and decided to look up a medical encyclopedia to get a diagnosis. Bad idea. It soon became very clear that our man was suffering from every fatal disease known to mankind, except Housemaid’s Knee. Before the advent of modern medicine, people would cheerfully die at forty, run over by a horse or bleeding from unknown causes. Now we cower till eighty, putting everything we eat under a microscope, opening our posteriors to polyp hunters and worrying about insurance. No spam about penis enlargement has been found on the cave walls in Lascaux, proving that most of our anxieties have a modern origin.The Fray upgrade unveiled this week mirrors this human condition perfectly. I don’t know whether Fray 2.0 is superior to its predecessor, but if the loud collective whine of a million fusspots is any indication, it must be. We came here to seek refuge from the toxic fumes of progress that has engulfed civilization. I was expecting the new Fray to be viewable only in a DOS window in typewriter font, the messages scrolling down in real time providing a brief opportunity to catch them before they disappeared forever. Instead, we get this over adorned, unwieldy mess, proving that the caretakers had every resource at their disposal except wisdom.Social philosophers come in two stripes (depending on whether they were spanked as a child) – the sunny and the morose. Marx was convinced that all conflicts push society towards a final utopia of harmonious prosperity, while the forlorn Malthus saw us engaged in a Sisyphean struggle that will inevitably end in squalor. Suffice it to say that simpletons like these should have chosen pursuits more suited to their temperament, like pizza delivery or telemarketing. Schumpeter alone among modern thinkers realized that understanding progress calls for an ironic approach, which inspired him to call it ‘creative destruction’. With typical Viennese drunkenness, though, he got it exactly backwards.Every time we advance one step, our aspirations take two steps forward. Whenever you fix a problem, you’ll learn about two more in need of attention. Life used to be a brief adventure. Now it is nasty, brutish and long. I can see the Fray of the future – an infinitely customized hall of sighs, where people are too busy adjusting font colors, toggling between multiple screen views and worrying about the right combination of settings to ever post anything at all. It would reflect a similar existence outside, where every waking moment will be spent fiddling with the controls of life, adjusting blood pressure, dopamine, libido, nose length, financial portfolios, global climate and a zillion other things.I say, fcuk that. Somebody please bomb us back to the stone age.
If you haven’t yet joined us, we’re eagerly awaiting your arrival in the spruced-up Fray. The dust hasn’t settled yet, but the new furniture is breaking in nicely. GA … 4:00 am PDT.
Monday, June 4, 2007
Welcome, campers! Today’s a big occasion for us Fraywatchers. We consider this Day 1 of the Future. The Dawn of a New Era. The First Day of the Rest of our Lives. So, we’re a little disappointed that the “Bombastic Cliché Generator” is already stuck in overdrive.
We rolled out an entirely new Fray this morning. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be tweaking and twiddling with the software to bring you the best forum we can muster. In the meantime, we’re both excited and anxious to see what you’ll make of the new Fray.
If you want to keep abreast of developments with the wikimagidgets, cybermabobs, and sundry technical details, be sure to keep a close eye on Dan Engber’s “Fix the Fray” blog. Otherwise, just hop on in and start fooling around with our new gadgetry.
If you run into problems operating the new software, we recommend consulting the Fray Help file. If you can figure out how to submit a post and read the replies, share your worries with us in the Fix the Fray forum. We’ll be patrolling throughout the week, so you can count on a timely response from a Fray editor, a developer, or a savvy and generous Fray volunteer. If your troubles are more extensive and you can’t use the Fray at all, please feel free to e-mail our support team at fix.the.fray@gmail.com. We’ll do all that we can to get you online.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be figuring out how to use the new software. The changes around here, however, will be more than cosmetic. Our team behind the is looking forward to this new system. With a more efficient back end, we should be freed up from all the work we’ve poured into merely keeping the lights on. We’re eager to devote more focus to the part of this job we love the most—reading your submissions and sharing your words, wisdom and insight with the widest audience possible.
That project will begin with Slate’s own published writers, who will be making a concerted effort to join your discussions in the Fray. While we welcome sharp disagreement, we do ask you to treat them with respect. A little dose of civility goes a long way toward producing a genuine exchange of ideas. We really do believe your ideas matter. If you do, too, we ask that you take an extra moment to express those ideas with a modicum of charity.
Speaking of your ideas, we’ll be redoubling our commitment to publishing your comments as appends to Slate articles. Over the last seven years, the number of Fraysters has risen exponentially, whereas the number of Fray Editors hasn’t. The new tools we’re unveiling should make it easier for you to find the kinds of posts you want to read. It should also make it easier for us to guide you to the posts you want to read. We’ll still have to keep an eye on the bottom of the barrel. But, with this new platform, it should be much easier for us to focus on the Fray’s strongest material, rather than its worst.
We encourage you to keep tabs on the Fray’s new front page. Most of our readers are also excellent thinkers and writers. Over the years, you folks have been churning out reams of material that deserves to be read. The new design for the Fray’s front page should give us the tools to spotlight much more of that excellent material. If you’re a Fray-writer, we’re hoping to give you the audience you deserve. If you’re just a reader, we’ll be offering you material you could really enjoy. Please do check in often.
What about this space? Will we be doing anything new with the Fraywatch column?
We sure would like to. Most of our columns have focused on discussions flowing from published Slate articles. Many of those discussions are too interesting and important for us to ignore … even if some of you don’t feel the same way about this column.
As always, if you manage to really knock our socks off, we’ll happily stand aside and devote our entire column to you. Let’s face it; seeing your words published on Slate’s front page is serious ego-candy. If you earn it, we’ll be happy to give you a taste. And unlike us, you won’t have to receive the ensuing hate mail.
What we’d really like to do, however, is develop a collaborative relationship with all of you. We hope you’ll trust us when we confess that hardly anybody’s in the news business for the money. At the end of the day, we believe that this job performs a genuine public service. As citizens, each of us is enriched by exposure to a diversity of perspectives and insights that defy conventional wisdom.
Most of you have real jobs, real lives, and real brains. You are, therefore, privy to newsworthy information. You have as much access to books, films, and television as our best critics. In the coming election season, our political commentators will be attempting to read the political mood of places just like your hometown. Our news reporters will cover fields in which you’ve developed expertise. We’ll all have questions at some point that you’re qualified to answer.
If all this high-minded talk brings out the cynic in you, let me just remind you that exposure through the Fray has a real value. Our advertisers pay a pretty penny for the kind of promotion we’ll be giving to you for free. One of us is a former Frayster himself, so we can assure you that giving your best to the Fray can indeed pay tangible, albeit unforeseeable, rewards.
If you’re willing to join us, we’d like to collaborate and open a new chapter in our relationship with you. We’ll be dependent upon your help to do so. If you have any ideas, you’d like to share about where to take the Fray from here, we’ll be available for discussion in the Fraywatch Fray or at frayeditor@slate.com. AC & GA … 5:30 pm.
