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Paris Hilton believes she shouldn’t have to serve her 45 day prison sentence for driving with a suspended license due to an earlier drink/driving offense, because she:

“………provides hope for young people all over the US and the world. She provides beauty and excitement to (most of) our otherwise mundane lives”.

Excuse me?

Paris Hilton is a spoiled, pampered, immature, near brain-dead brat whose only claim to fame is being born stinking rich. If she epitomizes anything, it is the shallow, self-centered, uncaring, sod-off-everybody-I’m-all-right-Jack attitude displayed by many of the wealthier American set to which she belongs.

Personally, I don’t consider her jail term long enough. She was convicted of drunk driving, and should have been locked up for that. Caught a second time for driving without a license, she calmly complains that she knows nothing of such matters and blamed an aide for misinforming her. She promptly fired him.

In fact, Hilton was stopped on the 15th January this year and warned for driving without a license. She signed a paper declaring she understood. On the 27th February she was stopped again for speeding and not using headlights. It was on this occasion she was charged.

Contempt for the law is popular among the stinking rich. It is found in the highest offices of the land, and permeates down through the so-called “upper echelons” of society. It goes hand-in-glove with a sense of superiority over everyone outside of the “elite circle”.

Apparently, Hilton’s mother shouted at the prosecutor, calling him “pathetic”, when the sentence was read out. Earlier, she had laughed at the judge and asked for his autograph. Perhaps it’s something in the genes.

It is possible, assuming wealth doesn’t win the day and overturn Hilton’s sentence on appeal, that 45 days in the company of women a little less well-to-do than herself might just prevail upon Hilton to take a deeper, more meaningful look at her life and where it is leading.

Personally, I doubt it will.

Filed under: Pampered pests

Following intense criticism for my comparison of Vice President Dick Cheney to the dwarf, Gollum, I have been forced to issue an abject apology or be sued for defamation of character. Once again, in these pages, I will repeat how sorry I am for such a grave mistake.

Sorry, Gollum.

In fact, I could be totally wrong, but isn’t Dick Cheney just an older version of Alberich, from Richard Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen”?

                        

More HERE.

Filed under: Even more similarity

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise……

Kipling had his own ideas of what made a man and most of us would, I guess, broadly agree with him. Yet that first verse of his famous ode is only the beginning. There is, as Kipling later points out, much more to being a man that just that.

Take Paul Wolfowitz, head of the World Bank, as an example. One could assume, after reading the lines above, that his dogmatic refusal to resign is an expression of manly aspirations. After all, he seems to be “keeping his head when all about are losing theirs” (one of his senior aides, Kevin Kellems, has just resigned, according to a BBC report today) and his self-trust is all too obvious, even though most others consider him dishonest. Quite obviously, he believes patience will win the day, though sadly it was lying that brought him to his impasse. He is certainly hated, particularly – we are told – by his co-workers at the Bank. We can only ponder on whether that negative emotion is mirrored in return.

At this point, then, he appears to achieve at least some measure of Kipling’s “manliness”. But, is it manly to cock a snoot (old English expression) at everyone around you, knowing they dislike you intensely; to continue in the same old way, seemingly oblivious of the negative vibrations you are generating throughout your workplace? If so, Paul Wolfowitz is one manly cookie.

However, there is a difference between manliness and arrogance, and in this case Wolfowitz is, I believe, merely expressing the latter.

In fact, the one common denominator that bound such neo-cons as Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Cheney was a surfeit of arrogance. Like all egocentric ogres they claw their way to power, and having attained it, cling fervently by well-manicured fingernails to the cliff edge of their positions. But even giants can be toppled. It just takes a bit of extra effort. Don a pair of good, hob-nailed boots, stamp on the fingers hard enough, and they will eventually plunge, shrieking and wailing to the end, into an abyss of anonymity – as Donald Rumsfeld eventually discovered.

“Who?” I hear you ask. “Oh, yes, Rumsfeld! We’d almost forgotten him.”

It seems likely Wolfowitz will soon follow a similar downward plummet, despite old pals in the White House desperately clinging to his fingertips. He, and his pals, wanted to “take over the Earth and everything that’s in it” but not, alas, in the way Kipling meant. They’re not true men; their only compassion is for themselves; they know bravado, but lack true bravery. Wolfowitz, and his cronies, will go the way of others deficient in the real manliness Kipling immortalized so vividly:

“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings – nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run –
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man my son!”

No. They will never be Men.

Filed under: Political psirens