paris hilton

The campaign to keep Paris Hilton in jail: nothing healthy about it

Paris Hilton at the 2007 MTV movie awards in Los Angeles, just prior to her incarceration

By David Walsh
WSWS.org
9 June 2007

The pious outrage Thursday over heiress Paris Hilton’s “early release” from jail in Los Angeles, accusations of “special treatment” and the vindictive demands that she receive “justice,” i.e., punishment, have nothing healthy or progressive about them—as the images of Hilton being taken in handcuffs to court Friday morning and from there, sobbing, back to prison should indicate.

Lenny Bruce: Arrested in 1963by Tre Marlix - Trews.org

Paris Hilton's arrest, trial, and jailing is a bonafide media circus. It appears to top all the news stories going on in the world. Stories of war, genocide, droughts, heroic moments, and anything else happening during these past few days. Like a prayer to a false idol, the news outlets are worshipping the idea of celebrity. But not just any celebrity, rich empty celebrity. A dumbed down version of a royal fantasy for all of us to watch and possibly get stupider in the process. But this whole charade of justice and the intoxication of the media just turns me off. So off in fact, that I found myself reading an entirely different story of a celebrity trial from the early 1960s. This tale is quite different, the celebrity in question actually had the tenacity to push his public image to the edge for a good reason, so much in fact that he became a martyr for the First Amendment. This man in the spotlight went by the name of Lenny Bruce.