It’s not as if it had been a quiet week, mind you. In the Kremlin, Russia’s new apocalyptics dimmed the lights, dusted off 30-year-old slides of trajectories and megadeath estimates and similar nuclear porn, and ruminated, jowls a-wobble, about the possibility of rolling their seeping, rusting arsenal westward on 10 000 donkey-carts. Away to the east the first rivets began pinging out of the red-hot bulkheads of the Shanghai stock exchange. And far down in the deep south the Sultan of Downing Street was carried into town on a toadstool, introducing himself to South Africans as Tone, Bwana With Cred and Friend of the Uncommonly Common Man. ”You know, that’s an incredibly insightful point, and, you know, actually one I discussed with Cherie last night on the love-futon while she was breastfeeding our newly adopted polar-bear cub …”
It was glamour all the way; but still the baggage thrust her wretched little mantis-face into our private reveries. Famine, plague, pestilence and war galloped unbridled through the skies last week, and yet there was Paris Hilton — that emaciated rectal thermometer endlessly measuring our collective ghastliness — walking towards the prison door like Joan of Arkansas.
Like plague after a cough, she was everywhere, and again one marvelled at how so startlingly unattractive a girl could have built a reputation as something of a looker. To say that Hilton’s feet are Hobbit-like would be to slander the Halflings and their flippered kin; for the flapping, hairy prosthetic trotters of Frodo Baggins and his band appear quite sylph-like next to the dirigibles bolted to Hilton’s ankles. Indeed, if Paris’s party trick didn’t seem to be vomiting on people, one would swear she could lean forward straight-legged at a 45° angle.
Which, at very least, would spare one from seeing those eyes; lifeless as a goat’s, but arranged prawn-like, that is, far too close together to be of much use: given that they seem to be migrating towards a singe central socket, it seems unlikely that Paris can see anything at all, let alone the bigger picture. But still, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed slattern is princess.
In short, one was reminded that Paris is the sort of girl who, if the world were just, would have spent her youth sitting on a fence chewing a straw while passing villagers threw dead cats at her. But it isn’t, and she hasn’t, and just when one was about to ascribe it all to the decline of the West and wish fleetness to the little hoofs of Russia’s nuke-mules so that our doom might come sooner rather than later, one noticed an extremely odd thing about the Parisites and their media lickspittles.
According to Bang Showbiz — disappointingly, a news service and not a Smolensk revue bar — Saint Paris the Moronic was terrified about her forthcoming ordeal. ”A source said: ‘Paris hasn’t been eating at all and her parents and friends are beyond worried about her.
”She breaks down crying a lot because she just can’t deal with the reality and the pressure of everything that is happening.”’
At this point one wanted to pause to wonder how anyone can tell whether Paris is eating or simply subsisting on collagen leaking out of her lips and into her stomach; but an oddly familiar paragraph loomed up, compelling further attention.
”Paris hasn’t been eating at all,” it said, ”and her parents and friends are beyond worried about her.
”She breaks down crying a lot because she just can’t deal with the reality and the pressure of everything that is happening.”
Perhaps it was a typo, but perhaps it wasn’t. It really doesn’t matter; because whether they say it once, or twice, or simply fill an entire article with the same quote repeated endlessly, they’re doing the same thing, endlessly reselling the same desiccated lie to the same worm-fodder who can’t tell the difference anyway.
It was depressing, but only for an afternoon, until happier, more fortifying thoughts shunted the boat-footed bimbo aside. Some of us still read real newspapers, they said; august weeklies in which the dissentient twitches and ejaculations of American swamp life are carefully ignored, or at most touched upon only to be mocked. Proper newspapers, they said, that protect us from the endlessly repeated mantras of celebrity, the deadening duplication that defines popular culture. We are still safe, they said.
And then, not 12 hours later, the lamppost screamed around a corner — twice — and all was darkness.