The trouble with Paris Hilton, Larry King and reality television

Did you see Paris Hilton come walking out of jail like she was prancing down a runway at a fashion show? If so what you saw was the French Revolution in reverse. You saw Paris/Marie Antoinette walk out of the Bastille unharmed. You saw the beautiful Germanic/Austrian blonde smiling from ear to ear as she ran to her mother to give her a hug in front of a hundred paparazzi.

Toulouse-Lautrec, the aristocratic French painter of short stature (from his relatives inbreeding) who became famous from painting can-can dancers and prostitutes in Montmartre on the outskirts of Paris in the 1880s, teaches us much about social decadence. Much of his work focused on France’s Third Republic and its legalization of prostitution. He was careful to juxtapose the conservative Roman Catholics who tolerated and policed the brothels with the poor women who worked in them.

How could such social decadence been legislated in a city that had just built the Sacre Coeur Catholic Church? It is very simple. The elite Catholics married other elite Catholics. The women had to be virgins for reasons of family honor, pride, virtue, etc. However, no French male could resist the pleasure of the flesh until marriage. Enter the legalization of Prostitution. Who benefits? The elites of Paris. Montmartre becomes a destination for all the decadent of Europe. Who loses? All of the poor women who contracted syphilis.

Paris Hilton is not French. She is however very similar to Marie Antoinette. Instead of suggesting that peasants eat cake, she sells them overpriced ingredients and ensures that they can never actually make a cake with what she gives them. The people starve. The Revolution ensues. Enter the guillotine. Enter Napoleon. Enter Toulouse-Lautrec. Enter Montmartre, Las Vegas, Hollywood, New York City, and all of the other historic homes of social decadence. “Values” as defined in Washington D.C. are in reality a high-class whore that spreads its legs to the highest bidder.

Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake” but the perception that she was indifferent to ordinary people became reality. Why were the ordinary people suffering so much? The French government was bankrupt, the price of bread had sky-rocketed, and the elites had filled the peasants with abstract notions of “liberty” in the same vain as Voltaire, Locke, Jefferson, and Franklin. The French peasant had been paying for the debts of abstract madness since at least 1789 most likely back to the “enlightened despotism”