KEY POINTS:
The liberation of Paris was short-lived. To near-universal delight she was sent back to the slammer, howling for her Mommy like a 5-year-old on her first day at school.
Once photos showing her puffy-eyed and frantic, the famous face squished like an old cushion, had flashed around the world, her public humiliation was complete and the sniggering speculation over what indignities she'll be subjected to in the isolation of her prison cell could resume where it had left off.
Most humour is at someone's expense and there's an undeniable appeal in watching someone who's often seemed more cartoon character than real person go from being the Road Runner to being Wile E. Coyote, from princess to jailbird, from the Hollywood Hills to Desolation Row.
Last week the Los Angeles Times published a spoof prison diary containing such gems as "there is no TV, no iPod, no cellphone. Just - I hope I'm spelling this right - 'boks' or maybe 'bowks.' Whatever, I took a few of them from the cart and have been looking at the covers. Then, last night, I looked inside and there are, like, a million words, page after page. Are these new?"
But how can you parody someone whose default mode is unconscious self-parody? Right on cue she announced, through the medium of the Methuselah-like TV personality Barbara Walters, that she's turning to God and will henceforth devote herself to good works, including building a Paris Hilton Playhouse for sick children.
Her comeuppance triggered schadenfreude on a massive scale because she's practically the only person in the world who it's entirely safe and acceptable to hate. It's safer to hate Paris Hilton than, for instance, Robert Mugabe.
She's pretty, privileged, white, American, smug, vapid, calculatingly sexual, devoid of intellectual curiosity, and pathologically vain. Not even her gender can garner her any support: "She's the ultimate anti-feminist icon for a post-feminist world," fumes author Naomi Wolf.
And, of course, her celebrity is largely bogus, based on little more than a well-known name/brand and an ability to manipulate the media. She's the archetype of the person who's famous for being famous. (A couple of years ago, her less-famous younger sister Nicky had an interesting riposte: "I'm 21 years old; I run two multimillion-dollar companies. Like, what were you doing that was so [expletive] important at that age?")
The other convenient thing about it is that we needn't feel guilty about taking an unseemly and malicious delight in someone else's misfortune because there's a really important principle at stake here. We're rapt that Paris got bunged back in jail because it upholds the principle that we're all equal under the law.
To which the only possible response is, yeah, right. One law for the rich and one for the poor is as true now as ever, and truer in America than anywhere. The legal profession and editorial writers can hail this case as proof that the system works, but humiliating one silly but essentially harmless young woman doesn't prove anything of the sort.
She's in jail because she violated parole in a reckless driving case and the media got on to it. No one was killed or even injured, no shareholders were fleeced, no fraud was perpetrated on the public, no ecological atrocity was committed, no vulnerable human beings were exploited or used as guinea pigs.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in America, the day Paris checked back into the big house, my local paper reported that a Virginian couple of modest means are going to jail for 27 months for contributing to the delinquency of minors. Their crime was to host a birthday party/sleepover for their 16-year-old son at which beer was supplied and car keys confiscated, rather than have them and their friends go out on the town and almost certainly drink-drive.
None of the youths tested by police was legally intoxicated. Almost half of them hadn't consumed any alcohol. The parents are now divorced and facing bankruptcy.
Over the page was a story about the nearly 50,000 unidentified bodies held at morgues across the United States and the estimated 105,000 open missing persons cases. It's safe to assume that a fair proportion of those dead and missing were murdered and the likelihood of their killers ever being apprehended is remote and receding by the day.
But America will sleep soundly tonight, secure in the knowledge that Ms Big is back where she belongs: behind bars.
After Rolling Stones Mick Jagger and Keith Richard were sentenced to three months' jail for cannabis possession in 1967, the editor of The Times William Rees-Mogg questioned the severity of the sentence in an editorial headed, "Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?"
When the butterfly in question is Paris Hilton, the answer would seem to be who wouldn't?
