: Mary, your thoughts?
: IN THE GAME OF ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS, JUDGE BEATS SHERIFF.
: Why are you shouting?
: BECAUSE I WAS UP ALL NIGHT WRITING A WITTY FIRST LINE FOR MY TV APPEARANCE AND THAT'S--UH--THAT'S WHAT I'VE GOT.
: Very good, anything else?
: NO, THANK YOU. MAY I GO HOME NOW?
: We have a special guest today. Nicky Hilton, Paris' sister.
: Whatever happened to me, eh?
: Geraldo, you're the Judge in this case. There's Paris Hilton. She finally comes into your courtroom, Judge Geraldo, what's your sentence?
: The Judge in this case was angry. He should have recused himself, this was not objective justice--
: So what's the sentence?
: Increase the probationary period, and give her time served.
: All right. Buzz Aldrin, your thoughts.
: I walked on the moon.
: John, you were there, what do you think about all this?
: Yeah, I'd do her.
: When they told her she would have to go back to prison, there was just a bloodcurdling scream.
(wacky scream sound effect)
: And when they tried to get her out of the courtroom, she just started screaming even more, she called for her mother.
(toilet flushing sound effect)
: She truly looked like she was overmedicated, or like she was coming off of something.
(slide whistle sound effect)
: Danny Bonaduce is here to give his unique Hollywood perspective on this case.
(Danny Bonaduce snorts cocaine)
(Danny Bonaduce slits his wrists)
(I begin to envy Danny Bonaduce)
: The police car, as you can see, if currently fighting through a swarm of photographers and paparazzi to get away from the courtroom. Once they get out on the road, they will--wait, I'm getting a report that Nancy Pelosi exploded. Is that right? I don't know, we'll check that. She may not have exploded, we'll check that, but Nancy Pelosi, dead at--ooh look, they're at a stoplight!
: Tiki Barber, you're a celebrity, you're a father, you played football. What are your thoughts on this whole Paris Hilton saga?
: (grins, fumbles)
: One word. Total bitch.
: OK, panelists. What do you think?
: Oh, yeah. Bitch, definitely. For sure, total bitch (etc.)
: What kind of message does Paris Hilton send to our children? To answer that question, we turn to this trained black bear.
: (growls)
: Is she getting special treatment because she's famous? Or is she being made an example of because she's famous? Mark, your thoughts?
: Well, it's hard to say. I think it really gets down to the heart of how our justice system really works, especially here in Los Angeles. I mean, does she deserve a shorter sentence because she's famous? No, but does that mean we should go out of our way to make sure that we sentence her just like everyone else? How is that possible? No matter how hard we try, there's no divorcing her personality from the objective facts of this case, and because we're worried that other people might be inclined to give her special treatment, do we run the risk of overcompensating for them and then being too harsh? I mean, this is still a human being here, right? Or is it for the best to make a strong example of her, to make sure that people understand the the justice system really is blind, even if that's the complete freaking opposite of what's going on, you know what I'm saying? Because the more we try to convince ourselves how blind the justice system is, we only prove the opposite, and go further and further towards showing how really unfair it is. And is being unfair any better in the case of a billionaire spoiled socialiate who everyone hates than in any other case? I mean, at the core, the moral transgression is still the same, no? And how can we even blame her? How can we even blame her, you know? I mean--society created this woman! We created her, we wrote her whole narrative from start to finish, didn't we? More so than anyone else in American history--God knows she did fuckall to deserve any of this attention. We built her up from rich nothing--just a pretty blond void--into this little monster. And we kept enabling her and enabling her and enabling her--we paid attention to her even though she continued to do absolutely nothing to earn her notoriety, because we knew that some day, she would make a mistake and we would be able to destroy her, and we salivated at that chance for years. And then today, years after her sex tape, which we also allowed to happen--I mean, you don't hear anyone talking about fucking Screech's fucking sex tape, do you?--and today, now we got the real money shot, with Paris crying in the back seat of a police car. It was our narrative from the start--this is what our cynical disgusting destructive society has become--we don't cheer at the rags-to-riches story anymore, we revel in the riches-to-rags self-destruction! It's just like--and I'm not the first to say this, but it's just like the Titanic. It had to sink, because it represented in our culture this idea of the old world, the Gilded Age idea of fabulous wealth and brutally divided classes, and that was ending, and we needed a symbol for it before we could truly move on. And then the Twin Towers, those too. American hegemony, fabulous wealth, the new technological information age, casual secular greed, naive oblivious arrogance--the towers were created to be destroyed, by the oldest of fucked up old world values. And in the meantime, we were creating this thing, this empty signifier, Paris Hilton, who may as well not even be a person, for everything she stands for in our society--and today was the big day, when we got to see her destroyed. And what did she ever do to deserve that? She had no idea she was being set up from the start! And I'm fighting all these conflicting feelings, because on the other hand, she's a horrible person who deserves to have her life ruined for forty days, you know? Because what's forty days? Maybe it'll even help her, maybe she'll gain some perspective and stop being such a trainwreck--because she really is bad for all of us, even as we're creating her, she's destroying us, she's rotting our core. She has to be held accountable for this, too, she could have stopped this any time, just look at her sister who comparatively fell off the earth! And then there's this third impulse running through my head that says, who cares? Who fucking cares, you know? I'm truly embarrassed to be a human being today, I mean that. Why is this--I mean, Scooter Libby's gonna get pardoned, isn't he? And he's a lot closer to something truly evil, you know? And there are people dying in Iraq and we haven't caught Osama bin Laden yet and--fuck. I mean, fucking fuck, you know?
(twenty-five seconds of dead air)
(deep sigh)
(sixty seconds of dead air)
(slide whistle sound effect)
: Do you think the press has made too much of this story?
: Yes I do, Bill.
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