The Idiotic Life

I don’t want to be accused of making generalizations, but the few minutes I stumbled across last night of The Simple Life – the Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie socialite-out-of-water “reality series” – did nothing to change my impression that these young women are stupid, outrageously self-centered, vapid, vacuous, nihilistic little ninnies. It’s the tragedy of Less Than Zero repeated as bad farce. The hosebag and the junkie don’t do a whole lot toward dispelling stereotypes of their indolent ilk:

For Hilton, the genuine “reality” of living the celebrity life hit home just last month when a video surfaced on the Internet of her enjoying a “sex romp” with a former boyfriend.

The resulting scandal saw the media-friendly socialite scurrying for seclusion.

Richie, meanwhile, left Altus for rehab having pleaded guilty before filming for the show began to a charge of heroin possession.

….Two young, super-rich socialites, famous for being … young and super-rich, are the stars of the latest US reality show in which they abandon their party lifestyles to slum it for four weeks on a dairy farm.

….The simple premise of “The Simple Life” is the plight of the city-slicker confronted by the harsh realities of making a living in rural America.

A sort of “Beverly Hillbillies” in reverse, the show takes Hilton and Richie, both 22, from their luxurious Los Angeles homes and flies them — in a private jet — to a farm near the town of Altus, Arkansas (pop. 817).

Once there, they squeal at insects, milk cows while in full make-up and generally flaunt what they clearly consider to be the required level of wealth-induced ignorance.

“What is Wal-Mart? Is that where they sell, like, wall stuff?” Paris asks at the dinner table of the family that play hick hosts to the two celebrity cuckoos in their midst. [USA Today]

Remarkably, not only do the girls look like useless twits, the farm family come off as twisted and clueless in their own manner. This meeting is about as far from the suburban reality of the large majority of Americans as Iraq – I wonder if the president will visit while the girls are in Arkansas