Paris Hilton going to prison. Aside from my typical frustration with our care for and attention about people who are this far removed from us, this reminds me of older forms of frenzied support for the pain of others. Really, the amount of joy people take in the pain of others (I would argue that this isn't just joy in justice--and even if it were, shouldn't we privately hope for mercy?) astounds me. It reminds me of a mob caught up in a lynching or people at a bullfight or gore-filled "entertainment" at the Colosseum or the sort of perpetual human need for a scapegoat. Don't get me wrong: I have little love for or interest in Paris Hilton. But that disinterest continues from her good days to her bad days.
In The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer writes about the blurring of the line between the sacred and the profane in ancient civilizations: "To us these various classes of persons appear to differ totally in character and condition; some of them we should call holy, others we might pronounce unclean and polluted. But the savage makes no such distinction between them; the conceptions of holiness and pollution are not yet differentiated in his mind." There are also primitive (and modern) traditions of killing the god and eating him. I wonder if the Paris Hilton phenomenon isn't yet another case of confusion regarding exalted status that can quickly switch to scapegoat when the people's mood swings. It isn't that I'm advocating ignoring the transcendent in the future, let's just work a little harder to properly locate it.
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