Arrogance Convicted....

One of my favorite bumper stickers reads, "Stupidity Should Be Painful." I offer yet another, "Arrogance Should Be Punishable." If such a sicker were readily available I'd slap it on the paddy-wagon that will transport Paris Hilton to jail where she will begin her over due but well deserved 45 day prison sentence. Were she not such a classic case of insipid ignorance and unabated conceit, I wouldn't bother to waste one paragraph on what has been to this point her pointless existence.

I despise passionately arrogance...the definition of same that so adequately describes this hollow of human failings; "being baselessly proud and overbearing through an exaggerated feeling of one's superiority." Hollywood and Madison Avenue are awash in these poor human specimens, striving and thriving on being famous only as a result of their flamboyant notoriety. Paris Hilton and others of her ilk - Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, the premature balding Britney Spears, the now departed, waste-of-a -life, Anna Nicole Smith, etc. & ad nauseam - bring nothing of value to the human condition but their own highly inflated sense of entitlement. And what is tragically sad is that so many of us, especially the impressionable youth of our country, hold these shallow individuals up as worthy role models to be immolated. It has become fashionable to be fashionable...an end and pointless purpose unto itself.

This is not intended to be a diatribe against persons of wealth. I am a proponent that what one earns, regardless of the amount of money accumulated, if so earned through means and methods of personal sweat and integrity, one deserves the spoils of one's toil. However, such accumulated riches does not imbue any individual from ascribing conceitedly that their wealth is an unbridled license to declare themselves unapproachable, privileged, and most certainly unencumbered by the dictates of legal statue. It has been said that "the mark of a man is what he does with his money." It can be unfortunately just as true by conversely stating that the mark of a man can be ascertained by what money does to the man.

In Ms. Hilton's case, money and the arrogant power that she derived from it, made her blind to any sense of obligation other than to her bloated sense of self-importance. The tears she shed upon the judge's sentence pronouncement were not ones of remorse nor ones of embarrassment. This spoiled debutante shed only tears of bewilderment at finally being made accountable for her own self-absorbed arrogance. Perhaps spending forty-five days behind bars void of all her unearned privileges will awaken Ms. Hilton to the realization that the sun, moon, and stars do not revolve around her well coiffured head...but I won't bet the home in the Hamptons on it.