Paris Hilton has decided that she is a role model for young women around the world. At first glance that creates the same kind of problem as the one a columnist wrote about recently with Hillary Clinton. At this point, either you understand and appreciate the problems that Clinton's candidacy presents or you don't; thereby inferring that if you don't know by now, you probably never will.
That's all well and good on the surface but the dilemma for me goes deeper. We need to question ourselves and try to understand what it is about the collective consciousness of American society that allows Paris Hilton to think that she actually is role model material.
What has gone so awry with our society that it has become the model, so to speak, of success to simply be a person who has enough money that she can "party 'til she pukes?" Concurrently, what has skewed us so far off the beam in American politics that the "fun" part is slinging the mud?
And why is it that Wal-Mart, having charted billions in profits, can with a straight face tell us that it is their solemn duty to litigate the last remaining dollar from a brain damaged woman in order to keep their self-insured minions solvent? It is more important for them to "contribute" a half a million dollars to the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation so as to wield influence with their former board member who is running for president than it is to even bother to respond to a letter seeking help on behalf of someone who desperately needs it.
And the Bush Administration would have us believe that they are helping out "the farmers" of America, and the environment, by promoting corn powered bio-diesel. They don't bother to explain, of course, that the farmers are not mom and pop but rather huge corporations like GE, BP, Ford, Shell, Cargill and Carlyle. Manufacturing bio-diesel from corn uses more energy than it saves and drives up the price of food. Then it inadvertently drives up the price of soy beans, which leads to more plantings, which leads to more virgin forest destruction, which then creates even more global warming.
These are the type of problems we have in a world gone wild after having been led for seven years by an administration that gives lip service to Jesus Christ while it secretly worships at the alter of corporate greed. When the President of the United States asks the people to help the "war effort" by going shopping, it is no wonder that huge masses of people wander about aimlessly only seeking self gratification.
Meanwhile, Joan Baez still sings about injustice but the masses have forgotten how to be outraged. The top one percent of fat cats in this country keep getting richer while, like in the days of the civil war, they orchestrate battles between the masses based on artificially contrived divisions; black against white, women against men, Jews against Italians, and so on ad nauseam.
During the 60s we understood the corporate mindset. We called them on it with movements that used slogans like "War is good business, invest your son." Now, the majority of Americans just acquiesce. They not only invest their sons but they prove that social progress has been made by investing their daughters as well.
The peace symbol turns 50 this year, if it were a person it would just be starting to hit its prime. It is a combinant pictogram of the semaphore signals for the letters N and D. Nuclear disarmament was the message it was originally intended to convey but it grew to mean so much more.
As Richard Lacayo notes in this week's Time Magazine, "...it kept spreading through the culture. Like the Christian cross, which served the purposes of soup kitchens and Crusaders, the Sisters of Mercy and the Ku Klux Klan, it was adaptable. Over time, it evolved from its narrow association with nuclear disarmament into an insignia for counterculture of all kinds. Hippies made it a sort of all-purpose symbol of peacefulness."
But now it sits idle, a younger sibling to the graying baby boomers who gave it a claim to fame. The infamous logo waits patiently for someone to realize just how relevant it still is.
The question it asks is as crisp as music by The Buffalo Springfield. How brain dead have we become?