Another post from John which seriously cracked me up

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June 21, 2007 - Thursday

Slut Payday Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities Paris Hilton is going to be paid a million dollars for her first interview after jail. In other words, Paris Hilton is going to be paid more money than most human beings will earn in their lifetimes, as payment for being sent to jail. A commodity is a strange thing, and to understand what you're looking at when you look at or hold a commodity in your hand requires a specialized critique into the nature of market economies. A commodity is more than the sum of it's parts. Let's look at a wallet as an example. The wallet is made of black leather. There's also some plastic in it to hold pictures, maybe some thread to stitch it together, and maybe a small metallic money clip. A square foot of leather, a square foot of clear plastic, and a gram and a half of aluminum, as raw materials, might cost you a dollar. When you go to the store to buy a wallet, you end up paying say fifteen dollars for it. The fourteen dollars between the cost of the raw materials and the price you, as the consumer, end up paying for the wallet are where a commodity takes on some very peculiar qualities. There was labor that was necessary to tan the leather, to assemble the wallet, to market the wallet, to put in on the shelf at the store. There is more labor necessary to stock the shelves, to store it in a warehouse before it is purchased, to ring it up at the register, etc. Then there is an amount of profit that the individuals with the vested capital need to render the wallet in order to ensure their continued existence. The raw material that goes into the wallet can be marked up, but only so far. The labor necessary to put the end commodity in your back pocket can be marked up far more so, hence you end up paying fifteen dollars for a one dollar wallet. Paris Hilton is a human being who is a raw material that can be added to a commodity in order to increase it's price. She does not work to add that value, her existence is the labor, so she's not labor, she's raw material. For example, you can add Paris Hilton to a television show or a magazine article, and the show or article or whatever the case may be becomes more economically viable, by the amount of money that was given to Paris as compensation for showing up at a nightclub, or lending her image to a perfume or an album, but also by the markup that's placed on the act of compensating Paris. Further complicating the peculiarities of the life of Paris Hilton, she became a raw material in the first place by being named after a commodity, by being pretty, and by seeming to have not a care in the world that runs deeper than the surface of it. In other words, she's a raw material that acts as a reminder of a complicated sequence of social relationships that inspire a weird mixture of awe, envy, and depression. In other words, she is the perfect image of what it means to be an American today. People ask me why I hate her so much. The answer is that I don't. It's not her fault. She's a dumb slut. What I hate is a society that makes Paris Hilton possible.