Saturday I had some time to lay back and relax for an hour or so. Seldom a television watcher, other than sports, I took a break from some eye-bending writing and reading. I grabbed the remote, popped a bag of popcorn, and hoped to watch part of a great movie TCM. That lends the question too, “when did Patriot Games become an American classic?” However, I digress. I began flipping the channels due to general mental fatigue and the fetishistic popular reality series that seems to pervade every channel from the Garden Channel to even the sports channels. Then the little ‘that’s hot’ vixen, Paris Hilton flashes on the screen and I hear her utter these words, “You’re my new pet.”

What, did I hear her right? Did she just refer to another human as her new pet? Sadly, she did. More to the point and even more disdainfully, she had eighteen contestants vying to become her new best friend. Hence the title, well I really don’t have a name for it but I presume, show will fit the bill, Becoming Paris Hilton’s New BFF?

Let’s examine the premise of the show first. Paris casts sixteen girls and two very flamboyant, young, gay men in a knock down drag out survivor of sort’s reality set. She, through the best means of modern communication, texts her pets due her will. The requests are audacious and at times demeaning. She places the contestants in precarious social situations and maliciously pits the characters against themselves. On Paris’s gluttonous and subjective whim, she eliminates, denigrates, and sets the women’s suffragists movement back decades.

Literary theory, popular film theory, and all other sublimated minds that sit around dissecting this tripe must be astounded by this horrific display of self-subjugation by the contestants. When did we as a culture deride our values to the sum lowest common denominator of basic human rights? Am I missing the point here? Is the show trying to tell us more? Is Paris the ultimate joke on the show? Sadly, no. I think the 20-something masterminds that now run the marketing division at MTV have lost sight of human value and are affectively the laughing point of this television monstrosity—Paris is simply a little spoiled girl without the mind to realize the damage she is causing our country. The emerging generations of 20-somethings are Hemmingway’s real Lost Generation left searching for an identity in a human that is transparent and devoid of human worth.

Paris is celebrity for celebrity sake; we all know that and it has been criticized in mainstream media and headier literary print ad nausem. She obviously has something on someone or, myself, one lightly attached to the popular media knows folks of lesser talent can simply pay their way onto the little screen. She has commoditized herself without the benefit of social production, talent, virtue, or credential (outside of the fact her grandfather owns a couple of hotels).

Now she is actively debasing our nation’s youth and turning them into of all things—PETS. As a dying super-power alone in an isolationist void of failed foreign policy teetering on the precipice of our own failure, what does the likes of Paris and her pets convey to the world? Moreover, what does it convey to our impressionable youth that sit home unsupervised and digest this digression without the filter of parental guidance? We are no longer the great country we were when our parents were children. We are capricious, salacious, lacking in moral judgment, and disconnected to the social fiber that once made us great. So please put down the crackberry, for heavens sake take the remote out of your child’s hand, and have dinner or go to the beach and watch a sunset.