"Puzzling and perplexing"

Having a pop at Paris Hilton is a bit like having a pop at a Liberal Democrat - pointless, but a lot of fun nonetheless. So here we go.

Paris is out of prison and banging on about it. Let's have a look at some of what she says. Apparently it was a "traumatic" experience for her. Quite what she thought prison was going to be like is beyond me, but it was never going to be a walk in the park, was it? And whilst I dare say it wasn't very pleasant, I'm guessing that, as a socialite celebrity, she wasn't kept in the female equivalent of Oz.

The BBC also reports that she "said she had panic attacks and nightmares that someone would break into her cell and do harm to her, and that her small cell had exacerbated her claustrophobia." I may be wrong here, but the point of a prison cell should be that you can't break out of it. So, logically, it must also be very difficult to break into. And you can't have it both ways. You can either have a small cell where you are protected, or greater exposure to the prison population. Prisons don't tend to palatial cells.

She also comments:

"I think the crime did not fit the punishment. I don't feel like I deserved to go to jail."

Making her unique amongst criminals (and yes, she is now a convicted criminal) - I mean no-one has ever felt before that their punishment did not fit the crime and that they should not have gone to prison. It seems like an obvious point, but it is actually for the courts to decide what is an appropriate punishment. Not the criminal.

But, fair play, she has learnt from her traumatic experience and says:

"I feel like God does make everything happen for a reason."

Yeah, uh-huh, God didn't make this happen, Paris. The real giveaway should be the fact that God doesn't exist, and didn't exist in your little world until you were forced to go back to prison and serve time for your asinine crime. The person who made this happen is you, Paris. For continually breaking the law. If you haven't figured that our yet then you haven't learnt anything from prison.

It is too easy to call Hilton stupid - I don't think she is as dumb as she is made out to be, and Larry King's comment (that is also the title of this post) that she is "puzzling and perplexing" is probably accurate. She doesn't understand that she caused her time in prison because she committed a crime. Her problem is not a lack of intelligence, but rather she has been brought up and lives in a world without consequences. And by being caught pissed up behind the steering wheel she should have faced up to some of the consequences of her actions. But it says something about her worldview that even a spell in prison hasn't persuaded her that she is the architect of her own misfortune.