I blather on a lot about cultural change and here comes Paris to make my point e

I blather on a lot about cultural change and here comes Paris Hilton to make my point effortlessly. After John McCain’s anti-Obama ad comparing him unflatteringly to the lewdness of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, it was Paris who struck back fatally—not Barack Obama.

Paris calls McCain out for being an old nobody in content and delivering her message in an online viral medium (FunnyorDie.com) form that has spread around the world further and faster than McCain’s political ad format ever could. Paris totally p0wnd McCain. Not that he’d know what that means.

McCain—who thinks the Internet has shows you watch like television and is less web-savvy than a 106-year-old—cannot become president for a whole host of reasons from being a McBush with PTSD, to being an oiltard. But overshadowing all of these is the simplest reason of all:

This election may be explicitly a battle over energy and economic doctrines but implicitly it is a war to the death between two solitudes.

One, the exsanguinated husk of old politics and the other a giant question mark of technology shifting and moaning far faster than the old farty cultural theorists can wrap their post/neo/posted-heads around.

Neither choice is soothing. We face failure on one hand and the unknown on the other. And while exploiting her youth and sexuality, contextualized, Paris’ video makes a much more salient point: American politicians are just celebrities who are humourless, rich, and repetitive. Promising “experience” or “change” is about as democratically deep as being totally hot. And while rich and repetitive, Paris is wise enough to hire writers who are insanely more amusing.

Tags: mccain ad, paris hilton, paris video, presidential election

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Posted on Wednesday, August 6th, 2008 at 10:09 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.