American party girl: the prisonerette in L.A.(CULTURE WATCH)(Paris Hilton)

FIRST, two confessions. When I saw the photographs of a sobbing, snot-faced Paris Hilton getting carted back to jail--she had been released for "an unspecified medical problem" after serving only a few days of her sentence--I got a creepy thrill out of it.

"Good!" I thought to myself. Paris Hilton needs to learn that the law applies to everyone. Paris Hilton can't drive drunk, get her license suspended, then keep driving. Paris Hilton is a symbol of everything that's wrong with this country--the obsession with mindless, half-educated celebrities; the cultish worship of fashion; the coarse public sexuality; the disappearance of shame; the unembarrassable rich. Paris Hilton needs to suffer. Paris Hilton needs to be forced to squat down on a stainless steel toilet in full view of the other inmates for the next 45 days, at least. That'll teach her.

And here's the second confession: Last night, I went out to dinner. Before dinner, I enjoyed a Maker's Mark bourbon on the rocks. With dinner--grilled fish, some vegetables, an odd-looking flan--I had three glasses of wine. And then I drove home.

I wasn't over the .08 percent blood alcohol content that California legislators have somehow arrived at as the definition of drunkenness. I mean, I don't think I was. Put it this way: I've probably driven home with more in the tank, if you get my drift. And dinner lasted several hours, though exactly how many hours, under the advice of my attorney, I choose not to specify.

Let me throw in a third, unadvertised confession. If, somehow, through a combination of too many Maker's, too much wine, and an insufficient amount of breadbasket Hoovering (highly unlikely, as anyone who has ever eaten with me will testify), I actually do end up driving home, at some point in the future, over the .08 percent legal limit, and I do get pinched by the local cops for weaving all over Olympic Boulevard, and then I do forget, as Paris Hilton claims to have forgotten, that my license is suspended (twice), and a chain of events ensues that results in my getting perp-walked back to the Los Angeles County Twin Towers Men's Correctional Facility, let me tell you: It will be a six-act play. I will cry like a freakin' baby. I mean sobs, hyperventilation, mouth-open wails. I mean tears and spittle and mucus until I look like a giant glazed doughnut.

So with the high horse thus dispensed, let's talk about Paris Hilton.

She's a 26-year-old, highly sexualized halfwit with nothing, really, to her credit. She's silly and pointless, and whether she knows it or not, more often the butt of the joke than in on the joke. We don't know for certain what the next five or ten years will bring for this tiny-brained, sexy little zero, but we're all pretty sure it doesn't end in Oslo, at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony. It doesn't end in the State Department, as the Ambassador Plenipotentiary to this hotspot or that. It doesn't end in the lobby of Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley-based venture-capital fund, with the specs to a revolutionary new search-engine algorithm in her Bottega Veneta attache. It doesn't end with her on the shuttle to Boston with a copy of Grant's Interest Rate Observer.