Unlike every newspaper columnist and half of North America north of Mexico, I did not watch The Simple Life, starring Paris Hilton and her dumpy friend. I have been too busy and, in truth, I try to keep my TV watching to a minimum (I mean, six hours a day of The Simpsons, Buffy, and Seinfeld repeats is enough). However, that does not mean that I bear any particular animus towards Paris Hilton. On the contrary, I consider myself one of her biggest fans, although I have never seen her first "movie" or even give a damn about her. Sure, she is attractive in a dirty-girl-with-wonderful-big-baby-deer-eyes sort of way, a contradiction I'm not sure that even I understand. She would also be a ton of fun to party with, as long as she pays the bill at the end.

However, my esteem for poor Paris has nothing to do with her come-hither looks, her ability to buy Third World countries simply by selling half her wardrobe, or even her discernible lack of talent. The reason I am such a big fan of the bottle blonde who is savagely tan in mid-February is that she reaffirms some impulses that we Americans instinctively have. Other countries sneer at our pop culture and hero worship for actors who portray noble heroes for the camera but couldn't bring themselves to remove a scary-looking clog in their sink. (We all know they watch as well. Hello, France, Jerry Lewis? I hate to bring that up, but it pretty much cancels out all the cultural cache you had for developing Gothic architecture.) However, the celebrity culture reveals something unique about the United States, and to a large extent Great Britain, in relation to the rest of the world.

People need aristocrats and always have. In some strange, Holden-Caulfield-wanting-to-go-back-in-the-womb sort of way, we want to believe that there simply are people better, smarter, more beautiful and decisive than we are. When we can't find the damn remote again, and our girlfriend calls us to tell us that she is now gay and that we drove her there (not me, I swear, but I had a cousin) we want to believe that there is somebody out there who could find the remote, remove that gravy stain from our La-Z-Boy, and find us a woman who is a cross between Charlize Theron and dear old Mom. Furthermore, we want somebody to blame when we screw up. The ancient Greeks and Romans could blame the death of their goat on the ever-capricious gods instead of the fact that they accidentally left it outside in a blizzard. The Middle Ages had their Tristans and King Arthurs, and we have our comic-book superheroes and Woody Allens. The impulse is the same, and, consequently, aristocracy is the one cultural norm constant throughout this great mud-ball. Even Socialist governments, whose ultimate goal is total equality, need an infallible leader to guide them to utter desolation and praise by Oliver Stone.

The rest of the world has their celebrities, and they, too, reveal where a country's priorities lie. The French worship their intellectuals; indeed Jean-Francois Revel is a sort of rock star without the tight pants, giant hair, or wailing solos. JFR is a powerful thinker and actually a defender of the U.S. to some extent, but hardly qualifies as a sex object. However, what this worship demonstrates is that the French revere thoughts, not actions or results. This sounds good on paper except when you notice that the French have not been a paragon of stability since the French Revolution, when they decided to off the only people who didn't smell vaguely of sewage.

So, what interests the United States? Why do we never see a picture of bikini-clad Norman Lear or Noam Chomsky with some sort of pouty, demure look in People magazine? Why don't we have a calendar with "the men of the Cato Institute?" The reason is that Americans are simply too busy to worry about such things. The existential meaning of an adjustable-rate mortgage won't help us pay it off any quicker, even if we could probably earn a doctorate if we whined about it long enough. I remember a high school history teacher of mine, Dr. Monahan, who stated contemptuously that the U.S. is not an intellectual country. Well, no kidding. When you are busy trying to raise crops in a dust bowl while the EPA is yelling at you for looking sternly at a spotted grackle and some damn kids have tipped over your one cow again, you tend not to worry about "unpacking" the idea of work. You just do it.

However, we have celebrities galore, and none more prominent or undeserving than Paris Hilton. True, that is like saying that she is the least chaste woman of leisure in a whorehouse, but I digress. She is everywhere these days-Cosmo, People, Guns & Ammo, Entertainment Tonight, and, most prominently, on the computer screens of every pimply freak alone in a college dorm on a Friday night. You can't escape her, and do we really want to? She is a wonderful example of America's relationship with its celebrities taken to the nth degree; her only talent is being pretty hot, a drunken slut, and richer than the '86 Mets coke dealer. She has laid bare the hidden truth behind American celebrity, namely: we want our celebrities to be good-looking or at least not visually offensive, and we don't give a frog's fat ass what they do.

Our celebrities, our aristocrats, our betters, what have you, are there for one reason: to entertain us. There is a reason the Behind the Music of Motley Crue (can't find the damn umlaut key on my computer) is so much more fascinating than Huey Lewis's. They were royally drunk baboons whose excesses made even Jimmy Page blush. We love to see our celebrities fall.

We loved watching Hugh Grant, aka the biggest fool ever, EVER, get arrested for soliciting a prostitute who looked like she had been smacked with a sewer lid while he was dating Liz Hurley. Dennis Miller, back when he was a left-winger, thought that is was Schadenfreude, or the taking of pleasure from another's pain, but I think it is slightly different from that. Our celebrities are created not by their own creative talent or ability to fight off the invading Teutons, but by us. We make them. Their fame is founded upon the not-exactly-granite foundation that we pay attention to them. They owe everything to us and, like Zeus, we love seeing them get caught with a few water nymphs. Sometimes we can have an active hand in their destruction, like in Heidi Fleiss's case, but they generally are dumb enough to do the dirty work for us.

Paris Hilton demonstrates this fact better than perhaps any celebrity alive. She is famous because she is famous. And here in the United States, where modern democracy was birthed, the peasants finally have their control over their social betters, even if it is a voyeuristic, sadistic control and if we have to bear the occasional Gigli for this right. As far as prices-to-pay go, it beats droit du seigneur. We need more Paris Hiltons to remind us that celebrities are worthless and are here at our whim. She has no problem with it; they are richly rewarded for it; and we get to enjoy Jay Leno asking Hugh Grant: "What were you thinking?"

Joseph Muller is an amateur-boxing enthusiast and libertarian philosopher who has been called an arrogant, stubborn, sharp-tongued SOB by almost every ex-girlfriend he has.