Paris Hilton's Next BFF: Beirut
Bored of Dubai: And who wouldn't be? Paris Hilton is doing in the Middle East what Middle Easterners do: partying in Beirut.
First off, an apology to all you savvy, intelligent, discriminating readers out there. You come here expecting a site devoted to Middle East issues—that is, to blood and gore, repression and regression, bigots and ayatollahs (forgive the redundancy), occupiers, imperialists and neocons (ditto), a site devoted to color-coding a thousand and one conflicts and stereotypes more eternal than the bunions on the feet of Mt. Olympus gods. You come here expecting a reliable refuge, I imagine, from the true scourge of the age, the one and only threat to Western civilization: celebrity news.
On most days you’d be more handsomely rewarded than at a John Carpenter movie.
Then this. Today. Paris Hilton. Here. Where the only “Paris of the Middle East” was that tired cliché that attached to Beirut’s reputation in the 1960s and 70s, before the Lebanese civil war demolished it all and turned Beirut into everybody’s favorite metaphor of mayhem.
How to explain this digression, let alone justify it, when I myself (native of Beirut in its Parisian years), with due respect to my colleague Diana Mimon’s irresistible gossip mill, don’t even know who Paris Hilton is beyond her occasional boosts (of ratings and other weights and measures) on Letterman?
It’s this. I received an email, apparently from something called the Crystal Group alerting me to its booking of Paris Hilton for—what else—a party in Beirut on July 3. Hilton, who apparently has a television show where she is perpetually hunting for a best friend, has run out of willing martyrs Stateside and has gone hunting in, of all places, Dubai, which she may or may not have mistaken for a ranch owned by George W. Bush somewhere in Texas. (An honest mistake, considering Bush's own mistaking of Dubai for an eponymous colony.) Like all sentient beings who get a taste of Dubai, Paris must have gotten bored and asked for a slightly more exciting place. Where else but Beirut, harem to the Middle East?
If Hilton can party in Vegas and somehow manage to survive Dubai, that Salem of the Middle East, she should certainly be entitled to a little R&R in Beirut. Just don’t tell her that Beirut is the 2009 World Book Capital. She might get a headache before imbibing her first taste of Lebanon, where everyone, as we all know, is everyone’s BFF.
As for my transgression here into the Styx of celebrities, it's over. That's it. End of story. I promise. And so back to our regularly scheduled Ahmadinejads.
See Also:
- When Lyndon Johnson Took in Beirut's Melons
- Hillary Clinton's Beirut Falafel
- Christopher Hitchen's Beirut Beating
- UNESCO Declares Beirut 2009 World Book Capital
- Biden Does Beirut
- Maya Angelou in Egypt
- Maya Angelou in Morocco
Comments
Hahah now we get to see her cause scandal with her “BFF’s” in Dubai, too? Should be great fun. How long will it take before they all get kicked out of the country?
The current version of Paris Hilton’s My New BFF is like a trainwreck waiting to happen and I can’t look away. Seriously, i always watch it because its so funny.
Anyone else think the whole grocery shopping ordeal in episode 4 was hilarious? I can’t believe none of the girls realized that you had to gut the duck or knew that they had bought a frozen one.
Also I loved the song they used, called “Piggy Bank” by Jet Stream. I thought it was funny and ironic to hear the lines “money make the world go round” and “the world is my supermarket, filled with shopping carts” while these girls are all shopping for Paris Hilton’s dinner haha. There’s a video clip of that scene at : http://modestcomplexity.blogspot.com/2009/06/piggy-bank.html