A terrible plight to suffer

Dallas Morning News: On second thought, maybe Marie Antoinette had it coming.
After sitting through the buzz-worthy Fox reality show "The Simple Life," you could be forgiven for reassessing the guillotining of the French queen, who infamously said of the breadless masses, "Let them eat cake." Series stars Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie show themselves to be the Uday and Qusay of contemporary class warfare.
The program takes the 22-year-old Beverly Hills brats to live on an Arkansas farm for a month. In the opening episodes, the fabulously wealthy fashion plates move in with the Leding family of Altus (population 817) and take up farm chores. Neither has ever held a job, and the pouty princesses regard being asked to round up dairy cows as if it were a Bataan death march.
Miss Hilton and Miss Richie come across as rude, vain, vulgar, horrible people. Perhaps in future episodes, the rustics will stew and eat the posh pooch Paris has dragged to the boonies. It would serve them right, so to speak.
Naturally, this makes for great television. Unlike the rightly condemned "Real Live Beverly Hillbillies" concept -- hicks move to 90210 -- "The Simple Life" is less offensive because it serves as a social leveler, holding society's winners up to well-earned (in this case) contempt.
Poor little rich girls
The show also flatters its audience, 99 percent of whom don't live in the Hilton-Richie socioeconomic demographic, by allowing them to feel superior to the poor little rich girls. Never mind that small towns are host to all of the moral weaknesses afflicting the ditzy socialites, though -- alas! -- none of the glamour.
Still, there's pathos in what being rich and famous has done to these young women. After a run-in with the law, Miss Richie recently entered a rehab program for heroin addiction. And Miss Hilton was internationally humiliated by a tape of her private sex romp hitting the Internet.