Thoughts on a dreary day: We’ll always have Paris

It was a rainy Saturday afternoon and the warmth of our house was embraced by the gray dampness outside our windows. There was a gentle quality to the rain, and the wind whispered through the trees like a mother soothing her baby at naptime.

This old baby, however, was not in the mood for a nap, but for something to tranquilize him into a state of conscious nothingness. I wanted my mind empty for a while, free from the demands of either thinking or writing. So I turned on television.

Nothing short of a powerful anesthesia or chug-a-lugging a full bottle of vodka will put one into state of absolute emptiness quicker than Saturday afternoon TV. So to pursue that perfect vaporous condition, I turned on the set and began surfing the channels, a phrase adopted from those dudes who, in similar states of vacancy, surf the ocean.

Doing so, I became intrigued by the vast number of so-called infomercials that clutter the tube. There was, for instance, a steam gun for cleaning the refrigerator, an invention which, one might guess, will never make anyone rich; a CD for contacting God through meditation or, possibly, Republican contacts; and a variety of drugs and exercise machines created to make one trim, muscular and a wonderful sex partner, all of which constitute the total aspirations of Generation Zero.

The infomercial that captured my attention the most involved a solemn man with the voice of a mortician who looked directly into the camera and said, “No one has to live with frizzy hair.” He was selling, as it turned out, something called Frizz Ease, accompanied by demonstrations of frizzy-haired women who, applying his product, emerged not only frizz-free but, judging by their energetic smiles, with a strong new desire to live.

My next stop was E! Entertainment Television, an electronic pathway designed to introduce us to the agony and ecstasy of celebrityhood. All that fame and money can be such a drag to a girl in her 20s. Examples of this cultural burden can be found in the breathlessly useless lives of Paris Hilton and her younger sister, little Nicky, whose high jinks and low jinks were featured in a Saturday afternoon special on E!, which, in my quest for nirvana, I decided to watch.

The phenomena of silly rich girls with no talent but lots of the kind of self-confidence that wealth inspires is a fascinating diadem in a society that craves royalty, any kind of royalty, to ease its own culturally impoverished state. Lacking anyone better at the moment, we have summoned the Hilton girls, especially Paris, from a pink mist of anonymity to become the stars of today. I say that even though, unlike a lot of other people, I don’t have Paris’ cellphone number and have never seen the video of her and Rick Solomon going at it like a pair of dingoes.

In an effort to project the idea that the two-hour Hilton show was a serious effort to learn about who and what the girls are, we were shown videos of Paris’ dog Tinkerbell; the street sign of a road named after her in Alton, Mo., where apparently her show “The Simple Life” was filmed; Paris and Nicky at parties hounded by those terrible scruffy people with cameras who sell their pictures to terrible scruffy supermarket tabloids; and a Paris Hilton expert of some sort, commenting on her acting talent, with, “She’s not exactly Meryl Streep.” No, not exactly.

Another, evaluating her inability to function in a workaday world, pointed out that operating a microwave was similarly beyond the woman’s intellectual capabilities. But she is able to don various kinds of clothing, cock her head, smile dimly and walk a runway, attributes that might qualify her to work as a model. Even if she lacks sufficient head-foot coordination to cock her head and walk at the same time, she can at least walk and smile, talents she has demonstrated in the past.

To illustrate her potential as a queen of clothes, she appeared in one scene of the “E!” show in a skimpy little nothing complete with a necklace featuring the word “rich,” and a diamond belt with the word “sex” dangling from it. For most, it would be an outrageous announcement, but for Paris, it’s simply a nametag.

I either fell asleep or drifted into an alpha state during an explanation by the mother of the girls on how she tried to shield them from the media and from others who, in one way or another, might take advantage of her playful little chickens. I don’t know if she commented on Paris’ sex video, but it would seem that one might abandon trying to shield them once it went on the Internet -- possibly conceding that, like a hit man who has betrayed the Mafia, they were beyond her protective custody.

If God gave us Paris Hilton to divert our attention, he has accomplished another miracle of human construction, unequaled since he borrowed Adam’s rib to create Eve. Only he knows what part of us was required to create Paris.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.