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A Massive Swelling was first published by Viking/Penguin in 2000.

The internet was just beginning to lose its baby teeth. There was no Gawker, no TMZ, no Perez Hilton, no Kardashians. The American Dream of home ownership was still intact; as was the dream of being suddenly discovered in your local 7-Eleven or live bait shop, and whisked off to an ecstatic new world of Hollywood superstardom.

In the context of today’s media climate, this sounds impossible — but when “A Massive Swelling” came out in 2000, it was actually considered to be controversial — or at least unforgivably rude. In some LA and New York circles it was tantamount to blasphemy; I was regarded with roughly the same distaste as someone who had just thrown up in the open coffin of a decorated war hero.

I am quite surprised that my shrill purple hyperbole on the subject of celebrity would more or less pass for reasonable entertainment industry reportage less than twenty years later.

Hollywood, as the propaganda arm of the American republic, has always (by accident or design) been a lopsided reflection of the larger political/economic context -- which, for the last 3 decades, has been a wholesale race to hit rock bottom financially, ethically, spiritually, and intellectually (on the brighter side, the unbearable tensions of this Fall of Rome-esque climate have produced a new Golden Age of television!).

There have been many notable ruptures in the culture of celebrity since 2000, and a particular few that I feel deserve mentioning.

I believe a seismic shift occurred in the landscape of fame-perception following the attacks of 9/11/2001. For some reason, the execution-style murder of the World Trade Center created the need for an abrupt democratization of Fame. Americans became suddenly aware of death; this created a kind of collective ego panic, loosely articulated as “I don’t care if I am not a Barrymore, Baldwin, Sheen or Paltrow — I deserve my shot at the big time, and I must sing on television right fucking now.”

Enter: American Idol, a show that answered this cri-de-coeur by providing an avenue via which any mammal with a power-vibrato and a dream had a chance to yodel their way into overnight celebrity.

Like the roller-coaster elasticity that replaced the regulations preventing the economy from crashing like it did during the Great Depression, and the predatory mortgage opportunities created by this heedlessness, the perceived value of this newly attainable fame also started to hurtle downhill at breakneck speed at its moment of inception. American Idol created new “stars,” but it did so by diluting the currency of stardom. Overnight fame, like the real-estate bubble, was engineered with planned obsolescence in mind: it blew up hugely and quickly, for the purpose of producing a sensational wet pop. It was a disposable flash-Fame that coincided perfectly with the fad of disposable flash-cameras.

Reality TV was a whole other radical cultural Quantitative Easing which borrowed negatively against human attention units, and made the value of Fame plummet even deeper into the abyss.

When we got bored merely humiliating hopeful yokels on “American Idol.”

The public got restless, cruel and itchy for the spectacle of real tragedy.

Audiences wanted to taste blood on their teeth (perhaps because we were now at war, but denied the type of hardcore, Vietnam-style televised war coverage that might inspire a peace movement.)

This is when Paris Hilton dropped like bright phosphorus onto an already tinder-dry media.

Paris — like the city of love — was expensive and filthy…and this was her secret weapon. Nobody ever said anything nice about Paris Hilton, and this only made her stronger.

Paris was much too formidable an heiress to give a shit about public disgrace, or need anyone’s approval. Everything Paris touched was so frankly commercial and perfectly liteweight as to be fashionably anorexic, and therefore attractively loathable, in spirit.

She even put out a pop album to celebrate her own celebrated lack of talent: a heady combination of electronic drum-beats and candy-sick whimpers; a perfect soundtrack for a Hentai anime featuring a bunch of schoolgirls in knee-socks getting raped by a cartoon octopus.

Paris Hilton correctly assessed that pleasant artistic accomplishments were no longer capable of controlling the attention span of a world fizzling with ADHD (particularly at a time when pornography abruptly evolved from the relative unavailability of pricey magazine three-packs sold in back of the Arco station to free super-abundance on every personal computer) — but that there was enormous money to be made in disgrace and humiliation. To really capture a news cycle, you needed scandals, disasters, public tantrums, guns in airports, murders, shark-attacks, and frothing fits of atavistic, old-school racism (a la Mel Gibson). Fame has always been made of quantities of attention, not qualities. For any fame-seeking narcissist, more attention (positive or negative) means …you WIN (cue ominous Donald Trump-rally kettle-drums).

Public Outrage became the new Fame, and Paris was crowned its favorite whipping-blonde.

Proximity to Ms. Hilton was a proven health hazard: She blew all the clothing, morals, inhibitions and self-control of her victims sideways, leaving them emaciated, dehydrated, broke, disoriented and often in jail.

Under-stimulated American audiences suddenly delighted in going chicken-killer on Hollywood strumpets in crisis. A whole new breed of glossy tabloids were suddenly a-gush with reports of oversexed former Mousketeers, and their habitual binge-puking, Mercedes-totaling, Vicodin gargling, pantiless public meltdowns and stints in inpatient rehabilitation facilities that cost $45,000 a week.

Most Americans didn’t really understand how our own government was abusing us — congressional bribes, organized mass deceit via domestic propaganda, policy fixing, violations of privacy and human rights — these realities were too head-thinky and depressing, particularly after putting in a long day of wage-slavery. Paris Hilton, for a time, embodied the angst of our increasing sense of powerlessness; we understood her crimes.

“You feel like you haven’t been screwed by the Man,” said my friend Angus, in defense of Paris-bashing. “If Paris goes to jail, there is still a middle class. There’s still an illusion of hope. We’re not the Philippines, yet. There’s still some kind of justice, and we’re not all just fucked.”

When a bald Britney Spears hit a paparazzo's car with an aluminum baseball bat in 2007...that was the death gong of Fame as we once knew it. The “Britney Industrial Complex,” if not a signal point for the End of Days, at least marked the death of any vestigial remains of Old Hollywood Glamour.

Paris Hilton was constantly derided for being stupid, immoral and whorish, but she was, in fact, a post-Warholian pop genius of media manipulation: an extraordinarily talented infamy artist, who was effectively responsible for the greatest of the rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem waiting to be bored: it was Paris who encouraged Kim Kardashian to “accidentally” release her sex tape, and the rest is history, or what’s left of it (and by “history”I mean Caitlin Jenner).

After this book, I switched gears to write about fashion and politics, because celebrity culture was becoming so intentionally nauseating that criticizing it was merely encouraging it.

Andy Warhol’s predictions bore out -- Fame is now fifteen minutes long (give or take a few minutes)...and pop eats itself. I add this overclarification: Pop now cannibalizes itself at the speed of pop, with a metabolic rate rivaling that of the fruit-fly. Fame jumps its own shark, then the shark eats itself, over and over again on an endless loop.

A Massive Swelling was my first book. It isn’t a perfect beast.

There are chapters that I probably should have erased from existence with a series of hardcover and hard-drive bonfires; but in the interest of not trying to airbrush history or goose my own talents in retrospect, this is the “warts and all”- time-capsule version, as it was originally published.

I was right about a lot of terrible things — most regrettably, my prediction of the weird, tragic, untimely death of Michael Jackson.

I was wrong about a lot of things, like the universal panty-throwing appeal of Ricky Martin.

In retrospect, I think I was a little too rough on Celine Dion, who seems like a good egg.

My lovely assistant T. Ryan Ward removed a rude reference to Robin Williams, because we loved him.

In closing, I believe that Celebrity is still a “Grotesque Crippling Disease.”

Fame, unfortunately, is the only antidote available for the desperate sufferers of galloping narcissism, but, like any radical medical intervention or toxic chemical treatment, it continues to prove that it is deadly enough in its own right to be avoided.

As Dan Rather once said (to boos and raspberries from media critics):

COURAGE.

Cintra Wilson, 2016