Princess Gwyneth - What's The Big Deal Anyway?

I know I'm very late to the 'Gwyneth Paltrow just doesn't get it' party, but I've been thinking about stuff lately, and it was late at night, and my browser just sort of got stuck on 'goop'* and... I finally read it.  Yow.

I'm of two minds about Princess Gwyneth.  First, I don't really see the problem with her website or the things her lackeys - let's not pretend she does it herself - put up for public consumption.  I don't begrudge her the right to post whatever she finds interesting or imagines might be enlightening to others.  Second, though... I see the creeping, insidious hand of everything that's gone wrong with the US since 'voodoo economics' became 'trickle down' and ruined the middle class.  I know, that's a lot of weight to put on the shoulders of a waifish actress, but she's the one who decided she wanted to have a website promoting $200 jeans and $2000 leather jackets.

First argument - Gwyneth.  So what?
   If you don't like 'goop'* don't surf there.  If you don't like her don't follow her Twitter feed or watch TV interviews with her.  Don't give any grief to people who do like her, because it's none of your business.  It seems lately there's a strong streak of pettiness and meanness in public discourse.  We want to hear about our celebrities so we can tear them down.  Honestly, you have better things to do.  She's just one woman, with no more or less a clue about how to get by than you or I have, she just has a lot more money to try to figure it out.

Second argument - Gwyneth, harbinger of doom
  Dig a little deeper, read a little more closely.  You will see that, yes, she Does Not Get It.  The 'It' here is the fact that she sits in the gilded tower shouting down advice to peasants working the fields below.  She genuinely thinks her situation is not all that different from yours or mine.  Who doesn't wander through the penthouse of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai?  What working mother doesn't jet to Paris to go to an art and design fair?  It's her world, and for her it's perfectly normal.
   This is oblivious, impenetrable privilege.  This is the 1% telling the rest of us it's possible to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps while never suspecting that most people don't have boots.  It's third- and fourth-generation wealth enjoying their unearned and undeserved inheritance from ancestors they never met.  It's trickle-down that never quite trickled down.  And yet, she pretends that she's a harried working mother, just trying to bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan.
   This is why Princess Gwyneth annoys so many people: she wants to present herself as 'just one of the gals' and at the same time recommend those gals spend $475 for satin shorts to wear for 'a nighttime occasion.'  It's this kind of willful ignorance of her very real and very obvious advantages over, essentially, every other person on the planet that makes people resent her.

So what is the big deal?  It's not the woman herself, not really.  It's hard to believe anyone takes her seriously at all, with her to-the-minute directions for the week leading up to a dinner party.  But what she represents we should all take very seriously indeed.  There is nothing more un-American than an hereditary aristocracy - it's what our Founding Fathers started a Revolution to escape from - and yet we have one, or at least the beginnings of one.  If we don't call it out when we see it, if we don't try to stop the seed now, and Lord forbid we accept it as normal, it's only going to find a patch of bare ground to germinate and then send corrupting, destructive roots through our entire Republic.  The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. 

* not capitalizing it makes it friendlier and more approachable