A malevolent conga line of recent events has made me wonder if, after eight years, I am still glad to live in America. Some were political: of all the terrible imagery to come out of hurricane Katrina, perhaps none was as distressing as the photo of Bush hugging two African-American victims.

Some were 'cultural': actress Denise Richards explaining how she had to wean her newborn early in order to get her breasts in shape for the cover of Playboy.

Some were financial: when Citibank started sending overdue notices on a credit card for which I hadn't been approved. In June, they said I owed $75 and then in July $91. The bills started arriving around the same time my health insurance was canceled. I find myself crossing Fifth Avenue with exceptional caution, certain I am about to meet my insurance-less demise, distracted by things I want to buy with the credit card I don't own.

And I'm middle class. No one at government level stopped to consider how people who were too poor to own cars or credit cards planned to get themselves out of New Orleans.

So it is a curious dichotomy that in this libertarian time of no 'hand-outs', we nominate a billionaire heiress as the nation's sweetheart. There she is on the cover of this month's Vanity Fair, Miss Paris Hilton, whose ascent from drunken hotel heiress to drunken multimedia star is not the final nail in the coffin of my American love affair. The nail is the celebratory manner in which the esteemed publication portrays her.

Paris, the story fawningly notes, is the first mainstream celebrity to have her career not broken, but made by a sex tape. The delightfully named 'One Night in Paris' was leaked by an ex in the week she was to morph from gossip page fixture to mainstream TV in The Simple Life, a reality show in which she and her equally spoiled best friend, Nicole Richie, went to live with country hicks. (She and Nicole, the daughter of crooner Lionel Richie, have since fallen out. Mysteriously, Paris will say only: 'She knows what she has done.' Stolen her stylist? Her pose? Given a blind woman a TV as a thank-you gift for appearing in the 'Hello' video, as her father did?)

The show was a hit, but it is because of the best-selling sex tape that Paris has launched her own perfume, advice books and nightclubs, with films and CDs on the way. She has pioneered 'slut chic', which is reproduced by 13-year-old girl fans across the country in both their dress sense and sexual technique.

Paris professes, says Vanity Fair, to not be very sexual at home with her fiancé. In which case, she is the perfect sex symbol for a country whose President would rather have owned a baseball team. In their mutual entitlement, they took what was on the table for them.

To get away with putting her on the cover, Vanity Fair had to make an executive decision that Paris Hilton is somehow empowering. And, instantly, post-feminism becomes pre-feminism, like the hypothetical point where communism meets fascism. Contributing comment, Camille Paglia misfires badly by claiming her a progeny of Madonna. Whatever you think of Madonna, she came to New York City broke, with no support from her family. The post-fame, leaked nude shots were from her days when she worked as an artist's model so she could keep paying for tuition with the revered Martha Graham dance troupe, with whom she was training eight hours a day.

And though she was selling sex a full 20 years before Paris, the difference, crucially, is that she was vamping it. As opposed to launching a career from hardcore sex.

Which, in truth, wasn't even what made the Hilton video a national talking point. It was the fact that she takes calls on her ever-present cell phone during coitus. That hyper self-involvement in the face of a world falling apart - ignore and insulate - is what earned her equal admiration from aspirational American women as well as horny men.

Again, whatever you think of her music, Madonna spent her money on Frida Kahlo paintings and first-edition Anne Sexton books.

Of her fiancé, Paris Kasidokostas, who now, avoiding the opportunity to avoid confusion, calls himself Paris Latsis , Hilton proudly tells Vanity Fair: 'I can't even pronounce that shit.'

Paris's unwavering confidence in her position as hottest in the room is matched by her and her followers' belief that everybody wants to be American. She is the ultimate symbol of where this country finds itself: the world is at our disposal; cost is not an issue as long as I look good and feel good now. As our mass media pander more and more to the prolonged adolescence of America, Paris and her crew - Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Richie, Jessica Simpson - have become the nation's 'Mean Girls', the high-school 'Heathers' of our psyche. Paris has the glorified life of so many American college girls: living off Daddy's credit card, partying nonstop, reveling in her new-found sexual power. It's 'Girls Gone Wild - Billionaire Heiress Edition'. And the thinner she gets, the more Paris consumes. It has become customary to see her toting in one hand her tiny dog Tinkerbell and in the other a fur Dior handbag to go with her mink-lined Mukluk boots. This is a key image. Because not only has fur become acceptable in the States, but starlets are lining their handbags with it. The undertone in US Weekly's breathless retelling of her latest fab outfit being: the world is probably about to end in madness, so let's just screw each other, the environment and all the animals we can on our way out.

Lindsay Lohan, asked at the opening of a new Madison Avenue diamond shop what she thinks of the protest outside against the company's use of child laborers, sneered between champagne sips: 'I refuse to get involved in their drama.'

Jessica Simpson, meanwhile, is not excused for her stupidity but actively celebrated for it. Her weekly televised ignorance, not just of politics but also of the fact that chicken is not fish, is her selling point. To be offended by Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson and Lindsay Lohan is not a feminist issue - it is pro-humanity.

The rich are different. The problem for Democrats trying to combat all the tax breaks afforded them is that so many on the US poverty line idolize them, believing that they, too, will one day become millionaires through happenstance (in their case, the lottery).

Which is why Paris's appeal breaks the class barrier. The all-consuming elite also breaks the race barrier. Puffy, who boasts of never spending less that $1million on his parties, reached out to the victims of Katrina by donating $500,000. It is not surprising to learn that Paris Hilton recently gave away Tinkerbell for growing too big. A manicured, mink-lined nail in the coffin of my American dream, fostered by an early love of Springsteen and Steinbeck and their American dream, whose greatest tenet is the work ethic.

But where to go? Especially when what happens in America, culturally and politically, is prescribed for Britain. Paris has already been lauded as an inspiring role model for young women on the cover of the UK's Glamour. And this month she stares, eyes the blue of killer jellyfish, from the front of Tatler.

Just as the Bush administration's tactic of 'say it often enough and it becomes true' has worked, so the phenomenon of Paris is: 'See it often enough and it becomes relevant.'

In another era, Pamela Anderson, the working class girl from Canada, made a fortune on the brilliant lie: 'I want you.' Infinitely more sinister, the lie behind Hilton's dead-eyed gaze is: 'You want me.'

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005