Let’s set an arbitrary figure.  Say $100 million. If you have 100 million dollars all to your lonesome and you are not a world class, king hell, reigning champion philanthropist, you suck. That’s more money than you can ever spend on yourself and like five generations to come.

Here’s what’s worse.  If you aren’t spectacularly generous,  you are saying that somehow you have been gifted with a provenance of wisdom and prudence so divine as to allow you to decide who eats and who starves. Who freezes and who gets a bed and a blanket.  Because you could make an actual difference and you don’t.  If all you bastards got together, you could literally save the world.

I’m talking about the 1% here.

The filthy.

Rich people can be disgusting. Most seem to hate the poor.  They actually believe poor people are somehow infected with failure.  Like it’s a disease.  They are are afraid of them.  Afraid of us.

I’ve always wondered, in terms of personal fortune, what really is the difference between $20 million and $200 million?  What the hell?  When do you stop caring how much you can accumulate?  How do the vulgar rich not understand there’s a finite amount of money and at a certain point  they are manufacturing poverty?

I’m paraphrasing a famous author when I say that socialism never caught on in America because most of the electorate view themselves as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires.  The pollution of ideology.  The absurdity of the carrot and the stick we’ve all been offered.

So we worship wealth.  And products that make us look wealthier than we are.  The rich do the very same thing only better.  We envy them.  We want to live in those cool living rooms we see in the movies. They do.  They live there.  Prosperity has become a euphemism for greed.

Cat puke would confuse them.  It would ruin their day.

I don’t get it.  But, I like money too.  Who doesn’t?  I was at the mall today and I shopped.  I didn’t buy much but I enjoyed my consumer experience.  I really love ostentatious indoor shopping malls.  I could spend hours in Williams Sonoma.  I could live there.  L’occitane is my favorite goddamn store.  I chose between Hot Dog On a Stick and a Mongolian barbecue.  I came home with a gorgeous cologne on my wrist.  I loves me some mall.  Retail therapy.  I love that shit.

I’d like to believe that if I won the lottery to the tune of say, five million, I’d buy an Audi R8, some new clothes, a nice watch and a modest house.  Then I’d enroll in some history and literature classes and find an animal shelter to volunteer at.  I’d get organized enough to eat mostly healthy food, exercise and spend way more time with friends and family.  I wouldn’t be available before noon no matter what.

I don’t understand why people who hoard houses full to bursting with useless possessions are regarded differently than people who hoard more money than they can ever possibly spend.  We are disgusted by the former but celebrate the latter.  Seems like the same disease to me.

Most filthy rich people in the world didn’t earn it.  They have no idea what it’s like to spend physical, intellectual or emotional capital day in and day out to barely get by.  Most of them inherited it from ancestors who made a career of screwing labor and they, the scions, make a career of the same.

Not a novel conclusion I know.

I’m not here to split the atom but i’d like to point out the obvious.

Understand.  The decisions we make every day are because of decisions they have already made.  They are running our shit.

It’s just weird how we revere these people.  With few exceptions, they contribute nothing to society.  Most of them are in fact, a cancer infecting the rest us one way or another.  They buy our representatives, they buy entire governments.  They pollute our air and water and food without fear of sanction or censure or punishment.  They invest in and make shit loads of money off of war.  Most of them don’t give a mad fuck about anyone but themselves.  They are sociopaths without the habit of serial murder.

Yet we have at least two presidential candidates running based solely on the credential that they are oily affluent.  One is leading in the polls and the other is gaining.

Their popularity is far more an indictment of us than it is of them.

Hang the rich.

Drinks for my friends.

 

 

 

5 Responses to “Rich Man Poor Man”