They are also different than they
were before the Reagan tax cuts.
Remember
Sherman McCoy, the protagonist from Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities
and his $2 million apartment on 5th Avenue? Even if you take
inflation into account that place wouldn’t be fit for a college crash pad for the
children of today’s hyper-rich elite. Only 30 years after the Reagan era tax
cuts for the rich went into effect we have seen Tom Wolfe’s cautionary tale
turn into a quaint little fable.
It’s
one thing for people to stand by and do nothing but watch as our elites stack
the cards in favor of the richest few in America but it’s another thing to cheer
it on at every step, convincing ourselves that we could be part of that group
with the right lottery ticket, a few hands of blackjack, or maybe a little promotion.
Most criticism of the hyper-rich is met with a cascade of insults about how you’re
just jealous, or that you hate capitalism—the modern version of apostasy.
It
just pathetic that we allow ourselves to be fed these inequalities in our diet
of popular culture, as if it’s now perfectly normal that a few members of our
society have risen to god-like status leaving us questioning whether or not it’s
even possible to be considered a citizen if you’re merely eking out an
existence like most of us. It’s supposed to be OK because in the future
(according to the books, stories, TV, and movies we are force-fed) we’ll all
have a super-rich friend who can lend us money.
The
pop culture landscape is littered with the propaganda that hyper-rich people
are our friends, they just have enough money to make the world spin the other
way if they so desire. A recent example is Why Him?, an utterly forgettable film with
the following synopsis: A holiday gathering threatens to go off the rails
when Ned Fleming realizes that his daughter's Silicon Valley millionaire
boyfriend is about to pop the question.
Except
the boyfriend isn’t a millionaire because that would be too boring and unoriginal,
not that the film is adverse to boring and unoriginal during its seemingly
endless one hour and 50 minute runtime. No, a millionaire doesn’t travel in a
private helicopter and may not even fly first class unless it’s a company
upgrade. In the film the father calls him a “zillionaire” which is just further
proof that our ship is sailing off the face of the earth in uncharted waters in
which a new vocabulary is necessary. Vocabulary is the least of our worries in
this age of wealth inequality.
“Michael was loaded, seriously and unambiguously loaded.
He was the kind of rich that even other people who were rich considered rich.
He had made the money himself. It was all the more impressive because Michael
seemed barely to have noticed. His peers and friends and rivals and colleagues
were all amazed by the fact that Mike was now some kind of gazillionaire…”
Just
why it’s important to the story to have a “gazillionaire” isn’t really clear
except that he has a house so big and vast that one would hardly notice if,
during an overnight visit, a mysterious stranger may or may not have diddled
your unsupervised kids while you were out doing something stinking rich people
do (killing animals that are served to you on a platter, like hunting at a
petting zoo). He could have placed the whole story in a moderately-priced hotel
but where’s the fun in that? I suppose that the author feels that the mega-mansions
of billionaires make for better literature than any Holiday Inn Express.
Next
we have the excellent Showtime series Billions which goes right
to the heart of the matter, sort of. Here is the synopsis: U.S. Attorney
Chuck Rhoades goes after hedge fund king, Bobby "Axe" Axelrod in a
battle between two powerful New York figures. U.S. Attorney Chuck Rhoades goes
after hedge fund king, Bobby "Axe" Axelrod in a battle between two
powerful New York figures.
Half-way
through the second season it’s almost impossible to tell who the good guy is
and who is the bad guy—if there is a bad guy. I completely understand the idea
of not painting this Manichean tableau of good and evil but at the same time I
have some misgivings about the storyline.
Balzac wrote in Le Père Goriot, “Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié,
parce qu’il a été proprement fait.” I don’t care to discuss here whether behind all great fortunes there is
a crime but I can state confidently that nothing threatens our democracy more
than the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few individuals. If you
doubt this I will point you to Exhibit A, the new president of the USA. If ever
there were an unqualified plutocrat running the show then that guy is Trump.
Hello Citizens United, adiós democracy, and welcome to the
new aristocracy. For those of us who have read some history we already know how
this ends. Now where did we put those guillotines?
