i was always kinda partial to GUN-Porn myself...
Posted on 10/21/2006 6:52:51 AM PDT by shrinkermd
Behind every liberal rich-person basher lurks a rich-person gawker. Or at least most of the time.
The New York Times has been running an impressive, book-length series of articles about class in America. Some of them have been riveting as well as "important." But I'd bet a Rolex that the most popular of the nine pieces published thus far was the front page story that ran Sunday, June 5, headlined, "Old Nantucket Warily Meets the New."
It's all about how the new "hyper-rich" have taken the island over from the old rich. It's a great and grotesque piece.
Accompanying it is a wonkish but equally impressive look at how these "hyper-rich" people, those earning about $1.6 million a year or more annually, are leaving even the regular rich in the dust. The amount of national treasure consumed by the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers has grown to levels not seen since the Roaring '20s.
This is also a terrific piece.
But cruise around the rest of this Sunday's Times and what you'll find is a whole lot of what can only be called wealth porn. There are voyeuristic, detailed, titillating accounts of the doings and digs of the rich and well-groomed all over the paper. It's like that every Sunday. This week it was jarring because of the stories I just mentioned. I think that's called cognitive dissonance.
It is precisely the same cognitive dissonance that allowed the Democratic Party to nominate John Kerry and John Edwards - combined net worth, about $1 billion - to bash the rich, bemoan the split of the "two Americas" and beat up on George and Dick for being pals of the rich. When the rich, or those profiting from the rich, condemn other, less enlightened rich people, skin crawls. And many Americans - to the chagrin of Democrats, Marxists and Europeans - tend not to begrudge the rich and hyper-rich their riches.
Back to the Sunday Times, the single greatest current events icon in the East Coast, Blue State urban, moneyed and intellectual world. If anything creates water-cooler buzz in this orbit, it's the Sunday Times. It is also the greatest purveyor of super high-class, wealth porn there is and it's blessed with the imprimatur of news, sociology and high purpose.
The Times magazine this week, ironically, was "The Money Issue." The cover story was a terrific profile of a more-than-hyper-rich hedge manager named Cliff Asness. The piece was a nice glimpse into the secretive hedge fund universe, but what made it riveting was the portrait of a not famous, under-40 gazillionaire. As always, the Sunday magazine had a section for real estate porn: page after page filled with ads for opulent homes. This week there were ads for 27 homes listed at over $5 million.
In the Sunday Styles section, Alexandra Wolfe - daughter of writer Tom Wolfe - filed a story about how grown daughters of people with names like Tisch and Della Femina are taking their kids to posh new clubs where they can exercise and socialize while their kids get taken care of nearby.
There was a short feature about what's hot in diamond earrings (hoops, not chandeliers, prices ranging from $2,400 to $16,500) and a long article about how David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg are concerned about giving the public access to public beaches in Malibu. There were also the regular weekly features about society weddings and charity balls.
The Sunday Business Section always profiles a hyper-rich guy and this week it was Ronald Perelman. The piece had real news value apart from the wealth porn, just like the hedge fund story.
I'm not suggesting the Times shouldn't have done any of these stories. I just want to point out the irony of running an excellent set of pieces about the anthropology and demographics of the hyper-rich in a paper that is dining out on them. It is a kind of limousine liberalism that I believe also afflicts the Democratic Party too often, a conceit that "we are the enlightened rich."
Bill Clinton didn't bash the rich a lot, but he could have; Johns Kerry and Edwards did bash the rich a lot, and it flopped. It flopped partly because Americans who are not rich simply do not have a European-style, class base resentment. Americans aspire to being rich. That's the American way. But the '04 Democratic rhetoric also flopped because the guys spewing looked like such phonies; they weren't just rich, they were richer than the Republicans: they were hyper-rich.
In the House, Dennis Hastert, former high school wrestling coach, is a more authentic voice of the little guy than Nancy Pelosi, wife of a wealthy real estate developer, and in her own right part of a powerful political family including two past mayors of Baltimore, one of them also a five-term congressman.
The Senate has plenty of guys who make well-to-do look shabby, but the Democrats probably have the greater net worth, led by heirs like Kennedy, Dayton and Rockefeller and self-made moguls like Corzine, Kohl, and Lautenberg.
The point is not that being rich, or exploiting interest in the rich to sell newspapers, should be disqualifiers for tackling issues of economic justice. The point is to do it with some humility and an ear well-tuned to hypocrisy.
Dick Meyer, a veteran political and investigative producer for CBS News, is the Editorial Director of CBSNews.com, based in Washington.
"Wealth Porn" is a term that should be used more often. Envy may be the second deadly sin but it is required for socialistic and RAT policies but they still like "richos" on their side.
Southerners understand this, which is why sKerry and Backwards didn't go over very well in the South.
************
LOL!
Great story on MSM hypocrisy though.
The target of the Democrat programs is the upper middle class, to prevent them from accumulating the capital needed to be able to compete with the owners of unearned wealth for investment opportunities
People use "envy" and "jealousy" interchangably. The Bible seems to do so as well although "covet" means more than jealousy in my way of thinking.
"They can maintain a wealthy lifestyle because of the revenue of their investments"
It's also been reported Kennedy and Kerry have most of their wealth in out of country bank accounts where they are not subject to the taxes they laid on the rest of us !!!
Quite true. It is also a way try to prevent their upwardly mobile lessors from being able to compete for the estates, race horses, and foundations that the established rich use to set themselves apart from the unwashed.
Better still, as Democrats, they can affect a pose of moral superiority while in reality they are protecting their own interest and elite standing.
Often the undesirable characteristics of human nature are not even acknowledged, and hardly ever is their universal presence in all men of all races admitted as a fact, as if non-recognition could make the bad characteristics evaporate away. I suspect that this blind spot regarding human nature can also be attributed to the generally prevailing zeitgeist about the noble nature of socialism itself.
Helmut Schoeck notes at the beginning (p. 9) of his comprehensive work, Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour, that in the 20th century there has been a curious "increasing tendency, above all in the social sciences and moral philosophy, to repress the concept of envy", and he speculates that this has happened because "the political theorist and the social critic found envy an increasingly embarrassing concept to use as an explanatory category or in reference to a social fact." Schoeck goes on to note that one cannot find a single instance of 'envy', 'jealousy' or 'resentment' in the subject indexes of the prestigious journals on sociology and anthropology over long periods of time in the 20th century. J.H. Berke reports this as well in The Tyranny of Malice, and also remarks that "in the indices of two major studies of human aggression and destructiveness, one didn't mention envy at all (or greed or jealousy), and the other mentioned it only once (greed once, jealousy not at all)" [p.13]. Berke adds a quote from Geoffrey Chaucer's The
Parsons Tale: “... It is certain that envy is the worst sin that is; for all other sins [are] against one virtue, whereas envy is against all virtue and against all goodness.
Envy is an ubiquitous presence in human nature. It is difficult to define envy as a discrete emotion, or to separate it out from other human emotions; it forms the substratum for many of them. Even of greater importance is the fact that envy is also a group emotion and thus a part of collectivist political ideologies and practices of our times. Therefore, it merits special attention when we talk about human nature. In Egalitarian Envy: The Political Foundations of Social Justice, de la Mora gives an excellent summary of man's views on envy from antiquity to the present. As mentioned above, Schoeck has noted the scarcity of studies of envy in the modern era. Similarly, de la Mora notes how reluctant we have always been to face and discuss the envy in us: Human kind has reacted towards envy with more ignorance and concealment than towards sex. Such an ethical problem, which has such extraordinary inroads into individual and collective happiness has habitually been dealt with hypocritically and almost in secret. [p.61] Envy is a feeling and therefore it is something that does not belong to the higher level [reason]; it is, besides, such a universal fact that it has been proclaimed to constitute an instinctive inclination of the human species. Envy . . . is one of the most negative feelings, for the one who feels it and for the one who inspires it. This relative rationality and this complete malignancy shows that this is a phenomenon that hides jealously and that has been missed by the sciences. For hundreds of thousands of years homo sapiens, with a strange mixture of fear and shame, has taken for granted and avoided dealing with envy, unable to make a decision and face it with the logos. [p.66]
In Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour Helmut Schoeck quotes Kant's statement in The Metaphysics of Morals which conveys the same understanding of envy being a normal component of human nature:
The impulse for envy is thus inherent in the nature of man, and only its manifestation makes it an abominable vice, . . . It is therefore natural for man to feel envious impulses. He will always compare himself with others, generally with those who are socially not too remote, but the vice that threatens personal relations, and hence society as a whole, becomes manifest only when the envious man proceeds to act, or fails to act, appropriately . . .[p.166]
Schoeck further recognizes that a certain controlled amount of envy, like many lethal poisons which are curative when used in small quantities, is essential to the functioning of society:
. . . without the capacity for envy, no sort of society could exist. In order to be able to fit into his social environment, the individual has to be trained, by early social experiences, which of necessity involve the torment, the capacity, the temptation, of envying somebody something. It is true that his success as a member of a community will depend on how well he is able to control and sublimate this drive, without which, however, he would never be able to grow up. We are thus confronted by an antinomy, an irreconcilable contradiction: envy is an extremely anti-social and destructive emotional state, but it is, at the same time, the most completely socially oriented. . . . We need envy for our social existence, though no society that hopes to endure can afford to raise it to a value principle or to an institution. [p.254]
In connection with my own understanding that envy is the substratum for, or blends with, many of the other human characteristics, it is appropriate to note what J.H. Berke has to say in The Tyranny of Malice:
Envy and greed rarely operate separately. My colleague, Dr. Nina Colthart, has suggested the term "grenvy" to denote the fusion of these two emotional forces and the simultaneous expressions of them. . . . Devouring and defiling characterize grenvy and distinguish the grenvious act from a greedy or envious one. The grenvious impulse is more common than pure greed or envy.[p.26] Envy can hide behind greed as well as fuse with it. Many people accumulate things in order to numb an overweening sense of inferiority or worthlessness. [p.27]...
URL for this article is: http://pages.interlog.com/~girbe/human_nature.htm. Author is George Irbe and the title is “The Dark Side of Human Nature.”
i was always kinda partial to GUN-Porn myself...
....But the '04 Democratic rhetoric also flopped because the guys spewing looked like such phonies; they weren't just rich, they were richer than the Republicans: they were hyper-rich.
Thank you for reposting this.
What is interesting is that the left focuses only on the economic aspects of class, rather than more significant determinants such as education and occupation. And with modest wealth comes the illusion of control: that somehow if we all contribute toward the "common good", we can "fix" problems such as poverty or racial bigotry. Never mind that wealth inequality is a result of behaviors and choices made over time (and no, I am not making a moral judgement here about the poor, just as I do not regard those wealthier than I as morally better), rather than the result of a "distribution" of wealth.
The left likes to juxtapose the existing wealth distribution against the Rawlesian "blind lottery" ideal. Yet suppose that the left took control of all branches of government, and could enact whatever draconian laws needed to achieve this ideal, and we started over in Year Zero of the new millenium with a perfectly "fair" distribution of wealth. But then how could any trade or commerce occur? How could I do anything that increases my wealth faster than other people? If anyone gives their wealth to me, we have made the distribution less than perfectly "fair".
So in failing to defend property rights, the left permits the state to engage in totalitarian, authoritarian behavior, all in the name of "the common good".
What they cannot stand are people who became wealthy because of hard work and intelligence. It upsets their egalitarian mindsets to have to think about the possibility that there actually ARE people of demonstrated superiority
And how do we begin to covet?
Do we seek out things to covet?
FReepers.. make an effort to answer.
We begin by coveting what we see every day.
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