Fallows On The Rich And Shameless
by digby
Mauve Gloves & Madmen, 2010 Version
Self-pity is the great vice. Or entitlement, to give it another name. It's socially un-useful, in making people grasping and uncharitable. And it's personally bad too, in focusing attention on what's not there rather than what is. One of many things I enjoy about modern China is that the average self-pity level there is pretty low. The occasion for this homily is a modern counterpart to Mauve Gloves & Madmen. Thirty-plus years after I first read it, I vividly remember that short story of Tom Wolfe's. Its set-up was a stylish and popular and liberal-chic writer going through his checkbook and revealing his life through the deposits and the canceled checks. After the jump, a sample passage. Mauve Gloves was in the tradition of great realist or naturalistic fiction that presents character through material circumstances. And now we have an unintentional modern counterpart, a law professor at the University of Chicago who has (unwisely) taken to the internet to explain why, on a household income that must be substantially above $300,000, he is feeling put-upon and strapped...
Read on. And read this, this, this and this too. They;'re all great, all fascinating insights into the bizarroworld of wealthy, elite whining.
As a person who has spent a quarter of a century in and around the entertainment business, which features some of the most superficial, entitled, grasping, materialistic greedheads on the planet, I can tell you that these complaining academics, CEOs and Wall Street Boyz put them to shame for sheer, out of touch, elitism. If anything, people in this business pretend like they are more successful than they rather than whine and moan about how unfair it is that they don't have more. (They may think it, but they wouldn't be classless enough to say it out loud --- and we're talking about some very crude people here. )But then it is a business where people who don't even have a college education mingle in boardrooms with Harvard grads, so maybe that changes the ethos a bit.
Brad DeLong, who collected those great Fallows links, has more on this phenomenon here. Scroll all the way down. It's great too.
I am so thrilled to see this subject being engaged. It's been driving me nuts ever since the financial collapse.
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