It may be more correct to say that the rich are fascinated with the very rich…

Taki wrote: “I have never understood the fascination of hoi polloi with the very rich.”

I can’t understand it either. Except for you, Taki, whose columns I’ve een reading since my first National Review subscription back in
the mid 70’s.

Maybe everyone’s a golddigger, and think if they meet a rich person that the rich person will give rhem some money, or conections. All these hangers on and golddiggers is why the rich might be so nasty.

Real material poverty is easier to identify
than material riches, especially these days when all money is fiat currency, in the long run as worthless as Confederate dollars (except as curiosities for numismatists like me :-) Some of those Confederate notes were beautifully engraved.)

I mean, after you’ve seen real poverty - eg, the submerged 70 percent of the Chinese (been there, seen that), or all too many poor White Americans for that matter - then one ought to realise that a very basic threshold of material comfort really is like vast wealth compared to how most of the Human race live.  My small house under crystal clear skies in Western Australia - near one of the most unspoiled beaches in the world - and a full refrigerator and case of Tasmanian lager, and good comfortable shoes, and small garden where I’ve begun to plant tomatoes and okra etc (mmmm, curried okra!) are all princely luxuries the majority of people in the world will never enjoy.  But that leads to another problem suffered by many of the so-called “rich”:  how many of them actually ENJOY their material wealth, or their lives at all?

(That’s what’s cool about Taki; he really does ENJOY life!  So his riches aren’t wasted on him.)

Beyond that basic threshold of material necessities and then a few comforts, the measure of wealth then transforms from quantity to quality.  Take collecting, for example.  Just because a Jackson Pollock painting costs a few million dollars doesn’t mean it’s better (or different at all) than some fingerpainting by a monkey.  But there are some obscure painters out there whose works’ quality rivals Monet’s or Corot’s, yet they’re selling for a few hundred dollars.  The only difference between them and Monet is publicity.  So you can spend millions and furnish your house with ugly crap, or spend a few thousand dollars and furnish it as beautifully as a gallery in the Louvre - and that’s no exaggeration.

As for the kind of company money can buy, the conversation in a provincial Scottish pub (just one random example) is generally more stimulating and enlightening than you’ll get with, say, Paris Hilton.  Not to mention that most of the working class Scottish girls are prettier and have better manners than La Hilton. 

And at any rate, we’re all just “renting” on this Earth during our several decades of transit here.  Those among the super-rich who are good responsible tenants - those who regard themselves as “stewards” of their family wealth and of the common-wealth, protecting and preserving it for the benefit of posterity - they’re great.  If inherited wealth is used in that way, with a sense of duty to others (and to God, the ultimate Landlord), then it’s a good arrangement. 

But there are others, like Ellison and Rupert Murdoch, who are just irresponsible tenants who ought to be evicted.  And one way or another, everyone’s lease comes to a final, unrenewable end, and then all we’ll possess will be whatever truthfulness and integrity our souls had.  (Hm, I respond to one of Taki’s posts and end up preaching the way of Bushido.......)

PS, here’s one answer to my own rhetorical question, “how many of them actually ENJOY their material wealth, or their lives at all?”

Taki mentioned F Scott Fitzgerald.  He seldom enjoyed his life, and died at 44.
His super-rich wife was a psychotic harpie and most of his putative friends were creeps.  And even Hemingway, who was a wee bit more sensible about “the rich” than Fitzgerald, was another miserable man who, by his own choice, didn’t outlive Fitzgerald by long.

One of my favourite jokes: “Why did Ernest Hemingway cross the road?”

“To die.  In the rain.  Alone.”

The nouveau riches have always been borderline vulgar.  Yet Arnold pointed out 150 years ago that the upper classes in the Anglophone world – be they grand bourgeois or nobility – have little interest in high culture, none in ideas, and none even in bella forma.  Friends in Maine tell me that the children of the old rich show up in fine dining restaurants clad in jeans. 

In Gringoland, the situation is even worse, because to be well educated here is not a life goal of any Gringo, and well-educated is the sine non qua of cultivating High Culture (to say nothing of prospering in a high-tech and international marketplace).  Add to this the New Englander’s Puritan dislike anything that can’t be turned into a moral witch-hunting crusade.  For him, anything refined, elevated, intellectually engrossing, or beautiful is somehow lewd and wicked.  The Dutch Calvinists produced much that was beautiful, as did Milton and Marvell.  The Lutherans gave us Schutz and Bach. But the Gringo Calvinist knows nothing of the artistic and intellectual achievements of Calvinism.  Mencken was right to call our Puritan universities slaughterhouses for ideas.  They still are, be they Bob Jones Fundy or Colombia Cultural Marxist.  Taki himself reflects how much better things are on the Continent, where I have found German businessmen who can talk intelligently about Thomas Mann, recognizing in his concept of the Burger an affinity, and where artist and professor are the most respected professions, not banker or bureaucrat. 

So bad is it in the Lincolnlands that those few of Gringo grand bourgeois who cultivated High Culture generally have adopted a strategy of escape:  Henry Adams, Bernard Berenson, T.S. Eliot, and Percival Lowell come immediately to mind. The first escaped into the Gothic Age, the second into the Florentine Quattrocento, the third into the Baroque, and the last into Outer Space (heard of the Lowell Observatory?).

The problem with the super-rich today is that most of them are arch-globalists.  Whereas older generations of the rich felt obligations at home and to their native country, region and people, today’s rich are globalists and have no such attachments.  They are Hallow Men living in vacuums.

Bede, some of what you say about the “rich” is true:  like a pizza pan, they tend to be broad but shallow.  I’m attached to my real country also (instead of the artificial one Dishonest Abe forced by arms).  Folks with roots have deeper and stabler personalities. But are they “broader” personalities?

The problem is that if I can get to Rome or St. Petersburg in the same amount of time it takes for me to walk from one end of my county to the other,then the Lokalpatriot has a new issue to face. That I can contact these places in seconds cheaply makes the problem harder. Also any future prosperity will depend on an international market; the free market in general ought to be an international market.  If I wish to sell in Singapore, I’d better know what folks there might like to buy, which means knowing their language and culture. Thus we need not only stable and deep personalities, but broad ones as well.

So the problem of Real Conservatives is how to be both centripetal and centrifugal at the same time. The Venetians were such.

Most of these modern fortunes were begot by disreputable means - industrialism, commerce and high-tech - not from a family estate, an agrarian tradition, the true bedrock of the artist and gentleman alike.  In fact, these capitalists are at war with the true gentleman, as they have been since the end of the Civil War.

Frank Lawrence Owsley in his essay \"The Irrepressible Conflict\” in _I\’ll take my Stand_ writes:

\"[The South] with its lands worthless, its cattle and stock gone, its houses burned, was turned over to three millions of former slaves, some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh and the bulk of them hardly three generations removed from cannibalism.  These half-savage blacks were armed.  Their passions were roused against their former masters by savage political leaders like Thaddeus Stevens, who advocated the confiscation of all Southern lands for the benefit of the negroes, and the extermination, if need be, of the Southern white population.\”

These capitalists are no friend to whites, their traditions, nor their survival.  Philistine profit is their religion.

@True Southerner

So you are caught in the old agrarian dream of the
gentleman farmer and deny rspect those who among ohter
things provide you with electricity, the lights taht allow
to read late in the night, the refrigeraton that chills
your beer, the TV that you enjoy, the computer that you
use to communicate, the stove that allows you to cook
without turning the place black from soot, the central
heating. None of those things you are so happy using
was created by those who ran family states in your
idealized agrarian past. It was not them who invented
central plumbing, and toilets, which finally defeated
the innumerable epidemics that afflicted pre-modern man.

It was not them who pioneered scientific research, who
created vaccines, nor medical treatments.

You may complain at the manners of those who run or
create the distribution systems of such goods, but
as long as you willingly use the products they deliver
and think they are good, then acknowldege that they
earned their money in a very meritorious way.

But that leads to another problem suffered by many of the so-called “rich”:  how many of them actually ENJOY their material wealth, or their lives at all?

Posted by John Ball on Nov 03, 2007.

Well, when not planning to rule the world, David Rockefeller collects beetles.  That sounds like fun.

“These capitalists are no friend to whites, their traditions, nor their survival.  Philistine profit is their religion.”

Posted by True Southerner on Nov 03, 2007.

Which makes me wonder how any white Southerner could support our invasion of Iraq and the destruction of their museums, libraries, etc.  Our smirking defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, blamed it on Saddam.  Too bad he doesn’t blame the seizure of our embassy staff by Iranians in 1979 on the brutal years of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule.

@ John Ball

You’re quite right: there is a lot of fine art
available for much less than the highfalutin’
impressionists and just as fine...sometimes
even finer. I have a superb Purvitis for sale
(not for “a few hundred dollars”—an absolute
steal at $75 thousand) and it’s better than
any damn haystack.

The Hemingway joke: very amusing. And terse.

Never has wealth created a soul for it prefers corrupting them.

I wept because I had no money until I met a rich man who had no taste.

It was not them who invented
central plumbing, and toilets, which finally defeated the innumerable epidemics that afflicted pre-modern man.

Modern sanitation systems may be effective in preventing rampant disease, but it does so at a great price to the environment and water supply. More eco-friendly and yet also health-preserving systems are possible, and would be more welcome in an agrarian society. See, for example, The Toilet Papers by Sim Van der Ryn.

It is better to be rich and miserable than poor and miserable.