mighty effort to
rigidify society
to protect the top
Adapted from the book, The Road Home by Jim Harrison (New York : Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988) where Mr. Harrison writes:
It struck me for the thousandth time that when you were on the move you noted the bottom third,
at least a third it seemed had become social mutants and were scratching along as minimum-wage menial laborers and without any reliable way to get anyplace else for a fresh look;
those in Washington who could help simply had never noticed these people,
that there was something about the xenophobic power trance in politics that made them unable to extrapolate any other reality than the effort toward reelection.
They were making a mighty effort to rigidify the society to protect the top, and the bottom third were being openly sacrificed.
It struck me as I read this how hard folks who have ‘got there’ work to maker sure their place is secure rather than look to help anyone else ‘get there’, where ever your ‘there’ is.
Tom Wolfe writes in Back to Blood how the simple act of being able to gain access to a road through the ‘Owners Gate’ gave satisfaction to rich people as they passed the long line of cars in the ‘Employees/Guest’ Gate.
Me?
I am with Bob Dylan and got nothing so I got nothing to lose as I continue to bankroll my kids best I can one my way to bankruptcy so its easy for me to say we should remember the poor.
So it was with some satisfaction when I read in today’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd’s column, My Ted Talk, as she recounted the life and times of Mr. Ted Turner.
Mr. Turner was rich and he knew it but he lived a life that, in contrast to other rich lives currently in the news cycle, lived free of law suits and court filings.
Mr. Turner was BIG.
And I am not sure he was ever small in the ways that get you negative headlines aside from his manic Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way mantra.
For me, he was that sailor guy who won the America’s Cup sailing races for the New York Yacht club, owner the Atlanta Braves and created CNN.
The mouth from the south but also seemed to be real if you know what I mean.
Ms. Dowd writes …
He was generous — another quality missing from many modern plutocrats. In 1996, at his friend Tom Brokaw’s urging, I called Turner to write a column on a pet peeve of his: the parsimony of fellow billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
Turner had, two years earlier, forked over $200 million to charity. He told me that he empathized with the fear of giving away so much money that you would fall off the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans.
But he challenged his peers — or “ol’ skinflints,” as he called them — to shut down that fear and open up their purse strings.
He suggested a list focused on who did the giving rather than the having, proposing an “Ebenezer Scrooge Prize” to embarrass stingy billionaires and a “Heart of Gold Award” to honor the biggest givers.
“Scrooge felt a lot happier when he saved Tiny Tim and bought the turkey for the poor family, right?” he said. The column I wrote spurred Michael Kinsley, then the editor of Slate, a pioneering online magazine, to start the Slate 60, a list of the most generous philanthropists. The following year, he donated $1 billion to the U.N.
Now lets do some creative imagining and imagine that current man in office saying, “Scrooge felt a lot happier when he saved Tiny Tim and bought the turkey for the poor family, right?“
Doesn’t work does it.
