|
Originally published in Britain's Tatler Magazine
In about five billion years the Sun, a star firmly in middle age as
stars go, will transform into a red giant, a cosmic event that will
radiate tremendous heat out so far into space that Mercury, Venus, and,
alas, Earth too, will be utterly consumed in flames, leaving the solar
system a safer, healthier, if infinitely more boring space quadrant. If
nothing else, we humans are good for a few laughs. Until this final
burst of nuclear fusion, rest assured that man (and woman) will
continue headlong with the universal human compulsion to acquire
material wealth at a pace surpassing anything Einstein ever had in that
great mind of his.
I know of what I write. Recently, I was in Palm
Beach, Florida for a series of speaking engagements. My wife, having
the misplaced confidence of allowing me to pack for myself, was no
doubt stunned to discover that none of my dress shirts made the trip.
After blaming the airline, the hotel bellman, and even my
long-suffering spouse for the mishap, I finally owned up to it and set
of for Worth Avenue (think Rodeo Drive, Fifth Avenue or the Riviera
only we're talking real money) looking for clothes.
I
was duly warned by the hotel concierge, who had no doubt noted my
scruffy jeans, and decidedly nonPolo shirt, that if I desired
low-priced goods (translation: cheap) that I should take a cab to the
mall off the island where lurked the big discounters like Nordstrom's,
Macy's, and Neiman Marcus. Otherwise, it might get expensive.
Walking
down Worth Avenue, I recognized Saks, a store I would never shop in
back home, but my options were limited. Shirts started at $250. That's
why I never shop there back home. And you couldn't simply buy one. The
sleeves had to be fitted to your arms, not something I really had time
for, my first speech being about two hours away. I opted for Brooks
Brothers (the only other store I recognized on the Avenue) and plunked
down $75 each for six shirts, gritting my teeth with each greedy clink
of the cash register.
We went out to
dinner one night. The taxi cab driver pointed out a yacht at anchor in
the Palm Beach harbor. It was actually a Nimitz-class recreational
floating fortress, standing out even among boats that were routinely
bigger than football stadiums. It was for sale, the cabbie said. Only
eight million bucks, U.S. Why was it for sale? I asked. The owner is
trading up, was the reply. To where? I didn't realize the QE II was for
sale.
Mixed drinks? Twelve dollars a
pop. I'd love to see the bottle that rum came from. Homes, think about
ten-to-fifteen mil each, Tomas the cabana boy not included. Cars? Poor
people drove Jaguars. Rich people drove Rolls Royce's. Very rich people
were driven in Rolls Royce's.
I
finally concluded that you can pretty much figure everything in Palm
Beach costing about a thousand bucks. I'm not talking about luxury
items, I mean various and sundry things like underwear, hair spray,
soup, those things with holes that you drain spaghetti in. Don't even
bother looking at the price, that's frowned upon down there, the
favorite line being if you have to ask the price, well, you know the
rest. Just pull the one grand note and be done with it, folks.
And
these people will pay. They will gleefully pay more than the asking
price because bidding wars allow financial muscle to be properly
exercised. After all, to paraphrase Dan Quayle: "it's such a waste not
to have money you can lose your mind over." If a home is on the market
for five mil, paying ten for it must mean it's actually a far grander
place than originally thought. What a deal. Suckered those pinhead
centimillionaires right out of their (not-ready-to-wear) Valentino. For
that is the other great, burning human passion: screwing our fellow man
(and woman) out of something. Or at least thinking we are. I told you
the Solar System was going to miss us yucksters.
But
after all, consumerism is what drives the mother ship; all the economic
forecasters tell us that. The poor stumble along, neither rising nor
falling (at least very much). The middle class is expected to plunge
its collective body head-over-heels in debt to keep the gravy train
going, with the Government doing absolutely all it can to discourage
savings and investment while screaming at its citizens to do just that.
What a dirty little secret. And the rich? Well the rich just seem to
keep getting richer. Maybe they are smarter, or at least have better
accountants.
Maybe it's genetic, a
double helix of materialistic lust telling us to spend! Spend! Maybe
it's biblical: "Thou Shalt Acquire Stuff Until Thou Art Broke or Dead."
Sure we could vaccinate the poorest kids of the world for what we spend
on Beanie Babies. Certainly we could feed the world's hungry for what
we drop on fast food burger, fries, and chicken nuggets. But we don't
get that rush, that compelling elixir of brain drain by doing good. We
get it by outspending our neighbor.
Communism
was a total failure; socialism not much better. Let's face it,
capitalism is where it's at. One need only check the numbers: more
jobs, more wealth, greater competition, magnificent market driven
efficiencies, higher standards of living for all. Or at least about
eighty-five percent of us -- Capitalism never claimed to be perfect,
folks. We flat-out kick the butt of every other major economic system
out there. Certainly we produce the super-haves and the
super-have-nots. But we also turn out that all-important category, "the
have-something's" to the tune of about two hundred million people in
the U.S. alone. Thus, we are safe and secure to gorge ourselves ad
infinitum. Or at least until we run out of room for the stuff we bought
that we didn't need in the first place.
It
is compulsive, this sense of acquisition, this feeling that if you're
not up to your fiscal eyeballs in supernova Internet stocks mightily
compounding in your retirement portfolio, that you're just standing on
the sidelines, loser stamped on your forehead; your life far from
complete, hell, empty.
I was even
seriously thinking of opening a small bookstore down in Palm Beach,
where I would sell only books written by me. That considerably cuts
down on the competition and doesn't overtax busy, wealthy people with
too many choices. I would peddle a $25 hardcover - that you could get
at just about any other place on earth for about $17.50 - for, you
guessed it, about a thousand bucks. At that rate I could buy that eight
million dollar yacht for twelve million in no time. And after all, I've
got five billion years to work with before the earthly music stops and
my sun-blasted dust is (could it be?) equally as valuable as everyone
else's. What a notion.
© 1999 by David Baldacci
|
