Oblivious Rich

April 4, 2007
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR – NY TIMES
The Rich Are More Oblivious Than You and Me
By RICHARD CONNIFF
Old Lyme, Conn.

THE other day at a Los Angeles race track, a comedian named Eddie Griffin took a meeting with a concrete barrier and left a borrowed bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo looking like bad origami. Just to be clear, this was a different bright-red $1.5 million Ferrari Enzo from the one a Swedish businessman crumpled up and threw away last year on the Pacific Coast Highway. I mention this only because it’s easy to get confused by the vast and highly repetitious category “Rich and Famous People Acting Like Total Idiots.” Mr. Griffin walked away uninjured, and everybody offered wise counsel about how this wasn’t really such a bad day after all.
So what exactly constitutes a bad day in this rarefied little world? Did the casino owner Steve Wynn cross the mark when he put his elbow through a Picasso he was about to sell for $139 million? Did Mel (“I Own Malibu”) Gibson sense bad-day emanations when he started on a bigoted tirade while seated drunk in the back of a sheriff’s car? And if dumb stuff like this comes so easy to these people, how is it that they’re the ones with all the money?
Modern science has the answer, with a little help from the poet Hilaire Belloc.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/opinion/04conniff.html?th&emc=th

are definitely a function of class, of never having to know anything because hired underlings know it for you, of never having to do anything well because hired underlings know how to do it, of never cleaning up after oneself because that is what the help is for.

Given a true national disaster like a war fought on our soil, the rich who were born to wealth will be utterly helpless when the underlings desert to find someone who will pay them in food instead of useless paper.

While I'm not a Marxist, I do believe there is something to class analysis of society.
Here's a great book to read of the subject of working class v. middle class:
"Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams" by Alfred Lubrano

http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471263761.html

and his description of the economics of his time (and largely ours) was also apropos. He just got a bad name through his prescription for a cure and the fact that his democratic rule by the working class was twisted into rule by a party oligarchy. It's a pity he's not required reading in any discipline but sociology.

Your author seems to have a good grip on that sense of entitlement each class has, although he seems to have missed working class entitlement to low stress along with low esteem. What upwardly mobile people don't have as their economic status changes for the better is the sense that they are entitled to have what they have. People who fall down a notch still have the sense of being entitled to what their original class would provide, and so firmly believe they are still in their original class. The description of a bricklayer's son at a middle class dinner party was so typical; talking about a lawyer parent is suitable, talking about a bricklayer father might as well be talking about a Martian.

Another problem is the oversimplification of class structure into only 3 or 4 classes. The fact is that there are many classes, from skid row addicts all the way up to plutocrats like Gates, a very small class indeed. People can generally see only a class or two below and above them. To a non salaried office worker, the office managers are the rich, in other words.

One point I can't dispute is the heritability of class. That goes in with the sense of entitlement experienced by the members of each class. The working class is entitled to the low stress (and low esteem) of never being required to think or to create. The middle class is entitled to a certain amount of education and goods and respect from the lower classes. The top class is entitled to automatic slots for their children in the best universities, a gentleman's C for a kid who has no interest in attending, and automatic places on boards of directors, inherited leadership.

up their messes. They don't have to take responsibility for anything. And I've encountered some who have the attitude that money = superiority.

I don't know if this particular asshole qualified as rich, but an idiot in a Lexus once backed into my Honda in a parking lot. The damage was only about $500.00, but he had the audacity to suggest that I not worry about it because "your car isn't worth much anyway."

Seriously.

POSes like that need attitude adjustments and that's something a letter from a lawyer can often deliver. It's worth the nominal retainer.

have counted class as synonymous with noblesse oblige, which would include statesmen like Al Gore and Wesley Clark, all the Greenpeace activists who stand between the whales and the Japan and Norway, the doctors without borders, Theresa and John Kerry and all their children, John and especially Elizabeth Edwards, many other citizens of the world past and present, who think/thought beyond the staus quo, who sacrifice for the rest of us, who do little things to make others' lives better, to the wonderful doctors who care far more and work many more hours than they are paid to, for the teachers who work without overtime and always have, for the lawyers who help the poor, the captives and who fight the big corporations, and all of us at DU and like web centers, trying to make the world better for the earth and its people everywhere. This only scratches the surface, but it still eliminates any Bush or Cheney or CEO or any other obnoxious money grubbing, self-absorbed sociopath, no matter how many years that their family has had money or no matter what they have now. The Bushes do not have any class and they never have had any and that goes for Barbara and her beautiful mind and all those who sired her too.

Competition? Here's a link if ya need a laugh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRBkgshj8Cw