At the top of his game.
Take Manhattan, but first take the Hamptons, where symptoms are readily apprehended, just as the pulse at the wrist is a telltale of the heart. Mere multimillionaires cannot afford anymore to go where within living memory actual people made a living from the farms, clam beds, and sword-fishing grounds. Now the potato fields are covered with houses that look like the headquarters of Martian expeditionary forces, ice-cream factories, vacuum cleaners on stilts, the Seagram building on its side, or shingled New England cottages monstrously swollen into something you might see after eating a magic mushroom. In simple and quiet towns that once deferred to the majesty of the ocean, the streets are now clogged with a kabuki theater of Range Rovers and $35,000 handbags.
"..the stories of ordinary men and women assume their deserved precedence.."
No one cares about ordinary anymore. There is no empathy for the ordinary people struggling to catch a break or improve their lot in life. The people who "have" consider the people who "don't have" to be stupid or lazy. The system is set up now to stop the clever or intelligent ordinary person from actually getting anywhere in life. We have reached a strange convergence in the world where the "class system" and "socialist system" have converged whereby we have rich socialist now running things and deciding who gets to succeed or fail based on a floating set of standards they seem to change daily.
This is a sad commentary on today's materialistic society. A very good dissection of a sick society - likely similar to what would have been said of the Romans.
it was always thus...
i will repeat....as a wise old englishman once told me when i were nought but a callow youth......
"you'll notice one day that socialists all live in the biggest houses they can afford'...
A phrase from the old days just popped to mind.
"The idiot children of the rich".
Used to hear it all the time. I wish it would come back in vogue.
How is the present time with these people different from what one would have seen during the depression?
Just a thought...are these the people who now embrace the ideology that would consign the ordinary folk to a life of enforced servitude without the free opportunity to rise to their individual dreams?
These are interesting times; I'm writing as a misfit in Chappaqua, NY - home of the Clintons and bedroom community for many of those Wall Street "fat cats" who knee-jerkly voted for Obama (the cool guy) and are about to get royally screwed by the the new banking laws. I'm curious to see if sanity will prevail. If not, well I guess there's always Singapore, Macau, Chile, Czechia, Switzerland ...
Thanks for finding that, Kate.
It's always a bit shocking, yet oddly reassuring, to be reminded of the oscillations of history.
Yes, Helprin at his best.
This is the class of hedonistic greed mongers who destroyed the middle class in America. I have nothing but contempt for these people.
$35,000 handbags = more money than brains
There has to be a major schism between earning and enumeration there.
Is there any commodity at all, gold or technology or heroin, that is worth as much as a $35,000 handbag per weight?
My mind boggles.
Is flat-out prestige worth that much?
They must have very low opinions of their own self worth to purchase imagined higher esteem in a freakin' handbag.
$35,000 isn't what it used to be, and the fabled "ordinary" folk don't seem to mind when told that their home is worth three times what they paid for it.
I sympathize with Mr. Helprin's yearning for the past - I grew up just outside of New York City in the '50s - but there is no going back.
It's long been said that the goals of civilization contain the seeds of its own destruction - peace and prosperity produces self-indulgent wimps, etc. - but, happily, the Dark Side is not entirely vanquished, and there are still things worth fighting against.
Is this the same Helprin who co-wrote "Game Change", that decadent, trivial, unmanly, gossipy "dishing" about the personality traits of various contemporary politicians?
@marquis: no, that's Mark Halperin, an ABC reporter.
Mark Helprin is a literary and political conservative who writes beautifully. You can google SDA for more information on him (Kate has some good links).
have they taken to feasting on peacock tongues and installing vomitoriums yet? we may have a short time.
Oz writes: "$35,000 handbags = more money than brains. ... Is there any commodity at all, gold or technology or heroin, that is worth as much as a $35,000 handbag per weight?"
We might not think so, but that $35,000 goes to pay a variety of people. We may not have a high personal regard for conspicuous consumers, but we should not be seduced by Obama's politics of envy. When, in the Clinton years, government imposed a "luxury tax" on things like costly yachts, a variety of small boat-yards went under.
Decline of civilizations always looked like it was caused by excesses, but I believe it was caused by refusal of people to sacrifice anything when they became better off. This is what I am observing for all of my life: life of ordinary people improves only when they are willing to sacrifice temporarily for a chance to make it better. Americans and Canadians flatly refuse to sacrifice anything and there you are, bailouts and PETization perks.
Aaron said "..life of ordinary people improves only when they are willing to sacrifice temporarily for a chance to make it better."
Yes but there has to be opportunity as well.
Wealth ….., what to think of it.
Most everyone one knows will tell how hard are they done by.
Play me a violin.
There is nothing in particular wrong with wealth. What one does with accumulated wealth may be where questions arise. That being said, it is nobody’s business how one spends ones wealth. It is nobody’s business how much money one makes, contrary to the socialist/fascist and union bosses types.
Where a problem arises is, as gord at January 22, 2010 9:14 PM points out, the rich have turned into socialists. They are now to be perceived as the good simply because they want to distribute the confiscated wealth of the producing plebeians to “spread the wealth around”.
You will find no worst character that walks this earth as a rich socialist. Look at the ruling bodies of any country in the world.
Canadian parliamentarians and senators earn good money, which for them is not good enough, they get tax free freebies and other such free lunches, they still insist they are hard done by.
However much I might share Helprin's distaste for contemporary trends, I find this piece overblown. It actually resembles Obama's rhetoric: all tone, little substance. It is "literary" in the worst sense of the word. Take this gem for example:
As the waves of history sweep through the present what they leave will depend in large part upon how they are perceived and how each individual acts upon his perceptions, which law and regulation follow more than they shape.
To those who admire that sentence, I would pose the following question: would the article suffer in any way if the sentence were removed? If your answer is "no", you have detected an instance of bad writing.
Some passages, in their reach for an erudite tone, are actually nonsensical: "How to accomplish [the enrichment of poor people] is a riddle to which public policy often proves inadequate and is anyway just a distant follower of forces of history that assert themselves as far beyond its control as the weather." The first part of this sentence is clear enough, but how exactly do attempts to minimize poverty "follow forces of history"? I suppose I could try to construct my own answer to that question, but that is Halprin's job, not mine. Again, ask yourself whether inclusion of this "thought", such as it is, helps the piece as a whole. I suggest that it does not.
A question for the reader: to whom is this piece addressed, and how will that reader be changed by reading it? I'm really not sure about my answer to the first question, but my answer to the second is "Not at all". Those who dislike some aspect of contemporary culture or politics may be pleased by the "attitude" of the piece. Those who are comfortable with present trends will probably shrug their shoulders and move on. All will have forgotten the article by tomorrow.
Halprin may or may not have written some fine novels. I wouldn't know since I haven't read them. But this article is no proof of competence.
I urge everyone reading this who is a Helprin fan to look up his audiobooks on ITunes. He narrates some of his own novels and he has a wonderful speaking voice.
"Gucci clad yeast".
Beaut.
I found this article boring and fairly non-sensical. Recently I bought his novel "Winters Tale" and frankly I couldn't get into it. I guess I am just wrong.
> Yes but there has to be opportunity as well.
Gord, there is always an opportunity.
If instead of allowing both bailouts...
Is there such a thing as a vomit of words? If so he must have had a meat lovers pizza for dinner.
We may not have a high personal regard for conspicuous consumers, but we should not be seduced by Obama's politics of envy.
~Roseberry
Read my post again.
I don't envy people with $35,000 handbags, I pity them for their spiritual poverty and low self worth.