There’s been a constant stream of headlines about the widening gap between rich and poor for months now, but this is pretty remarkable: Just six members of the Walton family, heirs to the Walmart fortune, possess wealth equal to that of the entire bottom 30 percent of Americans.Obviously if a poor person dies you can put 'em in a pine box and forget about it. But if a Walton dies the economy is stimulated, what with all the paper-shuffling and estate-selling and so forth. Food for thought.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Pure Craziness
Rich folks:
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8 comments:
I'll bet that poor person's pine box can be purchased at Walmart.
Tsk, Tsk, Mister McG.
Don't you know how hard those jerb creators worked to be born into the right family???
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Why don't they make themselves sick? Isn't having that much money a burden? Who could feel justified? Who could feel like they're worth more than thirty percent of two hundred and ten million (or so)? Who could believe that they earned that. It's mind bogglingly pathological.
And even moreso, after a certain period of Paris Hilton-esqe excesses, what would you DO? When you had done the things you dreamed of doing, been the places that wanted to go, driven the cars, sailed the boats, flown the planes, when you get up in the morning an there isn't a single goddam thing in the whole fucking world that inspired you to make a great effort, no drug un-taken, no sex act yet to be explored, no stimulation, no desire, no joy left yet to be experienced, then when you get out of bed and pour a cup of civit cat coffee, what, you would have to wonder, is the point of any of it?
A couple of weeks before he blew his brains out Kurt Cobain did a pretty good interview with MuchMusic in which he talked about how valuable the little knick-knacks he had to save for had been, and how that changed once he could buy the store and its contents.
My dear departed friend Venola Schmidt--- a baby of the Great Depression who adapted to the better economy by buying quality and having only what she needed and a few little special things--- told me about how in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" one of the women characters made coffee for her children every morning, even though her children didn't drink it, so that she could pour it down the sink. She said that even the poorest person should be able to throw something away.
At the time we were trying to decide on which side to err when I was cleaning out her refrigerator.
I learned a lot from her, and have been striving for a long time to run my household like she did. There is something really elegant about the way she lived that I aspire to. She was neither niggardly nor decadent. Her household was just right.
Even though clouds rents, I'm going to go good paint and a few of the supplies I need to paint our kitchen and bathroom the way that the guy she hired to paint her living room did. It took a long time, but it would last for years and clean up very well. There is something spiritual about using resources and labor in the impeccable way she did.
Enough is as good as a feast. Not that I don't enjoy a little indulgence, now and then---
I just don't see how those people with all that money could be anything but ate-up with misery.
Speaking as a Potential Tumbrel Entrepreneur, I like the cut of this post's jib.
I followed the link to the New Yorker interview with Alice Walton (art collector), and she says:
“I don’t think Walmart causes anything. The question is, does a merchant best figure out how they can best serve their customers? Look at downtown Bentonville—it’s a very healthy downtown. It’s always been very healthy, and we’ve always had a Walmart.”
Really!
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