I forget who, but obviously someone very smart, called Blackhawk Down, "War Porn." In a similar vein, CBS News's Dick Meyers takes The New York Times to task for its cognitive dissonance over its huge blind-spot: the titillating coverage of richness he calls Wealth Porn (excerpted en toto):
Behind every liberal rich-person basher lurks a rich-person gawker. Or at least most of the time.
The New York Times has been running an impressive, book-length series of articles about class in America. Some of them have been riveting as well as "important." But I'd bet a Rolex that the most popular of the nine pieces published thus far was the front page story that ran Sunday, June 5, headlined, "Old Nantucket Warily Meets the New."
It's all about how the new "hyper-rich" have taken the island over from the old rich. It's a great and grotesque piece.
Accompanying it is a wonkish but equally impressive look at how these "hyper-rich" people, those earning about $1.6 million a year or more annually, are leaving even the regular rich in the dust. The amount of national treasure consumed by the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers has grown to levels not seen since the Roaring '20s.
This is also a terrific piece.
But cruise around the rest of this Sunday's Times and what you'll find is a whole lot of what can only be called wealth porn. There are voyeuristic, detailed, titillating accounts of the doings and digs of the rich and well-groomed all over the paper. It's like that every Sunday. This week it was jarring because of the stories I just mentioned. I think that's called cognitive dissonance.
It is precisely the same cognitive dissonance that allowed the Democratic Party to nominate John Kerry and John Edwards - combined net worth, about $1 billion - to bash the rich, bemoan the split of the "two Americas" and beat up on George and Dick for being pals of the rich. When the rich, or those profiting from the rich, condemn other, less enlightened rich people, skin crawls. And many Americans - to the chagrin of Democrats, Marxists and Europeans - tend not to begrudge the rich and hyper-rich their riches.
Back to the Sunday Times, the single greatest current events icon in the East Coast, Blue State urban, moneyed and intellectual world. If anything creates water-cooler buzz in this orbit, it's the Sunday Times. It is also the greatest purveyor of super high-class, wealth porn there is and it's blessed with the imprimatur of news, sociology and high purpose.The Times magazine this week, ironically, was "The Money Issue." The cover story was a terrific profile of a more-than-hyper-rich hedge manager named Cliff Asness. The piece was a nice glimpse into the secretive hedge fund universe, but what made it riveting was the portrait of a not famous, under-40 gazillionaire. As always, the Sunday magazine had a section for real estate porn: page after page filled with ads for opulent homes. This week there were ads for 27 homes listed at over $5 million. In the Sunday Styles section, Alexandra Wolfe - daughter of writer Tom Wolfe - filed a story about how grown daughters of people with names like Tisch and Della Femina are taking their kids to posh new clubs where they can exercise and socialize while their kids get taken care of nearby.
There was a short feature about what's hot in diamond earrings (hoops, not chandeliers, prices ranging from $2,400 to $16,500) and a long article about how David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg are concerned about giving the public access to public beaches in Malibu. There were also the regular weekly features about society weddings and charity balls.
The Sunday Business Section always profiles a hyper-rich guy and this week it was Ronald Perelman. The piece had real news value apart from the wealth porn, just like the hedge fund story.
I'm not suggesting the Times shouldn't have done any of these stories. I just want to point out the irony of running an excellent set of pieces about the anthropology and demographics of the hyper-rich in a paper that is dining out on them. It is a kind of limousine liberalism that I believe also afflicts the Democratic Party too often, a conceit that "we are the enlightened rich."
Bill Clinton didn't bash the rich a lot, but he could have; Johns Kerry and Edwards did bash the rich a lot, and it flopped. It flopped partly because Americans who are not rich simply do not have a European-style, class base resentment. Americans aspire to being rich. That's the American way. But the '04 Democratic rhetoric also flopped because the guys spewing looked like such phonies; they weren't just rich, they were richer than the Republicans: they were hyper-rich.
In the House, Dennis Hastert, former high school wrestling coach, is a more authentic voice of the little guy than Nancy Pelosi, wife of a wealthy real estate developer, and in her own right part of a powerful political family including two past mayors of Baltimore, one of them also a five-term congressman.
The Senate has plenty of guys who make well-to-do look shabby, but the Democrats probably have the greater net worth, led by heirs like Kennedy, Dayton and Rockefeller and self-made moguls like Corzine, Kohl, and Lautenberg.
If there is one meta-theme that undergirds the Left, it is the unhealthy obsession with greed and wealth. This is so for communists, socialists, environmentalists, etc. There is no doubt that The New York Times, as well as other institutions and agents of the liberal left are obsessed with wealth, even as their political beliefs and tenets frown on it. This leads to an inevitable hypocrisy, the cognitive-dissonance often called "limousine liberalism," but there's more.
America was founded by Puritans. This is an inescapable fact: their contribution to our politics and culture is wide-ranging, including a belief in the free practice of religion, to a distinctly American hyper-affected public self-righteousness (not to be confused with the French version).
Yet that self-righteousness stems precisely out of a hypocrisy of values. As Nathaniel Hawthorne captured so well in A Scarlet Letter, in the case of the Pilgrims, they were privately obsessed with sex and sexual relations, even as they were publicly above such temptation. Likewise, Ridley Scott's Somalia film attempts to tell a nominally anti-war story about the human tragedy that comes from a lack of understanding when worlds collide, but succeeds in crafting one of the most sensual objectifications of violence and the spiritual redemption of professional soldiers -- warmongers -- that comes from the much-ballyhooed "Band of Brothers" effect.
In this way The New York Times bemoans the undesirable social fallout that comes from the wealthy being rich, even as it lingers, oh-so-lovingly, on all the trappings of wealth, promoting its mystique, as Myers calls it, "blessed with the imprimatur of news, sociology and high purpose."
Nobody likes a hypocrite, especially not a holier-than-thou -- in this case, wealthier-than-thou -- hypocrite. (Which is why there is such strong negative reactions to Americans and French worldwide.) Their insincerity erodes their attempts at positioning themselves on the moral high-ground, and this, more than anything else, is why the Democrats find themselves losing elections.
Will Franklin, of über-classy WILLisms.com, notes some statistics from the Washington Times, commenting that the alienation of the middle class means that the Dems, "are not in good shape moving into the future":
Among white voters, President Bush got a majority of support beginning at an income threshold of $23,300 -- about $5,000 above the poverty level for a family of four....
... [Kerry] lost the middle class -- defined by the report as voters living in households with incomes between $30,000 and $75,000 -- by six percentage points. Among white middle-class voters, the gap was 22 percentage points.
Voters from middle-class households made up 45 percent of the electorate last year, those making less than $30,000 constituted 23 percent of the vote, and households above $75,000 accounted for 32 percent of the vote. The median income among the voters was $54,348. ...
All of which explains why the Twenty-First Century Democrats are today's Puritans. Combined with their dogmatic political correctness, their hypocritical relation to wealth, reveals them for what they are -- and what they project on Republicans -- at best, a rich, select few, who like Katzenberg and Geffen, want to keep the proles out of their exclusive haunts, and at worst an unthinking and reactionary clique of out-of-touch ideologues who intrude into the lives of their neighbors and zealously attempt to legislate morality to banish un-enlightened wickedness.
It reminds me of an anecdote I once heard -- which I can't find supporting evidence for via abbreviated Google search -- that says that Marx disapproved of Engel's mistress, not because he thought infidelity to be wrong, but that the custom of having and maintaining a mistress was sooo bourgeois.
I LOVE this article.
I am an Australian escort,working in the nyc area, and am STRUCK by the hypocritical screwed up nature, of the wealthy men here in regards to sex. Women too, obviously.
I hate the liberal lefty rebelling against puratinism...equals the same thing mentality here.
Have a wife, but you have the best sex with the OTHERS. When its BAD, and delicious. Get OVER it. It's just SEX. Why do they have to make it so destructive to up the temptation...get a LIFE.
We have a legal business in australia...I LOVE this city, and I love this country...but I hate the lefty pedophile, Howard Stern thing.
Give me islam, give me harems...
I think America is great, balanced with the OLD world...the ancient civilisations...to keep it grounded. Without that...this country is just as extreme and destructive in its liberalism of women, as extremist muslims.
Everyday, in America, women are objectified...the pressure to look good is phenomonal...too much liberalism is chauvanism....
In THIS country....HAPPILY conservative. EEK
Posted by: Sydney | Wednesday, May 03, 2006 at 11:26 AM