Billionaires

I'm going to go way out on a limb here and claim that billionaires aren't all exactly the same.

At least, I'd be going out on a limb if I said that in some of the places I hang out. I like those places, it's nice to have found places where nearly everyone hates Elon Musk, but all the same, the frequent, unchallenged assertion that all billionaires are the same is getting to be a pain in the ass. 

 

It's possible that I might dislike every single billionaire, if I examined each one closely. But I haven't examined each and every single billionaire closely. Which is why I'm unable to say that they're all the same.

But there's more than that. Yes, even more. There are differences which anyone can see. Some billionaires are Republicans, some are Democrats. The they're-all-the-same yahoos will respond that they're just pretending to be different, while they pull the strings behind the scenes in our one-party system. Have we gotten to the 100 mark yet, 100 times of me mentioning, in this blog, that brilliant remark of Kurt Vonnegut's, that we are what we pretend to be?

Gotta be at least close to 100 by now. 

There are differences, though. When Warren Buffett says publicly that he should pay more taxes, that's different from Elon Musk publicly saying that he shouldn't have to pay ANY taxes, because he's already publicly benefited mankind so much. And whether Musk really means that, or can barely keep a straight face while he says it and is as amazed as, for instance, I am, that anyone believes he's a public benefactor (we are what we pretend to be!), both Buffett and Musk are decidedly different than most billionaires inasmuch as they've talked about taxes at all in any way except privately.

Musk and Trump and Cuban, and very few other billionaires, seem to live for the spotlight, for public attention. They can't get enough of it, it seems. Many other billionaires seem to live very strictly by the code: "Fools' names and fools' faces often appear in public places." So that we've very rarely, or perhaps never, even heard their names.

Which would make it even harder to tell if they really are all the same, and also exactly the same as the publicity-hungry type of billionaire. 

As with taxes, so also with philanthropy: some billionaires practice it openly, some by stealth, some hardly at all. Instead of "hardly at all," I was going to say "not at all," but it seems even Trump and Musk may have engaged in some charitable giving. Not as much as they would like people to believe, but a little, milked for as much publicity as possible, timed to divert from scandal.

Now, even in the cases of billionaires who give the great majority of their wealth to good causes, it could be argued that they are not making up for all of the damage they caused while accumulating that money. The Andrew Carnegie Syndrome. I'd be more than glad to debate that. On a case-by-case, billionaire-by-billionaire basis. I'm still not going to even debate the nature of all billionaires at once. 

Because, as Denzel Washington said in Philadelphia: "This is the essence of discrimination: formulating opinions about others not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in a group with assumed characteristics." Simple as that. I'm not having it.

But wait, there's EVEN MORE: I have come to believe that a great many of these people claiming that all billionaires are evil and all the same, are themselves millionaires who would much rather debate something else than whether and to what extent their own existence benefits society as a whole. The B-word gives them a very convenient way to change the subject. Might even work if the people they're talking to are also millionaires. Yeah, I bet in would work real well in those circumstances.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence that the first two people I heard spreading the billionaires-are-all trope were millionaires. Gore Vidal, and then Bernie Sanders. 

In fact, in retrospect, I've got to wonder whether Gore Vidal himself was a billionaire when he warned the public to keep both hands planted firmly over one's wallet whenever in the vicinity of a billionaire. Vidal was not merely a bestselling author when he said, he had written a great many very big bestsellers, besides some screenwriting and having been born the grandson of a US Senator and being the first cousin of Al Gore and a cousin by marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy, and living half the year in a villa in Ravello and the other half in the Beverly Hills Hotel. If he wasn't worth at least $100 million in the late 1980's, when he issued his dire warning about billionaires, then he must have given most of his wealth away, or followed terrible investment advice, or been a really amazingly big tipper, or something.

You know what, maybe Gore was a billionaire and knew it, and was ironically warning his more perceptive readers, those capable of reading between the lines just as he spoke between them, to watch out for him, and maybe go into business with less treacherous types. If so -- good one, Gore! and ain't I a dope.

My point was that when I read that article in Vanity Fair where Gore talked about the billionaires and the hands clamped on wallets just for safety's sake, it struck me as very odd that someone that rich was warning the public about the rich. 

And then in 2016, Bernie Sanders went on and on at such length about billionaires that he got a billionaire elected President. And I noticed that during 2016 he and his wife sold their second house for half a million. 

Their SECOND house. Making me very suspicious that the rest of their holdings might tally up to another half, making them the dreaded M-word, as are no doubt many if not most of Bernie's colleagues in the Senate and House. 

That was before 2019, when it became widely-known that Sanders' income in 2017 had been over $1 million, leading to his famous public gaff about how you, too, can become a millionaire if you write a bestselling book. 

Who knew it was so easy, right?

Seemed disingenuous to me, because Sanders seemed to be saying that only in 2017 had he become a millionaire. 

But again my point is: a rich person warning me about those evil, evil rich people like movie stars and the Clintons!

Also, I suspect that very many of the people around me these days repeating the all-billionaires-are-the-same trope, may have learned it directly from Bernie Sanders, thus adding to the reasons I dislike him.

Dream Log: Commercial Success as a Writer

Last night, while I was still awake, there were some noises just outside, and I couldn't figure out what they were. Then I fell asleep. I dreamed that I had suddenly become very successful, commercially, as writer. In the dream I was an adult, but I was living, by myself, in the house I lived in from the late 1960's to the mid-1970's, from age eight to fourteen, a large house with a very large front lawn. It was nighttime. Many people were coming to congratulate me. Many, who arrived in huge 1940's automobiles, identified themselves as distant cousins of mine. Typewriter copies of many things I had written pre-Internet were laying around here and there in the house, paper-clipped to handwritten comments by various people. I kept trying to read some of these comments, but the handwriting was hard to read, and I was constantly being interrupted by the many visitors.

In addition to the many visitors, many congratulatory gifts had been sent to me. The packages were piled high on the porch. I had received 300-pound

slam balls, gold and platinum watches, all sorts of hard-to-find books.

My distant cousins took me to a time machine. In real life, when I lived in this house, behind it were cornfields. In the dream, behind it was an urban residential area with narrow streets and small houses. The nearest small house was a time machine.

I went back into my house, went through a maze of hallways and stairways to reach a small room with a piano in it, with shelves on two walls crammed with sheet music. This room was crowded with people singing American songs from the early 20th century to piano accompaniment. Among these singers was Gore Vidal, wearing a tuxedo with the bow tie undone and the collar open. As soon as he saw me, Gore said, "They're going to turn you in to Langley!"

Langley, Virginia is the site of the headquarters of the CIA. Gore did not literally mean that, as soon as my distant cousins and I got to wherever we were going in the future, they were planning to hand me over to the CIA. What he meant was that these distant cousins of mine were right-wing reactionaries, and that I belonged with Leftists such as himself and the others singing in that small room.

I was going to start to try to explain to Gore that these distant cousins of mine were much more liberal than he thought, but instead I woke up.

Am I as Bad a Writer as Norman Mailer at His Worst?

Quite a horrifying thought.

I've been writing brilliant stuff for well over 40 years. I just want widespread recognition and fame and billions of dollars for it, what's the problem?

Unless the reason I haven't gotten widespread recognition is that I'm actually not a brilliant writer.

I don't really believe I'm not brilliant, but I worry that I might be brilliant only part of the time, and really, really stupid a lot of the rest of the time, like Norman Mailer. (OMG, was Norman autistic?) I'm not violent like Norman was. But I wonder whether what I once wrote about him, about how he "veers sharply from the sublime to the ridiculous from book to book, page to page, from one word to the next," doesn't apply every bit as much to myself.

Last night I saw a video of almost a half hour's worth of Norman at somewhere near his worst. I tell you truthfully, his attitude here is as grotesque as his hairstyle (Is he drunk? In the middle of the afternoon on a nationwide talk-show? That would not have been entirely unlike him). Finally, about 19:05, he briefly becomes coherent enough to state what is on his mind. The problem is, he's defending one of his worst books, perhaps the most atrocious one of them all, The Prisoner of Sex, his uncomprehending reaction to the Women's Lib movement, and he's reacting quite badly (to put it mildly) to good, constructive criticism from Gore. Granted, it was not flattering when Gore made a connection between Norman and Henry Miller on the one hand and Charles Manson on the other. But the way to refute the thesis that you bear no resemblance to a violent psychopath is not to behave like a violent psychopath. Don't feel obliged to subject yourself to this video if you don't have an especial interest in the literary feuds of mid-20th-century Murrkin literature.



Here's a much more impressive, much more rational performance by Norman, not particularly painful to watch at all, on the contrary, here Norman is rather charming, and promoting one of his better books, Armies of the Night, although unfortunately the man he's talking to is an insufferable weasel.



In both pieces Norman expresses his deep admiration for Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was Norman's hero, his primary role model, and Norman shared this with countless other writers -- my God, there still may exist some writers who idolize that sheer jackass Hemingway. Hemingway may have damaged more potentially-good writers in more deep ways than anyone since Hegel, maybe even since Rousseau. The deaths by overindulgence in alcohol alone, which can be laid at Hemingway's feet... Before one even begins to consider the damage done to what could have been so very many very fine books. How many of those low, low points in both Norman's books and in his public behavior go back directly to this inexplicable admiration for that jackass Hemingway?

Wadenbeisser

The last 12 twelve days of tempest in the teapot of culture have given me an idea for what might be a fascinating documentary film. It could be entitled Wadenbeisser, and examine people who have complained about other people receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Wow -- it has really only been 12 days since Dylan's Nobel Prize was announced. It feels like much longer than 12 days. There has been so much criticism of the award in those 12 days, which I have been able only to partly ignore. It seems incredible that such an immense volume of hostile nonsense and ignoble resentment could have been produced in just 12 days.

"Wadenbeisser," always with a capital W, is a German noun, one of those German nouns which is spelled the same in the singular and the plural, which literally translates to a "calf-biter" or "calf-biters," and figuratively refers to someone whose behavior is reminiscent of that of a small dog which charges a person, barking furiously, and bites the person in the calf. A Wadenbeisser is someone who is figuratively small, in the sense of shallow or petty, attacking someone of greater (figurative) stature.

Wadenbeisser might be a good name for this documentary, because, of all the impassioned denunciations of various Nobel Prizes in Literature which I have read, none has been a tiny fraction as interesting as the written work of the denounced Laureates.

Bob Dylan's award may have kicked off the greatest of these storms of boring and petty discontent, because he is so famous. But I'm also thinking of the outrage expressed when William Golding, VS Naipaul and Mario Vargas Llosa won The Big One. I'm sure there have been many earlier cases in which the Wadenbeisser have been deservedly forgotten. I would dig such cases up primarily to mock them, of course, and to underscore the greater stature of the winners.

In the case of William Golding, at least one Wadenbeisser usually wrote much better stuff than his complaints about the prize: Gore Vidal, who usually was not a Wadenbeisser at all. Indeed, typically he was arrayed against the petty-minded and the resentful. He will deservedly be long-remembered. Just hopefully not for bitching because Golding got the prize in 1983, and not his pals Burgess and Calvino.

(In case the name Golding rings a bell but you can't quite place him: he wrote novels, drama, verse and non-fiction. He wrote Lord of the Flies and published at least 12 other much less famous volumes before his prize in 1983, and 4 volumes afterward, not counting a posthumously-published novel.)

There would have to be a special place in the film for those criticizing awards going to writers not one line of whose work they had read, and of course, I am among that special class of Bozos: I've complained about the number of Literature Nobels going to Scandinavian writers, but I shouldn't have, because I haven't read them. And I'm always bitching about other people talking about texts they haven't written, which makes me a double Bozo for bitching about these Nordic bards unknown to me, and I'll take my licks for it. I'm not one of those people, like Donald Trump, who think that no one can see fault to which the faulty party does not admit.

Gore Vidal, Political Populist and Literary Snob

Gore Vidal's essays on politics and those in the form of memoir are glorious, but he more than makes up for it with his literary essays, which basically consist of contempt for writers and their readers who are not of his aristocratic class and or, among contemporary writers, his personal friends. In the essay collection At Home there is a Part I, consisting, oh boy oh boy! of delightful telling of anecdotes from Vidal's amazing life, peppered with good angry funny political populism, and a Part II consisting, oh Jesus, oh no, of Vidal pompously and dully lecturing the reader about American writers who have had the nerve to win more awards than he has, and to make ends meet by teaching, instead of from coming from a wealthy family like he did, the barbarians who *cringe* went to public schools -- the bad American kind, not the good English kind which produced some of Vidal's friends who it's an outrage they didn't get the Nobel Prize cause it's all a conspiracy of mediocrity among people who weren't taught the classics and have an (understandable, of course) envious rage against the cool kids like Gore.

Oy.

Except that one of the essays in Part I belongs in Part II because it mostly consists of spleen against those of us who waste our lives with trash like Gaddis and Gass, and, oh dear, even uncouth types such as Pynchon, instead of having the common decency to love Louis Auchincloss for having continued the tradition of George Eliot, Henry James and Edith Wharton. (Never mind that Gaddis and Pynchon are just as upperclass as Vidal, Pynchon maybe even a little more, but Gaddis committed the crime of becoming good buds with that professor Gass, who lives in St Louis, my God! and Pynchon, worse still, often convincingly writes in the cadences of us regular folks.) I'm talking about the essay "Frederic Prokosch: the European Connection." Prokosch was cool with Vidal because he came from that same American boarding-school background, was an expat like Vidal is part-time, and, most important of all, because he dripped with the same instinctive contempt for non-snobbish writers.

I just want to talk about the end of the essay: Vidal has taken his friend Prokosch (why??) to a party chock-full of his bêtes noires, American poets who have won awards and who teach college classes. Vidal's description of these people is petty and gratuitously cruel, and, twenty-some years after first having read it -- pardon me, folks, sometimes I'm slow -- it only now occurs to me to wonder how accurate his descriptions of the persons are. (His descriptions of their books are pretty much completely worthless.) He writes that all these boors have just agreed that the classics are worthless -- Did they? It occurs to me, unforgivably late, that this is the sort of thing I tend to encounter in Vidal's depictions of writers he hates, and nowhere else; for instance, nowhere in the writing of those writers -- which inspires Prokosch to the classy act of reciting some lines of Vergil, after which he will calmly inform these tenured unwashed where he used to read them every day, carved in marble in the gardens of the Villa Borghese "at Rome," so there! And he will go on to say, "I'd think, that is what poetry is, something that can be carved in marble, something that can still be beautiful to read after so many centuries."

The implication, which of course Prokosch was too cultured to say, and Vidal too cultured to write, being that centuries after the world had forgotten this entire roomful of college-teachin' boors, the best people would continue to read Vergil and Prokosch and Vidal.

Yeah, maybe so. Vergil, anyway. But as I said, I wonder whether those people Gore Vidal hates so much really did say anything like "The classics are worthless." It has been known to happen that a party guest was so choked with booze and bile that it affected his hearing. According to Vidal, as Prokosch began to recite Vergil, a "full professor" murmured to his "full wife," "It's Dante." (Hey, Gore, you're fat too! Sometimes you act like you don't know it.) Cause he wuz just what passes for a full professor in Amurrka these days, and ain't never even been to no public school and cain't even tell no Latin from no Eye-talian! hyuck hyuck hyuck...

This was the point and peak of Vidal's punchline in the joke he made of these partygoers. But maybe in reality it was all very different. Maybe these professors and their spouses -- according to Vidal it was all professors and their wives, as if there were no female professors and no gay professors to be found in the Hudson Valley in the 1980's. Add that to the list of unrealistic details in Vidal's portrait of American academia and American prizewinning literature -- maybe they appreciated the classics very much, and were also bright enough to perceive Vidal's and Prokosch's misguided disdain, although too polite to return it in a manner pointed enough that Vidal could perceive it. (Why were the two of them there? Is it completely farfetched to wonder if they might go to a party full of American professor-poets solely in order to wallow in their own disdain?) Maybe that man knew quite well that Prokosch was reciting Vergil, and what he really whispered to that woman was something actually quite witty, like, "We're officially going to Hell now. I feel like Dante."