[TheForge] Wealth is wasted on the rich

[Justin Fellenz]

--- Justin Fellenz <sunironworks at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Well said, Ries. You don't even have to be very rich to be
> impersonal,
> either. I know a lot of folks in this area who have identical houses,
> huge, colonial things with enormous entryways and beautiful open
> plans,
> but with model names like cars that the guys discuss over lunch. "Oh,
> yeah, I got the Waverly." "Really? We like that one, but we had the
> Ascot." They're generally comfortably, but coldly, appointed from a
> crate and barrel catalog, with potpourri and lace in the downstairs
> bathroom, the right wine in the dark-wood-and-fabricated-iron wine
> rack, and black leather in the home theater. All very nice, but ot
> something you could trace a life to. These guys are in the 150-250k
> household income bracket, and their hobbies are golf and TV. With
> incredible consistency. I'm not sure what to think about that. Some
> of
> these guys are friends, more or less, guys I work with and have beers
> with, but I don't really get why their clocks turn and they don't get
> me at all. Our house is full of love and stories and jokes and
> strange
> things like a sign that says "we don't rent pigs" I picked up in
> Texas.
> But I can't feel superior to them, not without making grand
> statements
> about "society" that I'm not really qualified to make unless I've had
> a
> lot to drink. It's just that they're from a different planet from me,
> one that looks the same and interlocks on a superficial level but
> quickly parts company from mine. 
> 
> I have a suspicion, thinking back to the cool kids in high school,
> the Hilton sisters, and the people that win on "the apprentice," that
those
> who get rich are often those who know how best to approximate
> whatever
> the center of the culture is at the moment, the ones who are most
> outstandingly "normal." If they look like iconoclasts it's because
> they're slightly different from the old center, not actually breaking
> much ground but just renewing the center a little farther along.
> They're the next logical step, staying within the headlights. Crate
> and
> barrel is a symbol of a rustic cultural moment most folks would like
> to
> be associated without without actually living, just a little to the
> side of regular reality. It's like a good joke that makes you jump a
> little ways in your mind, not so far that it doesn't make sense or so
> close you see it coming--or a blue note in a chord that reminds you
> of
> the familiar major chord just a half-step away, or a riff that starts
> a
> half-beat later than last time. The apparent anomaly reminds us of
> the
> familiar if it isn't too far out.
> 
> Most of us here, I'm guessing, are a whole lot more peripheral and
> polyphonic than crate and barrel, which is why we're here, warming
> our
> hands over this particular burn barrel of a subculture, keeping ideas
> flowing for the vortex in the middle, scavenging and re-using what
> gets
> flung back out, helping define the inside by being further toward the
> outside.
> 
> That crate and barrel wine rack wouldn't make any sense without
> shaker
> blacksmiths back in the day. See? Without blacksmiths, where would
> the
> world be?
> 
> I think the Hiltons, as current icons of centrist popular
> culture, owe us a commission.
> 
> Whaddaya think?
> 
> Way OT again, JRF 
>