Courtesy of wikipedia.org
The day after Alex Pretti’s death, I sat down with a cup of coffee beside a woman who was finishing her lunch. When I mentioned my shock over the young man’s killing, she said she’d heard the news on NPR and found the incident too upsetting to discuss. A book she was reading lay open on the table, one I’d enjoyed, so I shifted the conversation to it.
We didn’t talk long, but before I left, I made a mental note of the difference between us. She had a right not to dwell on a tragedy for which she had no remedy. My coping mechanism, however, was to protest.
Representative Ilhan Omar, when sprayed with an unknown substance at a town hall, responded as I would have. She didn’t retreat from her assailant, but ran forward with her fist raised. After the incident, she told a reporter that she was a war survivor. This small agitator isn’t going to intimidate me from doing my work.
In large part, humans are the sum of their experiences. Our plastic brains help us learn and adapt. Understandably, the worldview of an ordinary person will differ from that of someone who is super-rich.
Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby contains this famous observation: Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.
An article in Business Insider exposes some of these differences. Plutocrats require extravagance, like buying mansions for their horses; $600 gold toothpicks; $859 gold straws; champagne delivered by helicopter; a room the size of a parlor for their shoes; and owning several mansions which they leave vacant.
In his book, Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen makes many observations about the super-rich and their need for conspicuous consumption. Unlike Nature, which abhors waste so that the bones of a fallen sparrow become fodder for the crocus burgeoning beneath, among humans, waste is a status symbol. To possess wealth is not enough, says Veblen. It must be in evidence and treated with conspicuous frivolity.
Donald Trump’s plan to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom encrusted in gold leaf is an example. Journalist Karrie Jacobs calls the design a perfect expression of Trump’s unfailing plutocratic worldview. (“Demolition Man,” by Karrie Jacobs, The Nation, January 2026, pg. 77)
If Trump’s overindulgence were his only defect, democracy might survive. Unfortunately, he relies on corruption to fund his ambitions, which include becoming a dictator. Surprisingly, leaders in the tech industry seem unfazed. They’ve pledged 1 billion dollars to complete his ballroom. Do they have a fetish for gold leaf, perhaps?
I doubt it. Most of us assume the tech giants support Trump’s peccadillos because he holds the government’s levers of power. (“Big Tech And Artificial Intelligence,” Public Citizen News, Jan/Feb. 2026, pg. 11)
They aren’t the only ones who see government as transactional. The fossil fuel industry bent a knee before them and received generous tax loopholes in exchange. (“Climate & Energy,” Public Citizen News, Jan/Feb. 2026, pg. 10.) That was corruption we could see. What should terrify us is the corruption we don’t–the dark money of cryptocurrency super pacts dedicated to fulfilling Trump’s ambitions.
I do not target oligarchs out of envy. I do it to underscore what Fitzgerald, the writer, and Veblen, the economist and sociologist, have revealed. An excess of wealth and power puts oligarchs out of touch with the common man, a breach that deprives them of their compassion.
With their eyes fixed on their desires, they do not see their transformation. Could it be that gold’s dazzle blinds them to the loss of human warmth?
One could almost pity them, these lost souls who are addicted to the pursuit of money… except we can’t forgive their cruelty. Misfits of the human race, they are unfit to lead our country.
I seldom listen to NPR, a fault, I know. Even so, each Saturday, I stand on a street corner with a sign that reads, “No King’s.” Will my actions change the course of human events? I don’t know. But it is my way of coping.
BOYCOTT: Tesla, Apple, Amazon
