Well, whiles I am a beggar I will rail
And say there is no sin but to be rich;
And being rich, my virtue then shall be
To say there is no vice but beggary.
Since king's break faith upon commodity,
Gain, be my lord, for I will worship thee!
-- The Bastard, King John, William Shakespeare
How many Americans do everything they can that is legal (or that they think they can get away with) in order to get rich, even as they hate Paris Hilton precisely because she is?
You buy lottery tickets, don't you? Or play poker, hoping your skill and cunning and luck are sufficient to hurt the people you "play" with, the ones who are trying to hurt you? You'd stop just short of bankrupting them, right, just short of making yourself a millionaire, wouldn't you? Do you gamble in the stock market? If your stock soars, even as the company lays off thousands of workers or moves offshore to avoid taxes or outsources all the jobs it can, are you happy or sad? One hundred per cent happy? A little bit sad?
Are you for tax cuts or tax increases? Easy answer? Apparently. Okay, if you had to choose between sending the government less of your money or paying more-for pet food inspectors in China, armor for the troops, decent veterans' benefits, a Marshall Plan to save the planet from global warming, universal health care, true homeland security, stopping genocide in Darfur, stopping AIDS in Africa-which would you choose? Tax cuts, liberal do-gooder increases? Which side are you on?
Would you vote to pay more taxes to make the richest country in the history of the world safer, fairer, more decent? To help the world's less fortunate and protect the earth? Come on. How do you really feel about the government trying to take away even more of your money, the capital you have been working so hard to accumulate? Drown that government in the bathtub, right? And how, incidentally, do you feel about people who disagree with you, the bleeding-hearts who would vote for tax increases? They make you angry, don't they? You hate them even more than you hate Paris, don't you? You're a piece of work.
But all of us, liberals and conservatives alike, like our money. We like it and we want more of it. Lots more. Right? Enough to quit our jobs-who hasn't imagined the profound satisfaction of that glorious day, right? To do whatever we want to do, work that would be more fulfilling, say, or travel, or spend more time with our families. If we were rich, we could help all those we love. We'd get out of debt, too-once and for all-and never have to worry about another bill, never again. Can you imagine? We could get a bigger house, a better car. We could hire somebody to drive us around in that new car? Why not? We could get used to that. Did I say a bigger house? Why not a colossal house, in a fairy-tale setting? Hey, not just a house -- a compound! We have to hire staff, for the compound, of course. And we might like houses and apartments in other choice locations. Why not? Oh, money! Enough to go anywhere we like whenever we like and buy anything we want when we get there! Sure, why not?
Examine your conscience. If you hate Paris Hilton and enjoyed seeing her cry as they sent her back to jail, why?
I'm not addressing the degree of her guilt or the justice of her sentence. My own feeling is that anyone -- anyone -- pulled over for driving drunk should lose car and license, never be issued another license, and spend a full six months in jail thinking about how lucky he or she is that he didn't kill anybody. All the suffering of this legion of incarcerated drunks doesn't begin to compare with the suffering involved in the loss of a single loved one to a drunk driver. I'm not discussing the law, Paris's guilt, or the state of American justice. I'm only interested now in the psychology of those who hate Paris. Here's what I want to ask them:
Has she harmed you? Really? How? Because she's spoiled, she's shallow, immoral? Undeserving? That's it, isn't it? She's rich, and she doesn't deserve it. You wouldn't be undeserving if you were rich, if you won the lottery. Of course not. Rich is all right, just not Paris being rich. Right?
There are people in America in the same income and asset range, more or less, as Paris Hilton, and they are people who have harmed you, people who damage America by their rapacious getting-and-spending every day of their privileged lives. Oil company gougers. Pharmaceutical or tobacco or polluting executives who falsify science and, for their bottom line and the lucrative present, knowingly mortgage the future and sell you death. Bosses who would never choose secure borders if it meant giving up cheap labor, slave labor if they could get it. Rich men who care only about themselves and their profits, who don't give a damn about the poor, even when those poor are their own workers.
Do you hate them? Have you done or are you doing or are you planning to do anything to stop them, to protect yourself and the rest of us, the non-rich majority, from their hypocrisy, their corruption, their savagery, their (wink, wink) "trickle-down" meanness? Are you helping to preserve the country and even the planet from their business-as-usual depredations? A majority of Americans has voted twice, more or less-voted against its own obvious and most fundamental interests -- to elect and re-elect their appallingly spoiled, shallow, immoral, undeserving stooges. And now, unbelievably, in the catastrophic ruins they have created, they are fielding another full slate of similar smiling-and-spinning stooges in a breathtakingly brazen attempt to try and keep their power undiminished, their greed unimpeded.
Are you for fairness? Decency? Justice? Accountability? Change? Renewal? Hope? Salvation?
You like your money, don't you? If you don't think life is fair, if you don't like the way America works, if you're looking for somebody to blame, well . . . you can just hate Paris.