Thursday, December 15, 2011

Richistan

Robert Frank wrote a book a few years back that may or may not be relevant today. It's the book I wanted Willian T. Vollmann to write about the lives of Rich People. It's not as piercing as Vollmann because Frank is a proper journalist for the Wall Street Journal. In fact, the very title, "Richistan", is a tongue in cheek political delineation of a land where the extremely rich set lives. This is how to get books published. He asks the right questions and pulls few punches but it's a lot different to go to a Palm Beach diamond tiara ball and eat goose butt than to scamper down a flood plain in China to talk to the men living under the bridge. What would I know? I haven't done either. Vollmann's book "Poor People" is more my style, painful, desperate, longer than it has to be, equivocal.Stripper poles are apparently standard equipment on a 200 ft. yacht along with alligator lined toilet seats on private jets. Google owners bought a Boeing jumbo plane. But I'm divided on the unfairness. If you can drive a man off his land to later give him the opportunity to pick your grapes then maybe that's fair. IT happened and is ignored so maybe that's the way it goes.
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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.