When the Rich, in the Age of Trump, Forfeited All Respect

From the ethics of “noblesse oblige” to the rabid morals of men like Trump, Don Rudy Giuliani and Bernie Madoff

By

David Gottfried

  

At the beginning of the 20th century, fierce Marxists and anarchists wanted to pummel and pound the monied class into submission.  However, many poor people found revolutionary polemics repulsive.  In large measure. this is because the rich and ruling classes commanded enormous respect.

They commanded reverence and submission even though the chasm between the rich and the poor, in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, was epic and astounding: A) people in the East End of London were markedly shorter than people in other parts of London because the poor simply starved; B) the workhouses gave the poor a diet of cheap starches and water, or essentially the bread and water we think was only reserved for convicted felons;  C) In 1776 (admittedly well before the Victorian age), the same year that Adam Smith sang the praises of capitalism in  “The Wealth of Nations,” a doctor noted a rash of cases of scrotal cancer, in London, in young boys who were chimney sweeps and compelled to crawl through chimneys (while naked because clothes made it harder to squeeze through), and the constant exposure to huge amounts of soot was carcinogenic (footnote 1); D) In 1911, well over one hundred teenage girls were incinerated, or jumped from a factory’s inferno to the street, because their boss, the Triangle Shirtwaist company in New York City, locked them in their factory, and prevented them from leaving, for fear that a girl might steal some fabric. 

Nevertheless, for some reason the rich enjoyed a deep reservoir of respect.

I got an inkling of the origins of this respect when I heard Bertrand Russel discuss his youth.  Russel was born in the 1870’s or 1880’s.  His Grandfather knew Napolean and was the Prime Minister of Great Britain in the 1830’s, when England enacted its “reform laws.” (The British reform laws of 1832 were like almost everything in reform politics: An obfuscating misnomer; they made life better for industrialists and cursed the peons who worked for the new tycoons.)  In any event, through youtube you can hear interviews the BBC conducted with Russel in the 1940’s and 1950’s and be transported to the 18th and 19th centuries. 

Russel said that his grandmother would not sit in a chair, that had armrests, before the evening had arrived because such a comfort would be too sinful and downright decadent. Although Russel’s grandparents were exceedingly rich, the food they ate was spartan and austere and the only seasonings they consumed were salt and pepper.  The rich often did not enjoy their wealth.   Their stern sense of Protestant propriety made the English and American ruling classes lead lives circumscribed by inhibition, self-denial and guilt.

In World War One, British soldiers from the upper class were more likely to die than soldiers from poorer classes, presumably because their sense of obligation and duty was more pronounced.     In the “Best and the Brightest,” David Halberstam relates that Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles (John was secretary of state under Eisenhower; Allen was Director of the CIA) went to prep schools where the boys were awaken at 6 AM, rushed into the courtyard without any breakfast, and made to perform mental arithmetic in front of their fellow students. 

When the curve ball was introduced in baseball, the Dean of Harvard was aghast.   The curve ball, he opined, was fraught with sneakiness and deception; such a snaking, serpent of a pitch recalled the infamy of the Garden of Eden, and the good men of Harvard sought to banish it from their verdant playing fields. 

Some of this continued into the middle of the Twentieth Century.  In the early 1960’s, about ten percent of the graduating class of Harvard College went not to graduate school, not to Sheister Street (sorry, I meant to say Wall Street) but straight into the United States Military.  For those readers who doubt the ethics of enlisting in the United States’ armed forces, I would remind my readers that many young people joined the Peace Corp or the Civil Rights Movement. 

By contrast, today’s elites never volunteer for anything and never, ever shoulder a burden.  Join the military.  Fuggedaboutit.   Rich Americans have adopted the ethics of Don Corleone and Donald Trump.   Christians who once believed in Jesus believe in plush, deluxe vacations on Christmas.  (I first got an inkling of this when I saw “Ordinary People,” in which Mary Tyler Moore’s character views Christmas as a time to vacation in London.) 

Donald Trump sounded like many pigs in our poshest suburbs when he said that military service was for lowly losers. These rich pigs don’t give  a rat’s ass about poverty, hunger, discrimination.   You name it, their response is, “I couldn’t care less.”  After all, don’t you remember that sickening jacket or blouse Melania wore, in 2017, when she visited the Southern Border.   Clearly inscribed on the garment were the words, “I couldn’t care less.” 

Today, the rich are free of morals.  Although we have no communist government which has condemned religion, we do have exceptional wealth and that is conducive to the violation of all moral standards.  Marxists have often noted the correlation between wealth and the sort of preening pride that casts off moral restraint, and Religion has condemned the very same thing that Marxists deplored.  I refer you to the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament.  Supposedly, people were building a Tower that would reach Heaven.  G-d found their aspiration arrogant.   G-d stymied their construction project by creating the many different languages of the world.  Suddenly, workers who had once understood everybody else found speech incomprehensible.  

I suppose some people who went college to learn a few big words and an even smaller number of tiny ideas will say that the Tower of Babel is irrelevant because episodes in the bible are myths.   But they miss the point entirely:  These Bible “stories” illustrate conflicts that people experience, and the Tower of Babel demonstrates that great accomplishments are conducive to a concomitant  measure of arrogance and that arrogance can morph into wickedness. 

(I suppose someone is going to attack me for using the word wickedness just as they attacked George Bush for using the word evil.  George Bush had many faults, but not excluding evocative words like evil from his vocabulary was not one of them.  Sometimes, the mealy-mouthed speech of compromise and discretion is nothing but the death rattle of a man or a civilization dying from impotence.  Some things are evil.  Call them evil.)               

In any event, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average soars ever higher, it is a sort of modern analog to the Biblical Tower of Babel -- and periodically it is driven down into the dust whence it came.

However, our stock market crashes never seem to pack the punch that 1929 had.  Nowadays, the market, over the long haul, has only gone in one direction and a class of investors have become as stinking and as fetid with undeserved wealth as only a massive carcinoma on the conscience of this country might be.   Their wealth has become so majestic and malevolent that it stinks more than all the industrial toxic dumps of the NorthEast and the Rust belt taken to the tenth power of moral degradation.  

If they are Jewish, their Bar Bitzvahs are dedicated to themes which are culled from popular culture and might entail the sport of tennis or some tacky situation comedy.  [Of course, the Bar Bitzvah boy does not waste any time speculating on what his Haftorah (a segment of the prophets that the Bar Mitzvah boy reads) means in English].  If they are Catholic, I suppose they make a trek to Rome where they say they hope to see the Pope, but they are soon content to stuff their faces with a huge Italian meal at a restaurant in Italy whose Italian food is no better than the stuff served in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.    

And if they are Jewish and Italian and live in Long Island, New York, a sea of suburbs so vulgar and vice-ridden that one of its towns in named Babylon (For decades, your author has wanted to deface the signs on the Southern State Parkway by writing “Whore of” before the word “Babylon”), as if it wants to recreate all the pagan perversities of the ancient Levant, they have devolved into spoiled shits like Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafucco, a crazed couple responsible for killing Joey’s wife so they could ride off into the scabrous sunset of their filthy dreams.

Footnotes:

1) Of course, the ordeal of chimney sweeps was prettified for Hollywood, and Americans and Brits were led to believe that chimney sweeps were happy go lucky guys after seeing the movie “Mary Poppins” in which Dick Van Dyke plays the part of an amusing chimney sweep and beau to Julie Andrews.