[lit-ideas] Re: last honest reporter missing

>>why aren't you outraged that the people who messed up so seriously, the CEO's and hedge fund managers and others, are not only not being fired or sent to prison, but they're given the 700 billion to gamble away?
The spa trip of the bailed-out money crunchers bothered me. (Even Bush denounced it.) It's also easy to imagine all these "celebrity CEOs" and money mavens hanging from lamp posts in every town and village. In fact, the sudden rise of CEOs American style -- was it Lee Iaccoca who started it? -- always bothered me.
It offends me because it announces a de facto aristocracy in a country that had historically freed itself from the paradigm of inherited aristocracy in favor of what Jefferson dreamed of as "natural aristocracy."
Yeah lamp posts ... $3,000 dollar shoes swinging in the wind. Crows coming to peck cold eyes ... distended tongues flapping from expensive orthodontics. 

Then I stop.
I realize "the other side" (ha-ha!) is using that demotic sense of class envy to promote their own ascendancy to more and more power.
I realize that, as a hintergedanke, in the back of my mind, is envy. Just envy. The ugly face of envy. An imaginary envy too, envy foisted on me, since I never craved wealth or power in my own life. Have I ever wanted a job in management? No. Have I ever tried to become a captain of industry but was rebuffed? No. Have I pursued any of the things to which these executives have devoted their lives? No. Will their suffering improve the world? No. Do I want to spend whatever time remains of my life in pursuit of such goods? No.
So I take the crooked execs down from their lamp posts. Revive the lynched beau monde. Pull apart the barricades and quit the rampage. The status anxiety abates. 

We all get what we deserve in time, namely being ourselves.

Serving time,
Eric


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