Are You A Member of the Poorgeoisie?

According to the article, they drive hybrids, have creative jobs and grow their own vegetables.

They were the Google guys, or Richard Branson or the art-buying hedge-fund managers in Greenwich, Conn.

We love the rich. They supply one of life's necessities, gossip. They shock & shake our moral fibre. They ease our constraints and prove we are possible rakes and courtesans if we could but afford it. They give fashion the illusion it is not a bewitching, mindless hoax. Above all, the rich have the one lure that holds us spellbound. They are celebrities. Drawing to them like a magnet other world celebrities, the rich and their private golf courses, inside loot-heavy drawing rooms and on princely yachts become the sun surrounded by a shining galaxy.


The European rich know better than Americans that their role is to be rich and nothing else. They make a diamond-studded mousetrap, and the world beats a pathway to their door. It was an old enduring principle. The swagger of Europe meant Edwardian rich who gorged, gambled, flaunted jeweled mistresses, kept racing stables, drank champagne from slippers and rode into gilded ballromms on white horses. Their lives were a smash extranvaganza, a harlequinade with royalty and grand dukes as the chorus and Newport, Paris, Monte Carlo and Marienbad as sumptuous backdrops.

For our own sakes, for the cream in our coffee, the hashish for our dreams, the rich must be box office again with long queues at the ticket counter.

The American rich are a problem. They take themselves seriously. They want to be Method actors...all beer and boiled potatoes. Hounded by tax collectors, cowed by puritanical killjoys and the sobbing climate of the times, the American rich surrender their loot to museums, dole out riches to foundations and play footsie with the arts. It is a dreary capitulation. They are chameleons turned grey.

Their awareness of the fine arts is vague, secondhand if not nil. They are not Borgias, they are not Diaghilev. They are not even Oscar Wilde. How can they be? They are like stars miscast in black and white documentary films on ecology when they should be playing The Merry Widow in Panavision. If this misguided effort to dull down their glitter continues, the American rich will end up as national monuments like the Grand Canyon and Yosemite.