Sorry. My Bad.

I worked a long time writing this morning, a clever piece, I thought, about our conflicted feelings about the rich and the position they hold.  Then I did something and the font went crazy so I tried to "undo" and lost a big chunk of the text.  I don't have the time now to go back and redo it, so you are stuck with this.  Sorry.  I'm more aggravated than you.  What can I say?  C'est la vie.



Narratives and counter-narratives surrounding the Occupy Movement abound.  Q just sent me a link to an article in Slate that talks about the banking industry's funding "'opposition research” on the Occupy movement in order to help construct 'negative narratives' about protesters and the politicians who support them."


Well. . . they have the money.  


Most of us, however, are not ideologues, so we are skeptical of both claims and counterclaims, thrust and parry.  What we do know and feel is that the very, very wealthy need to be checked.  They make their money off the backs of other people's labor or through corrupt financial laws that allow them to monopolize resources to cut down competition.  Still, we don't want to spend more money for products and continue to buy things made out of country where corporations can get things made at a fraction of the cost of manufacturing here.  We don't want to pay more for food or clothing or even luxury goods.  But we do want the price of our houses to rise again.  Even we like to feel smart when we've made "a good investment."  I've done it several times when the housing market was going up.  Genius that I am.  

I spent yesterday touring the tourist spots of Asheville.  First, the home in which Thomas Wolfe grew up.  It was a proletariat deal--one single dollar ($1)!  Thomas did not grow up in luxury.  The son of an alcoholic tombstone cutter and a severely miserly mother who had separate residences a few blocks apart for most of his life, he lived with his mother in her boarding house where up to thirty people stayed at a time.  Thomas was shuttled to whatever bed was empty at the time, and if all the beds were full, he was sent back to his father's house to sleep.  The cost of staying at the Old Kentucky Home (the name of the boarding house) was a dollar a night.  


Up the hill where I stayed at the Grove Park Inn, they charged five dollars.  The Grove Park Inn was built by Edwin Grove, a chemist who discovered a way to suspend quinine powder in a "tasty syrup."  Known as "Grove's Chill Tonic," it helped quell the symptoms of malaria.  It was purchased by every major army in the world.  Grove was rich.  In 1912, he began construction of the hotel and put his son-in-law, Fred Seely, in charge.  The two had a falling out, though, during the construction because Seely wanted to pay his top masons more than Grove intended.  At a dollar a day, they were considered "highly paid."  All the rock was carved out of the surrounding mountains, all the timber cut from nearby forests, and in less than a year, the hotel was complete.  During the early years, you could stay at the hotel by invitation only.  Grove entertained the world's most famous and powerful people.  


And there I was, living half the week in the belly of the beast, a bourgeoisie enjoying himself at the expense of others, drinking at the bar in the big lobby with hillbillies and shit-kickers who somehow had stolen enough money for themselves to bring their wives and lovers for a romantic weekend of relaxation and luxury.  

After the tour of the Wolfe house, I drove to see Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate, the largest private residence ever built in the United States.  With 250 rooms and 135,000 square feet with miles and miles of landscaped ponds and forests and fields, it stands the penultimate monumnet to unregulated wealth and gilded greed. And with one million visitors a year, it is North Carolina's main tourist attraction.  


Count me one.  


I had only a couple hours before I needed to get to the airport, so the $59.00 entrance fee seemed like more of the rich stealing from the poor, but hell, money must be paid, so I put up my card (easier than watching the cash leave my trembling palm) and took the ride.  


It was a house.  Room after decorated room.  There were medieval tapestries and oil paintings and chess sets that had belonged to Napoleon.  There was a basement with a heated swimming pool and changing rooms and a gymnasium with a rowing machine and Indian dumbbells, medicine balls and weighted pulley machines.  My favorite part was the servants working rooms and quarters.  All was nicely appointed with airy rooms for one.  There were laundries with washing and drying machines and huge indoor hanging racks.  There were refrigerated rooms (some of the first) and pantries and butcher shops and flower shops and cheese rooms and fruit rooms.  I imagined myself working there, stealing from the larder until I got caught, sneaking into some pretty servant's room besides.  Really, for me it was the best part.  


So what can I say.  I was no different than the hundreds of other people who walked along the cordoned path with me imagining what all of this would be like, not wishing to be that asshole Vanderbilt but not minding at all to be one of his children living like this.