CAMPOS: Gatsby would understand

By Paul Campos, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

I've come to this sybaritic playpen of the rich and semi-famous for the annual Ideas Festival, put on by the Aspen Institute. The idea I'm having at the moment is that I would like to ride in Mr. and Mrs. Fiji Water's swan boat.

The Fijis, who I'm given to understand made their fortune by selling water in plastic bottles featuring a colorful label referencing a Pacific island, are hosting a party for the festival's participants at their ski chalet.

Among other things the grounds include a pond (trending toward a lake), complete with its own dock. A paddle boat in the shape of a swan is tied to the dock.

The chalet is full of people you can vaguely recall having seen on TV, along with an Indian swami or two, whose flowing robes add just the right touch of Third World exotica to the proceedings.

I think, inevitably, of The Great Gatsby, and in particular that passage in which the author recites a Homeric list of fictional celebrities and socialites who attend Gatsby's parties: "Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S.W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square."

After going on like that for a couple of pages, the narrator ends the passage with a terse epigram: "All these people came to Gatsby's house in the summer."

After a couple of glasses of champagne I find myself jostling with Thomas Friedman (of the New York Friedmans) for the last prawn at the end of a splendid buffet table. I ask him if he wants to help me paddle the swan boat, and he declines politely.

I then ask him if he's ever noticed that one of the other guests - another rich and semi-famous "media personality" - has an accent exactly like that employed by Eva Gabor on Green Acres. He retreats in horror.

The following idea then occurs to me: A man who makes $5 million a year can no more question the fundamental structure of the society which pays him that salary than he can long jump the English Channel.

Things like the Aspen Ideas Festival perform many useful and edifying functions. For example, the next morning I'll have the opportunity to point out that the panel I'm on, which is supposed to discuss "solutions" to the "obesity crisis," has been organized around a false premise (that there's an obesity crisis requiring solutions).

But on this star-spangled evening I'm struck by how these kinds of events play a role in creating a sense among the elites that, in the end, they really should be running things, and that, moreover, things ought to stay largely as they are - subject, naturally, to various marginal tweaks and reforms that above all must not and will not alter the social and economic relations that have brought us together on this lovely summer night.

Suddenly the whole thing - the swan boat and the prawns and the champagne and the ridge full of $50 million houses that are occupied for 20 days a year, and which loom directly above the conference center where tomorrow we're going to be talking about why the poor eat too much cake - feels very much like France in 1785.

That, of course, is absurd. I'm well aware that everything is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. After all, I'm at this party.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado. He can be reached at paul.campos@colorado.edu.

• July 9, 2008

  3:28 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  arby writes:

  Mr. Campos
  Too good. You nailed it. I assume you know the rest of the refrain from Kris Kristofferson

  "I was walking through the summer rain trying to kill that old familiar pain running through my tangled brain when I tipped my bottle back and ran into a cop I didn't see"

• July 9, 2008

  6:25 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  ItsJustme writes:

  PC, your behaviour was boorish. And your column today is boring.

• July 9, 2008

  6:48 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  taoistblockhead writes:

  “How The Rich Are Destroying the Earth” (Herve Kempf, Forward by Greg Palast) is a new book available in September. Bringing to bear more than twenty years of experience as an environmental journalist, Kempf describes the invincibility that many of the world’s wealthy feel in the face of global warming, and how their unchecked privilege is thwarting action on the single most vexing problem facing our world.

  In this important primer on the link between global ecology and the global economy, Kempf makes the following observations: First, that the planet’s ecological situation is growing ever worse, despite the efforts of millions of engaged citizens around the world. And second, despite environmentalists’ emphasis that "we’re all in the same boat," the world’s economic elites—who continue to benefit by plundering the environment—have access to "lifeboats" that insulate them from the resulting catastrophes.

  Societies have not been able to effectively combat the expanding ecological crisis because it is intimately linked to the social crisis in which the ruling form of capitalism has been organized to impede democratic initiatives. This link explains the failure to make progress against the greatest emergency of our time, because in this relationship the oligarchy plays an essential and destructive role. For this reason, solving the ecological crisis depends on disrupting the power of the world’s elite.

  We cannot understand the entwined ecological and social crises, Kempf argues, if we don’t see them as the two sides of the same disaster—a disaster that comes from a system piloted by a dominant social strata that has no drive other than greed, no ideal other than conservatism, no dream other than technology. But Kempf also calls for measured optimism: "Despite the scale of the challenges that await us, solutions are emerging and—faced with the sinister prospects the oligarchs promote—the desire to remake the world is being reborn."

• July 9, 2008

  7:33 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  VVVV writes:

  Taoist - It is not a tragedy that due process is in place to prevent a majority from imposing it's tyrannical opinions onto a barraged minority (that also happens to have scientific fact on its side). However, it is ironic that you argue against balance while calling yourself a taoist.

  The example Taoist gave is perfect proof showing that the elites may have all the money, but they don't have any of the control. The environazis are seeing one success after another, and have nothing more to complain about than "it isn't happening fast enough". Guess what? There are people getting rich off of the green tide, and they will be at those parties soon enough, if they weren't already. Where there is money changing hands there is profit, and there is no line, imaginary or otherwise, between "us" and "them".

• July 9, 2008

  8:50 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  irisman writes:

  If Campos was hanging out with people who were only making $5 million per year, he must have been in the cheap seats. The folks who own those big mansions are making a lot more than that.

• July 9, 2008

  11:32 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  peterpi writes:

  Ironman, he was talking to a columnist. Newspaper folk are in the servant class.
  Leave it to Sasquatch to completely miss Campos' point and emphasize it in the process. Limbaugh is the epitome of a media personality (the word I'd like to use would be caught by the computer nanny, but begins with "w" and rhymes with "shore") who absolutely is committed to maintaining the status quo at all costs to benefit himself and his pals.

• July 9, 2008

  2 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  Konyok writes:

  Actually, I've got to give the good professor credit for writing something interesting. His 1789 reference is a bit dissonant, if I understand him correctly. That the poor eat too much cake is just what bothers our betters - the "obesity epidemic" is a lower class phenomenon.
  In our modern information age, the kind of good old fashioned exploitation of the poor by the rich that produces the kind of starvation that sparks revolution has been replaced by a curious form of postmodern paternalism. They will save the planet and save us from ourselves, all of these Ford Foundations and Thomas Friedmans.

• July 9, 2008

  2:41 p.m.

  Suggest removal

  Konyok writes:

  Taoist,

  So, capitalism thwarts the democratic initiatives that would end the ecological crisis. I'm sorry, those are just words strung together that require the reader to squint and contort to make any sense of.

  Democracy is the will of the people. The people around the world want to eat cake. Too much consumption of cake is causing an ecological crisis. Oligarchy is preventing the people from curtailing their desire for cake? No, I don't think so.

  As described by Campos, the oligarchy is hellbent on "raising the consciousness" of the people, hoping to convince them that they don't like cake after all.

  This is positively Orwellian.

• July 10, 2008

  11:04 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  RS writes:

  No obesity crisis? Apparently Campos is not aware of the throngs of fat women begging for attention across dating websites and on Craigslist! There is an obesity crisis, but natural selection may snuff it out - though the effects of Viagra and other such "stimulants" may delay the Darwin effect.

• July 16, 2008

  11:42 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  coloradovet writes:

  We live in an economy dominated by corporate greed, which is driven by the price of stock. In the food industry, the best way to maximize profits, and drive the stocks up, is to serve up fat thru the drive-thru. Although the rich eat wherever they want, and can therefore make healthy choices, people eating on the economy face mostly unhealthy choices for food, which is part of the obesity crisis.

• July 16, 2008

  11:48 a.m.

  Suggest removal

  coloradovet writes:

  Fiji Water has been criticized for the environmental costs embedded in each bottle. The production plant runs on diesel fuel, 24 hours a day[3]. The high-grade plastic used to make the bottles is transported from China to Fiji, and then (full of water) to the United States. A 1 liter bottle of Fiji Water contaminates 6.74 liters of water to stretch-blow mold the plastic, burns fossil fuel to transport plastics from China and full bottles to the U.S., and produces 0.25 kg of greenhouse emissions[4].