04-03-2017, 05:45 PM
(03-14-2017, 01:33 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: You know what else is tacky? Envy.
Except for Donald Trump, the people that I have excoriated for bad taste are also horrible people by the standards of Donald Trump. Except for Goering, those rulers have bled their people and bought expensive schlock. Goering simply stole his; even if he got excellent stuff that belonged to Polish nobility or to the Rothschild banking family, he displayed it badly. They have impoverished the people that they ruled and terrorized. I have deliberately avoided discussing castles from antiquity that a long-standing royal family might have inherited from antiquity. If your family is the House of Orange or the Japanese imperial family, or would be Doge of Venice if there were still the aristocratic Republic of Venice, then you probably hold those ugly displays of come-from-nowhere tyrants or kleptocrats in contempt for their vulgarity for much the same reasons as I do.
Waste and excess are pitiable and contemptible. It is safe to assume that nobody gets rich by being Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I would not find 10 Downing intimidating. Margaret Thatcher, very much a middle-class person, would not find it too rich for her tastes. Neither would a union official who actually spent time in a mine or foundry and represents miners or foundry workers. That's one reason the British political system works. Note well that Goering, Marcos, Ceausescu, Yanukovych, and Satan Hussein all fell. Tito did live a long and charmed life... but his system did not long survive him. They all bought over-bloated Kitsch, and as someone else said, "it won't hold up well". Neither did the rulers.
Sure, we can all say how we would use the proceeds. I wouldn't buy stuff that says "I am on the same level as mobsters and tyrants". Of course I prefer 10 Downing Street to those ugly displays -- probably because I really know people who have spent much of their lives working in factories. If you are Labour PM you have no desire to intimidate people who really have been blue-collar workers much of their lives. If you are a Tory PM you have no desire to intimidate owners of small businesses who might be an important part of .the constituency.
Maybe it is a pointless exercise to say what one would do if one got fantastically rich without really trying. I'd invest most of it , which is the least harmful way of handling wealth possible. Plant and equipment create jobs. Maybe endowing a university (Vanderbilt, Stanford), libraries seemingly everywhere (Carnegie), or setting up a medical research facility (Howard Hughes) would be my style.
Maybe I read too much into Donald Trump for his vulgarity. Do I really know how Bill Gates or Warren Buffett live? Maybe not.
Does anybody want to see the digs of Emperor Bokassa?
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.