BEZOS/SANCHEZ AND THE REST OF US

Maybe you’re more high-minded than I am and averted your eyes from the copious coverage of the Bezos/Sanchez nuptials. I always dig a spectacle, as long as it’s not me making one of myself. And it’s not like I followed the minutiae of the extravaganza, like who wore whom. If someone asked me if I like Schiaparelli, I would probably answer, “As long as it’s cooked al dente.” The event was a paparazzi’s wet dream: all the Kartrashians were there in their grossly plastic splendor, along with Oprah, Tommy Hilfiger, Tommy Brady, Ivanka, Queen Raina of Jordan. There was enough silicone there to supply a semiconductor plant for a year and enough Botox to smooth over the Rocky Mountains…and I’m not just talking about the women. Smiling into the cameras were a lot of “Mar-a-Lago faces” with bee-stung upper lip, mannequin skin, chubby baby cheeks, overfilled-in brows, dainty tipped noses.

The total guest list was 200. Given the reports that the wedding cost $55 million (I remember a time when it would be gauche—French for low-class— to let everyone know what your wedding cost), that would come to $275,000 per guest.

But why begrudge a billionaire’s right to blow his money however he wants to? Perpetually sourpuss progs like Rosie O’Donnell and Charlize Theron relished the chance to display their impeccable good taste and outrage at income inequality, with Rosie spouting, "The Bezos wedding. It turned my stomach seeing all these billionaires gathering in the gross excess of it all, the show of it…,” and Charlize snarking, “But that’s OK because they suck and we’re cool.” Charlize is supposedly worth a measly $170 million and Rosie $70mm, so their outrage that some people are worth much, much more is surely genuine and justified.

But if Jeff wants to buy his bride a $2.5 million engagement ring, then go for it tech-bro. It is kinda of sweet how he hid it in a box under Laura’s pillow. Awww….You have to remember that Bezos spent 80% of his adult life as a scrawny, goofy-looking nerd with a bad cockeye, whose attire for decades consisted mostly of Docker’s chinos and pull over golf shirts. His cos-play fantasies about being Bruce Banner have finally come true.

The newly-weds concluded their three-day-long Venetian extravaganza with a celebration at the Arsenale, a former medieval naval shipyard turned into a luxury White Lotus-type honeymoon spot, transformed from martial to marital. Funny how those two words “martial” (relating to war) and “marital” (relating to marriage) so often get confused.

The super-wealthy showing off their newly-minted money has gotten fairly commonplace, but you would have to go a long ways back to find a similar efflorescence of excess that generated so much publicity and commentary. A good analogue might be corporate raider Saul Steinberg’s 50th birthday bash in 1989 that was thrown by his “ravishingly beautiful wife” Gayfryd. The gossip columnist Liz Smith described it thusly, “Steinberg was well known for his collection of old masters. So Gayfryd made the party tent into a seventeenth-century Flemish eating-drinking house. In ten vitrines were actors posing in re-creations of some of the world’s finest paintings. These included two by Vermeer—The Kitchen Maid and The Artist in His Studio. An actors’ agency provided people who could stand stock-still in costume for twenty minutes at a time…The Steinberg beach house overlooking the Atlantic rocked and rolled with hundreds of flickering terra-cotta pots, identical twins posing as mermaids in the pool, dancers in seventeenth-century garb, heralds, and banner wavers.” A lot of people were agog that Gayfryd spent over a million dollars on the party! For the Rosies and Charlizes of the day, there was no better sign of 80s decadence.

Saul famously said in a toast to his wife at the party, “Honey, if this moment were a stock, I’d short it.” He joked that his wife had done a lot for the economy and “anyone who is talking about recession—well, forget it!” Steinberg should have thought about shorting the stock market instead. From the date of his party in August, 1989 to October, 1990, the S&P went from 346 (no, I didn’t forget to add a couple of zeros) to 304, a 12% drop. By July, 1990 the economy had gone into a recession that was mild overall but devastating for certain industries like real estate, savings and loans, apparel. A few years later, Steinberg declared bankruptcy and had to sell his cherished art collection.

Does the Bezos/Sanchez wedding signal a similar market top, an economy at or near its peak? Is it emblematic of a zeitgeist that has gotten a little too giddy? The party-like-it's-1999 sentiment trickling from the tippy-top of the pyramid all the way down to the base? Mae West may have said that too much of a good thing is wonderful. But when it comes to prosperity, too much of a good thing sometimes foretells its own undoing. When people are too happy, they get careless, complacent. Kind of like a buck when he's rutting and is too much in priapic bliss to realize that a hunter a hundred yards away has him in his cross hairs.

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Facts that make you go, “hmmm…”

Fifteen years ago, Republicans represented 26 of the 100 lowest-income House districts, according to Census data. By 2023, they represented 56—more than half. At the same time, Democrats came to dominate the wealthiest House districts, representing 69 of the 100 where incomes are highest.

As The Wall Street Journal put it: “In other words, America’s two political parties have traded places economically. Where Americans once referred to upper-income ‘country club Republicans’ and blue-collar ‘lunchpail Democrats,’ they now see a working-class GOP and, in many ways, a professional class Democratic Party.”

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Deep thoughts by Bart Goodie

Strive to be the person your dog thinks you are.

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Happy July 4th to all. As I said in my July 4th post last year: “Next time some social justice warrior Prog starts ranting how America has been a horrible affliction on humankind, don’t just nod but dare to call it bullshit.”