You know, we are trained not to be sorry for the rich, but I confess to yielding to that weakness where it's the very rich who are ridiculed. The term "billionaire" is -- check this out -- almost always used derisively, or condescendingly. I haven't counted how many billionaires there are, but you don't need the answer to that to know that they arouse a special kind of killer-envy. The Web gives you a (farcical) site for "Who Wants to Be a Billionaire" and the entry page gives five headings. "The Stats" is a philosophical introduction to the whole question: "Did you know that 90 percent of American wealth is controlled by ONE PERCENT of the population? Are these people smarter than you? Are they more creative? No? Then who allows these people to retain their wealth?" Elucidating on this, item four ("The Target"), reads, "Wealth is neither created nor destroyed -- it merely changes hands. Which billionaire will be our first target?" Why not the man who invented penicillin?
You don't have to sound like a Marxist to stick it up their behind, and this is nicely exemplified in the jocose mode in the current Slate magazine. The headline is, "The joy of watching billionaires lose the America's Cup."
The spirit of this account of the racing classic may be that of Madame Defarge, the lady who sat knitting with ecstatic pleasure at execution square in 1793 in Paris, watching the guillotine come down, but the language is jocose. Caution! Derision is deadlier than denunciation. If Lenin had had that skill, he could have made headway without having to kill so many people.
The story on the America's Cup begins by telling us that "At least three of the world's richest men are about to be publicly humiliated in the waters off Auckland. Such a delightful spectacle should not pass unnoticed." Every billionaire's death exalteth me.
"For the hoi polloi, the perennial appeal of this periodic regatta is that it attracts egomaniacs who spend freely and then lose badly." Yes, once in a blue moon you get a rich egomaniac who actually demonstrates his own skill. But "most seagoing plutocrats serve mainly as ballast when they're not writing checks."
The author goes on to describe the principal players this time around. The Seattle team, the OneWorld team, "is backed by not one but two billionaires, cell-phone impresario Craig McCaw and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen."