Any Port in a Storm?

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I can't help but inwardly smile - make that overtly grin - with schadenfreude for the current (albeit trivial) woes of the super yacht scene, caused in no small part by the sanctions being imposed on the admittedly relatively few Russian oligarch-owned vessels that have either already been impounded, or which are currently flitting from safe harbour to safe harbour to avoid being impounded. All I can say is that it's your beloved free market kicking in, people...

Just caught a recent (by now rather out of date) programme about super yachts and their owners/brokers/charter clients, and it's like looking down a wormhole into the nineteenth century world of the country house, only with even more vulgarity, and frankly, even more money. The world of the ultrarich now mirrors the largely faded world of the landed families that once ruled the British Isles.

Even the 'great' families of these lands had to eventually admit that their resources were limited and had to marry into new money in order to maintain their lifestyles. My grandfather was in service as an under-butler in a country house as a young man in the dying embers of the era of inherited wealth, and all I see on this programme is a re-run of this for the twenty-first century: poorer people in service to keep rich people insulated from the real world in a bubble of their own creation, expecting perfection in all things, all the time.

It must be a disappointment to ultimately realize that perfection is unattainable and that its very pursuit is self-delusion: the false elevation of the trivial through the offices of unlimited cash/debt resources that would be better more equitably distributed  throughout human society, rather than squandered on the naff and irrelevant whims of those too wealthy to value anything greatly. The human race really does have skewed priorities if it considers the lifestyles of the mega-rich to have any real value for it.

Comments

  1. Anonymous2 May 2022 at 09:31

    Kel,

    Read a piece in, I think, The Guardian recently quoting a report by Oxfam that says the 85 richest people in the World have more money than the poorest half of the World combined. So - a double decker bus could comfortably transport those owning half of the total wealth of the entire World.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. sideways2 May 2022 at 13:13

      Regrettably true, and the disparity worsens daily...

      Delete

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