Getting rich quick - and having much more money than you ever need - will look as pointless as taking bodybuilding too seriously, says Clive James. This is my last broadcast until my next spell and I'm in a summing up mood. I have no New Year resolutions apart from the usual one about tidying my office in case the body of my missing cleaner is lying mummified under that pile of magazines. But I do feel like making a New Year prediction. I want to put down a marker that proves I have a grip on world events. The best way to prove this is to make a prediction that everybody knows has already come true, but that few people are yet ready to admit. I hereby predict that from now on, starting today, nobody will look good who gets rich quick. I can predict more than that, in fact. Even getting rich slowly is going to look silly, if getting rich is the only aim in mind.
This is my last broadcast until my next spell and I'm in a summing up mood. I have no New Year resolutions apart from the usual one about tidying my office in case the body of my missing cleaner is lying mummified under that pile of magazines.
But I do feel like making a New Year prediction. I want to put down a marker that proves I have a grip on world events. The best way to prove this is to make a prediction that everybody knows has already come true, but that few people are yet ready to admit.
I hereby predict that from now on, starting today, nobody will look good who gets rich quick. I can predict more than that, in fact. Even getting rich slowly is going to look silly, if getting rich is the only aim in mind.
Maybe we shouldn't praise the getting rich quick, or even slowly, but i'm pretty sure it beats increasing impoverishment, which many face. keep to the Fen Causeway
If it were true that big money were to become only a nice by-product of otherwise satisfying activities, it would be quite a change; of course, it's still rather unlikely. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
and I seriously believe that most people are in such situations. We don't do work because we actually like what we do, we do it so's we can sod off after our contracted hours and try to squeeze in what little life we can afford.
so, I guess when I see some guy who's had a pretty good life and had the fortune to be very well paid for living it lecture me about the awfulness of getting a lot of money I tend to get a little chippy about it. Esepcially when I'm pretty much broke and getting a few ridiculous unearned megabucks seems pretty damn attractive. keep to the Fen Causeway
so, I guess when I see some guy who's had a pretty good life and had the fortune to be very well paid for living it lecture me about the awfulness of getting a lot of money I tend to get a little chippy about it. Esepcially when I'm pretty much broke and getting a few ridiculous unearned megabucks seems pretty damn attractive.
Hmmm... maybe this is the upper midle class finally realizing it's been had and wanting to bring down to size the upper class? In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
And if he isn't aware of this seeming hypocrisy, then he is as guilty of being insufferably smug as I suggest. keep to the Fen Causeway
Good lord - perish the thought.
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | A prediction that's a safe bet
It was agreed, back in the day, that serious artists should not look like hucksters. Now it is assumed that serious artists look even more serious if they do look like hucksters. They look bigger, more corporate, more influential. Or they did until yesterday. But now it's today, and it suddenly looks like a fast buck. It looks off. Madoff off. And it looks silly. We've reached a turning point. A madness has gone out of fashion: the madness of behaving as if only too much can be enough. There will always be another madness, but not that one. From now on a man will have to be as dumb as an petrodollar potentate to think that anyone will respect him for sitting on a gold toilet in a private jumbo jet.
It was agreed, back in the day, that serious artists should not look like hucksters. Now it is assumed that serious artists look even more serious if they do look like hucksters. They look bigger, more corporate, more influential. Or they did until yesterday. But now it's today, and it suddenly looks like a fast buck. It looks off. Madoff off. And it looks silly.
We've reached a turning point. A madness has gone out of fashion: the madness of behaving as if only too much can be enough. There will always be another madness, but not that one. From now on a man will have to be as dumb as an petrodollar potentate to think that anyone will respect him for sitting on a gold toilet in a private jumbo jet.
Maybe it will get somewhere, maybe not. What I don't understand is having resentment at the messenger.
So it galls for two reasons - one of which is that James himself is unlikely to be poor, and the second of which is that what he's saying isn't true.
Nothing corporate will change because of anything that either Stirling or James write or say. The corporate world will still be fuelled by greed, toxic stupidity, egotism, pointless drama and social climbing for the sake of it. It may stop being fashionable to flaunt wealth - if only for fear of being lynched - but that's hardly going to stop the rest of the world from continuing to try to accumulate it.
It's a wrong-headed view because you don't take a nipple like greed away from people without giving them something else to suck on. Currently there's no replacement - survival is still on the same Darwinian branch with the same value set. Instead of accumulating when you win, you don't lose your home or your life.
That may be evidence of a New Seriousness - which may even be Far More Serious than last year's Seriousness was.
But it's not much of a real change, and it's certainly not a progressive one.
Anyway, I'm hopeful about a general shift away from materialism in popular culture and Clive is doing his part in propagandising it, so bully for him.
