Cardinal Richelieu's Six Lines

The remark that "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him" is commonly attributed to Cardinal Richelieu. The historical evidence for the attribution may not be as shaky as that for Lenin's alleged remark about "useful idiots," but it is very weak.

For my part the remark interests me far less as testimony to Richelieu's having been Machiavellian in outlook than its truthfulness. Those with a mind to find excuses to destroy someone can and do find it in anything they do--as we are ceaselessly reminded in the age of "cancel culture."

George Monbiot's Ounces of Hope and Tons of Despair Today

About a decade ago George Monbiot published a piece titled "An Ounce of Hope is Worth a Ton of Despair," in which, reflecting "on the past few decades of environmental campaigning" (his own included) it seemed to him that had environmentalists "set out to alienate and antagonise the people we've been trying to reach, we could scarcely have done it better." What specifically concerned him was the multitude of mistakes that the environmentalist movement had made--from accommodating itself to neoliberalism in ways large and small (looking for "common ground" with their opponents, etc.), to stressing fear and despair in a way actually encouraging the "extrinsic" value system reinforcing opposition to environmentalism, to its failure to connect protection of the environment with any vision of a "better world."

Mr. Monbiot strikes me as having been right on every score here. But unfortunately his message has been little heeded--all as, of course, those most hostile to policies which would protect the environment make the most of those failings. The result is that not only does the decade 2014-2024 have very little to show for it from the standpoint of working toward "sustainability" in a broad way, or even redress of specific problems of this kind (like climate change), but on top of added damage and lost opportunity the political context has grown less promising from the standpoint of such action, the anti-environmentalist right made gains that seemed scarcely imaginable to many a decade ago, while deepening economic crisis, pandemic, the unraveling of the global economy in the most illiberal fashion imaginable, and the resurgence of great power conflict have increased the number of demands on the time and attention of even the alert and well-intentioned--all as environmentalists and the broadly progressive go on making the same mistakes. The result is that the piece seems to me just as relevant today as it was a decade ago--and attention to its insights the more urgent.

Watching Just Because Other People Are

One of the absurdities of contemporary pop culture is just how much time and money people spend consuming stuff they don't like. In contrast with those who, for example, find their food choices limited by their financial means, health needs or personal values, and so eat what they do not like because they must eat to live, in spite of no comparable compulsion people "hate watch." Or they watch because their partner wants to watch and does not want to watch alone (even though it's just TV and not the movies). Or because they want to be "part of a conversation," even though they have no material incentive whatsoever to bother, not being journalists or scholars with an intellectual interest in the matter, or professional critics paid to do so.

Personally I find life too short for such stupidities.

Doomist Proclamations and the Silence About Geoengineering

Imagine for a moment a scenario in which we were told that it is as certain as it is possible for anything to be certain that a massive asteroid is headed straight for Earth and that its impact will destroy civilization, and perhaps humanity itself.

Imagine that there was a suggestion of launching a space mission to divert that asteroid and thus save Earth.

Imagine that opponents of that mission pointed out that the mission could fail altogether to divert the asteroid, or perhaps causing a piece of the asteroid to break off and possibly do damage to the Earth even as the bulk of it is diverted--and then everyone said "All right, because of the risks involved in attempting to deflect certain doom for everyone and everything let's rule the idea of a space mission out of discussion altogether, permanently."

This can seem to be the stance of climate doomists regarding geoengineering. They are certain that absolute catastrophe in the near-term is locked in, and yet absolutely opposed to even discussing any action that might buy time because it is "too risky."

I cannot take such an intellectual position seriously. If the situation really is "that bad"--if the apocalypse is at hand--then one expects that, unpleasant as the risks may be, one is willing to bear some risk of unfortunate side effects to head off certain disaster. Alas, that assumes an interest in actually resolving the problem--which, it seems, is quite an uncertain proposition where they are concerned.

Doomists and Consumer-Bashers are the Useful Idiots of Anti-Environmentalism

What passes for a discourse about the world's environmental problems is notoriously pervaded by "doomism," and attacks on consumers. As the miserable failure of the environmental movement to realize its objectives has demonstrated, this has not been a terribly useful approach--but we are saturated in it anyway. The plain and simple reason is that this is because it is not a terribly useful approach. Knowing that doomism and consumer-bashing induce apathy, denial and hostility to environmentalism the mainstream media, which has not been on the side of redress of environmental problems (their "both sidesism" bespeaks not ignorance or clumsiness, but deference to the same interests to which they have always been deferential), is ever happy to give them a very considerable platform, precisely because these "inactivists," when not deliberately fraudulent, have been the "useful idiots" of opponents of such action (to the point of that long and increasingly worthless rag The New Yorker giving Jonathan Franzen a high-profile platform upon which to display the ignorance and superficiality which make him such a darling of the ignorant and superficial tastemakers of the literary scene).

The wonder of the situation is that many ostensibly progressive political media outlets give doomists and consumer-bashers so much time and space on their platforms. The answer, I suppose, is that they fail to recognize the perniciousness of their standpoint, confused as they are like a great many others about how the world actually works amid a colossal collective breakdown of the ability to think.

Who Was Thomas Malthus? And Who Are the Standard-Bearers for his Ideas Today?

Thomas Malthus, of course, was an English clergyman remembered today principally for his work in economics--which few seem to understand, in spite of his explicitness about his concerns (I suspect, because few bother to actually read him). Simply put, he was a champion of the landowners who was eager to crush any hope of the existence of a fairer and freer society and justify callousness toward the poor--and the intellectual tradition which followed from his work is inseparable from that view. Naturally it has historically been the right which has cited Malthus, while progressives spurned his views. However, in an age in which the right has identified itself with the defense of capitalism above all, and environmental crisis has called into question the reconcilability of the freedoms of business with ecological sustainability, the right has distanced itself from Malthus, favoring Cornucopianism instead, while ostensible progressives embrace the Malthusian perspective--all of it, whether explicitly or implicitly, consciously or unconsciously.

One may see in that yet another example of the extreme muddle into which the late twentieth century plunged what passes for political thought.

The "Self-Help System" in International Relations, and Self-Help Culture

Those who study International Relations theory are certain to learn of "realist" theory, and to encounter characterization of the international system in that theory as "a self-help system."

By this they do not mean that the international system is about the kind of "self-realization" that Oprah Winfrey used to promote, but that in the absence of any authority over the international system really capable of making its writ good the states comprising the system have no one to rely on but themselves in providing for their own security, sovereignty, survival--the system a "self-help system" in the sense that in the end only your "self" will help you.

It is a bleak, brutal vision of the world that may seem at odds with the "optimistic" tenor of much self-help culture, but I would argue that they are not really so far apart as they may seem. After all, what do those who look to self-help want? They want to make their lives better, or at least less bad, in some way--and, while setting aside the extreme limitations of the essentially individualistic approach (there is such a thing as society, and most of what will improve or worsen individual lives is far beyond individual control), what they would ideally want is a sympathetic ear, a good listener, a wise friend who will let them express a concern, and then if there is hope that anything that might be doable, help by talking the issue through so that they can make up their own mind about what to do in their own particular situation.

Alas, sympathetic ears, good listeners, wise friends seem to me rare treasures in this world, unavailable to many. And so they pay their $29.99 for what is almost always the platitudinous one-size-fits-all claptrap of a self-satisfied huckster--with, making matters worse, said huckster's guise a Strict Father figure who thinks the obvious and conventional thing beloved of the "apologists and admirers of injustice, misery and brutality" is always the one and only right thing to do and that people only need a Red Forman threatening them with "foots in asses" to make them shut up and get down to doing it.

Of Linda Evangelista, Gwyneth Paltrow and the Neoliberal Age

The story goes that the beginning of the end for the supermodel was Linda Evangelista's much-cited quip about not getting "out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars a day," and this remark, which could so easily have been taken as a bit of self-mockery (I personally think this was how it was meant), instead drawing forth a backlash against the extremely high public profile of the elite of the modeling world.

I have never found this version of events persuasive, but it may say something that so many people think it is--especially as we hear far, far more snobbish utterances all the time without there being any such consequences, not only when they come from, for instance, the elite whose doings make up so much of the "business" news, but even from celebrities much more easily comparable with Linda Evangelista, like Gwyneth Paltrow, whose speaking anything not written for her by a screenwriter seems an unceasing stream of far worse snobberies leaving far less room to take them as jest (e.g. "I am who I am. I can't pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year" variety), as indeed she often doubles down on the ways she offended people before (as seen in the appalling "Gwyneth Paltrow Accepts Your Apology" cover of the issue Town & Country that hit the magazine racks in May 2020 amid the pandemic's socially fraught early days, which seems to have attracted no comment whatsoever).

Granted, some will point to a less forgiving attitude on the part of the press toward models than toward "Oscar-winning" actresses who also become "entrepreneurs" and "businesswomen" trafficking not in anything so "frivolous" as beauty but in "wellness." There is also the way an ever more pervasive and aggressive identity politics plays into the media's responses, with such figures' supporters ever ready to react against anyone who criticizes anything a public figure does with a ferocious counterattack charging them with double standards, prejudice, bigotry against whatever demographic categor[ies] they are identified with (at once changing the subject and muddying the issue, usually very sanctimoniously and also usually very effectively). However, the more fundamental thing may be just how much more brazen the ultra-privileged have become about displaying their inegalitarianism in the last quarter of a century, and how very accommodating and defensive of that sentiment the operatives of that media have been, ever ready to not just excuse but exalt elite stupidity, self-satisfaction and disdain for the plebs and their feelings and opinions as they cheer for every punch they throw downward--and in the process unfailingly remind us that if some present the generality of "journalists" as tribunes of the people they are in reality courtiers who strive to be more royalist than the king.

The Supermodel's Moment: The Fashion World's Prominence in the 1990s

I suppose that spending as much time considering the '90s as I have it may be inevitable that I have come around to saying something of the place of the fashion world in that decade. After all, the public's interest in the broader world of haute couture would seem to have attained a peak of interest then, certainly to go by how it seemed to be everywhere in those years in which New Hollywood star Robert Altman directed Ready to Wear, and the original House of Style was on MTV, and the Buti brothers were opening their Fashion Cafes in major world cities, and FashionTV came to your cable package, among much, much else.

Was the prominence of the fashion world at this time pure coincidence? That seems to me very unlikely. After all, this same moment when the fashion world rode so high in the public consciousness was a moment in which modern life had become hyper-mediated, and media "high concept," combining electric imagery with a touch of high art, and the public, amid a rebirth of the visibility of and popular fascination with a kind of plutocratic luxury unseen in a half century or more, the more alluring for marrying the elegance of an earlier era (sartorially as in other ways) with a later jet-setting mobility and freedom and sexiness. Thus as some people gabbled about "heroin chic" an April 1995 TIME cover featuring Claudia Schiffer in Versace remarked of the couture "Simply Beautiful: Fashion Returns to the Classics"--and that was what really made the public pay attention. It mattered greatly, too, that the makers of conventional wisdom called on the broad public to aspire to the goods and the world and the fantasy with which they were associated in that "You can do it too!" way (likely the more effectually in as, not at all coincidentally, market populism was then at its height).

At the same time that uppermost tier of fashion brands were just beginning to really penetrate the awareness of a global public such as had never existed before--with the names of those brands helped by the names, and images, of the supermodels who served as their "ambassadors" to a wider world. (Certainly models like Claudia had a great many admirers who cared absolutely nothing for fashion as such--but came to know names like Versace nonetheless because of them.)

However, that hyper-mediated world just went on becoming more so, until it undeniably fragmented--people less and less looking at the same direction at the same time, though that is far from being the whole story. After all, the high concept aesthetic that was such a fit with the glamour ran its course--producing visual styles like the mannered and oblique commercials for perfumes that not only lost their effect as they grew overfamiliar, but in their apparent pretentiousness became the subject of endless parody (Calvin Klein a particularly notorious case), and the Mad Men looked to other, fresher, strategies (just as, in a different corner of the pop cultural world, they also did with the "extreme" marketing aesthetic).

It seems to me, too, that the images of luxury themselves likewise lost their impact as a result of their familiarity, while the trajectory of economic life--the growing gap between rich and poor, the tougher times people had at the bottom even as the haves had more and more--meant that the world to which that luxury belonged seemed ever more out of reach for ever more people, and the "aspirationalism" and the fantasy palled accordingly, even come to seem an insulting trick or cruel taunt amid never-ending Great Recession.

It may also be that just as at the movies the franchises became bigger than the stars, the brands the models helped build up became bigger than any model could ever be. (Thus did people come to know the names of particular models because they had represented Victoria's Secret, rather than know Victoria's Secret because of the models who were wearing their clothes in commercials and on the runway.) Meanwhile an age of war and pandemic, of trauma and emergency, of lockdowns and tightening borders, and the combination of a blistering identity politics that made that of the identity-mad '90s look like nothing by comparison with a New Puritanism that made open expression of an appreciation of female beauty come to seem a politically significant act (!) did not help (as, in an age in which Victoria's Secret had become a bigger name than any of its models, that brand refrained from staging its annual show for five straight years).

It seems symbolic of all this that the Fashion Cafe went bust before the decade's end, that a few years on FashionTV disappeared from the offerings of North America's cable packages, that House of Style went off the air (and when revived later sought its hosts from outside the world of modeling, a choice in its way suggestive of how few really Big Names are to be found there now), all as echoes of the moment like America's Next Top Model ran their course. The world had changed, the niche disappeared, and fashion lost its old prominence--all as for now I think its recovering it as unlikely as the return of movies to their old centrality in the culture, or professional sports regain the level of attention that they once enjoyed. Still, going by what I see online those of a certain generation, and maybe not just of that generation, still remember the personalities and aesthetic and ads of that earlier era with some fondness every now and then, and smile.

Battle of the Flops: Furiosa vs. Borderlands

As it happened the summer of 2024 had two big-budget sci-fi action movies based on well-established franchises that centered on female protagonists adventuring across a post-apocalyptic, or at least post-apocalyptic-looking, desert landscape--the Mad Max franchise film Furiosa, and the adaptation of the Borderlands video game. Both of them flopped--and flopped so badly that I expect to see them on Deadline's list of the five worst money-losers of the year when it comes out this spring.

But which is likely to come out "ahead?" (Or "behind?")

The publicly available figures indicate that Furiosa cost the studio $168 million to produce, and $100 million to "market," so let us assume an outlay from the studio of $270 million. The movie made $174 million in theaters. Given that the studio typically gets half that, this gives them back $85 million or so. Of course, after that there are the post-theatrical revenue streams, which count for relatively more with low earners. (Consider 2022, when Avatar 2 made $2.3 billion in ticket sales, and the studio got almost $1.3 billion in theatrical rentals. The movie also made a very good $350 million in home entertainment, television, streaming--but this is scarcely a quarter of the net from the theaters. By contrast Lightyear made a mere $112 million from theatrical rentals, but $155 million from home entertainment/ television/streaming, about forty percent more than its theatrical net--and nearly half what the far more theatrically successful Avatar made from those income streams.) Given parallels like that Furiosa could thus match or exceed its theatrical income from these sources, pulling in, perhaps, $100 million, perhaps even $120 million. The resulting $170-$200 million or so would thus leave the studio in the hole on this one by some $70-$100 million (an estimate in accord with the industry papers' reports of insider expectations).

By contrast Borderlands cost perhaps $145 million to make and market, significantly less, but made only $32 million in theaters. Working out to perhaps $15 million in the till, the question is then how much it could make from the post-theatrical revenue streams. That figure is low enough that the movie could triple or even quadruple its take here, raising its income to $50 or even $60 million--but still leaving the backers $85-$95 million in the hole.

There is an overlap here, which makes it too close to call--but it seems safe to say that these losses, considerable as they are, will still work out to less than Joker 2, at least, suffered, and more than the loss on other flops like The Fall Guy or, as seems possible, Gladiator II, relegating the rest of the contenders to the lower ranks.

Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament: A Few More Thoughts

If 2024 was full of movies with mediocre grosses it was also the case that the number of really costly movies was more than usually limited--the year dominated by second-stringers--making it harder to assess the gap between expenditure and revenue. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, for instance, cost $100 million to produce and made $200 million theatrically. It is possible that if not too much was put into promotion and distribution, if not too much went to participations and residuals (they did, after all, bother to bring back Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson), the movie has made some money thanks to home entertainment and the rest topping off its theatrical gross--but it may also turn out that the movie failed to do so.

It is even the case that two big-budget movies the second half of the year delivered--Twisters and Gladiator 2--are in a similar spot. Much of the media put a positive face on their performances, but the truth was that relative to the expectations raised by the originals and the requirements of their colossal budgets neither film can be judged to have been all that was hoped for in this regard (with Twisters especially suffering in the international market). It is thus unlikely that either film will be listed as a major profit-maker by Deadline--but it is not impossible that in spite of the fact that they fell far short of making back the money spent on them during their theatrical runs by next spring we will learn that they got to (or even a little past) the break-even point with the help of their post-theatrical earnings.

Still, the year had its share of evident big-budget money-losers. However, some underperformers were more obviously catastrophic than others. The result is that the list of the five biggest losers seems likely to have Joker 2 and Megalopolis in the top two spots, with the Mad Max sequel Furiosa and Eli Roth's adaptation of the video game Borderlands "competing" for the next two places.

The Last Third of 2024 at the Box Office: A Few Thoughts

At the start of 2024 the expectation was circulating in the media that bad as 2023 had been for Hollywood (with an epic string of big-budget flops leaving the box office gross down more than a third from the average seen in the pre-pandemic years of 2015-2019 in real terms), 2024 would be even worse, finishing up about another billion dollars down from what 2023 managed, significantly due to the thinning of the year's release slate by strike-related delays.

The early part of the year certainly bore out the expectations as one movie after another managed only weak grosses. By the end of May (a May which opened with The Fall Guy and saw the year's biggest flop up to that point, Furiosa) 2024's box office gross was running $900 million behind that of 2023 at the same point. In spite of the spectacular debut of Inside Out 2 things were even worse a month later, the year $1 billion behind--and by the end of July, over $1.2 billion behind.

However, the five months since have seen the year close the gap, with the help of a strong August (largely thanks to Deadpool & Wolverine picking up $300 million that month, accounting for over a third of the whole theatrical take), a surprisingly strong September (the Beetlejuice sequel's quarter of a billion accounting for 42 percent of the month's receipts), and then after an admittedly weak October things really picking up in late November and December, especially relative to 2023's particularly lousy holiday season. Where that period saw Captain Marvel 2, Aquaman 2, Wish and the remake of The Color Purple all flop, as Ridley Scott's Napoleon epic and The Hunger Games prequel added to the list of big-budget underperformers (so that with a gross barely north of $200 million Wonka was the champion), Moana 2 and Wicked both look like they will finish up with at least twice what Wonka managed (both having broken the $400 million barrier as of December 31). All that meant that where in November and December the box office gross was just $1.3 billion in 2023, in 2024 it was a comparatively robust $1.86 billion, these two months alone closing the gap by over half a billion dollars.

Still, even if the situation is not so dire as it was looking at mid-year, when the trend threatened a gross in the $7 billion range, the end result still confirms the prediction we saw at the start of the year of a marked drop in the take over the twelve month period as a whole. As of December 31 the gross for 2024 was a bit under $8.54 billion, as against the $8.91 billion figure for 2023, and the $9.25 billion it is in inflation-adjusted November 2024 dollars (which works out to a real-terms drop of about 8 percent).

The box office figure for 2024 also affirms the reading of the data from 2022 and 2023 as indicating the contraction, and increasing fickleness, of the American movie market to a degree demanding some hard thinking and bold decisions on the part of Tinseltown's executives. Of course, given sheer inertia (it can be years between the greenlighting of a movie and its hitting theaters, even when there aren't delays of the kind seen in 2023), the release slate of 2025 represents the thinking of a period before 2023's disasters, rather than any rethinking of Hollywood's filmmaking. After all, we have (just to cite the most obviously relevant offerings)

four really first-rank superhero movies, including three Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films (Captain America 4, the new Fantastic Four, and reclaiming the first weekend in May for the MCU, The Thunderbolts), and James Gunn's Superman movie . . . Zootopia 2 from Disney . . . live-action adaptations of animated classics [with] Disney releasing such versions of both Snow White and Lilo & Stitch . . . more of James Cameron's Avatar saga (Fire and Ash), more Jurassic World (Rebirth), and more spy-fi from the Mission: Impossible franchise (the second half of 2023's Dead Reckoning).

Will people come out for all of this stuff the way the Suits who greenlit it all must be hoping, or will we see the kind of epic string of colossal flops we did back in 2023? The box office-watcher may have an interesting time following how things go--maybe more interesting than they will watching the all-too-familiar stuff of the movies themselves.

What Can We Say of Gladiator II Now?

Gladiator II opened in North America below expectations that had not been particularly high for a $250 million movie, let alone a high-profile sequel to a New Classic hitting theaters the Friday before Thanksgiving--grossing $55 million over the Friday-to-Sunday period (against the $60-$80 million Boxoffice Pro had consistently forecast for the preceding month). Of course, rather more than in the summer the holiday season sees films open less than impressively but much more than make up for it with very long legs (as James Cameron's three movies all managed to do on the way to high rankings on the all-time blockbuster lists). Gladiator II, however, did not prove one of these, as of its sixth weekend not much more than tripling its opening weekend gross ($163 million), leaving it with less than the original Gladiator took in current dollars, and maybe half what it made in real terms ($188 million back in the summer of 2000, $345 million when adjusted for November 2024 prices). The movie has done a little better in the international market than the original--as period pieces tend to do--but as the fact that the domestic/foreign split's about the same indicates (it was 42/58 in the case of the original, 38/62 in the case of the sequel), not enough so to make much difference.

The result is that the $450 million mark the much cheaper original reached at a time when that was more impressive than it is now is one toward which the movie is still straining, and may not quite make it--calling into question the movie's profitability. It will take a really robust post-theatrical performance to get the revenue to the break-even point, never mind past it--all as room remains to wonder if come the spring we will not see it on Deadline's list of the year's biggest money-losers.

Is the Charge of "Fan Entitlement" a Red Herring?

When we speak of an adaptation of, for example, a play by William Shakespeare or a novel by Jane Austen it is considered eminently respectable for observers knowledgeable of the original material to judge an adaptation at least in part by its makers' evident respect for the original--and their complaint about any lapses in such eminently respectable. This is in spite of those authors' work being so far removed from that of our own time in authorship, and outlook, as to make appraisals of faithfulness relatively difficult. (I, for one, incline not only to the view that at least some of the playscripts by which we know Shakespeare's play are less complete than they might be, but more importantly to the view that Shakespeare was a Medieval rather than a modern in the ways that count most, with all that means for our experience of his work.)

By contrast those who would comment on the faithfulness of adaptations of superhero comic books are dismissed contemptuously for doing so at all--for caring about faithfulness at all, which brings forth a charge of "fan entitlement" such as would never be leveled against Bardolators or Janeites.

One can see this as a result of how the conventional-minded adhere to a hierarchical view of cultural production that puts Shakespeare and Austen on one plane and comics on another much lower plane, far less worthy of the reverence and passions of a purist--all as there is a profound difference in cultural standing between the person who reads Shakespeare and Austen and the person who goes to a comic book convention (the more in as fans have, in recent years, come to be so demonized in so many quarters politically). However, what one can fairly call that snobbery would seem to me to just make the dismissal easier, rather than entirely account for it, because one can easily see the discussion of "fan entitlement" rather than "respect for the original" as changing the subject from respect for the content of the original to the presumably pernicious attitude of those who would ask for respect for that content.

The (rather cynical) intent in doing so where the big superhero movies and other films like them is concerned is shutting down the critics who would undermine the efforts of producers as crass as they are illiterate to wring as much money as possible out of the movies they make, art be damned--and I think it may be said that there is far more incentive to do so in the case of the comic book fans, with the career of Michael Fassbender exemplary. Fassbender starred in a film adaptation of Macbeth which made a whole $16 million worldwide, with the modest figure not really surprising to anyone. By contrast the four films in which Mr. Fassbender played Erik Lensherr (aka Magneto) made $1.9 billion--over a hundred times as much. Were adaptations of Shakespeare and Austen doing nearly as well as X-Men movies I suspect we would be hearing the equivalent of accusations of "fan entitlement" directed at those who criticize the adaptations for offenses to purism--and that we ought to remember that during the inevitable next round of cheap fan-bashing by the elite's courtiers in the media.

"Why Don't People Appreciate My Hard Work?" Whines the Nepo Hire

When a "successful" individual has benefited from personal advantages such as coming from a wealthy, powerful and well-connected family anyone's pointing out the fact has a way of making them defensive--the relentless defense of extreme inequality that is the basis of so much "conventional wisdom" becoming for them a very personal fight now. Thus rather than saying that yes, life has been very good to them, they can't deny that and they know that it has made a difference and appreciating this they feel some humility, some responsibility, something, anything, that makes for a more complex emotional life than sheer egomania, they trivialize their advantages, as they insist that they have earned and deserve all that they have, for they are not beneficiaries of social "privilege" in the term's true and proper sense (Heavens no!), but instead owe everything they have to "hard work," speaking those two words as if they were a magical incantation that must secure the acquiescence of anyone in anything they have to say.

"I worked hard to have what I do," they say.

Or, expressed in more blatantly self-pitying terms: "Why don't people appreciate my hard work?"

In doing so they are oblivious to how unbelieveably insulting they are being to every person who "works hard"--often far harder than they ever did, if indeed they ever did any hard work--for far, far less than the world has given them. For to say what they do is either to deny others' hard work--or to raise the question of why they had such an extraordinarily higher return on their effort than other people with those personal advantages ruled out as a possible answer, such that one can only conclude that their superior return is a matter of their being superior people.

Putting it another way, the "Why don't people appreciate my hard work?" they are so quick to speak is translatable as:

"I worked hard, and you losers didn't, that's why you're not rich and famous like me," or

"I worked hard--and my hard work got me somewhere because I'm BETTER THAN YOU, so just SHUT UP AND ACCEPT IT LOSERS."

One may add that on top of this undeniable and rather severe insult--the at least implicit claim that those who do not have what they have either failed to work hard, or were in some way deficient--the statement is a great insult to the intelligence of the listener, regardless of whether they are aggrieved in this particular way. For as anyone who is not a complete idiot (i.e. smarter than those throwing their claims of "hard work") is well aware, without opportunity, in many an area of endeavor the kind of opportunity that is very disproportionately enjoyed and often monopolized by those for whom nepotism is a super power (usually, their only one), all of the hard work in the world--and all the talent and everything else that makes up "merit" too--very often amounts to little or nothing but exhaustion and bitterness at the end of a misspent life in which those who failed to do well can only feel that the aspirationalism with which they have been indoctrinated was a cheat and a snare, with those competing most closely with nepotism's beneficiaries without that advantage feeling the fact especially keenly. Indeed, given the choice between a capacity for "hard work" (and other such meritorious qualities), and having the right background, the right connections, from the standpoint of simply getting ahead it is far, far better to have the latter than the former.

Of course, simple and frankly obvious as all this is you won't see this spelled out very often--for the media is staffed by the courtiers of privilege, who, "more royalist than the king" (and the king is pretty damn royalist), cheer for every punch these throw down at the plebs, for these Josiah Bounderbys who so readily whine about their hard work not being appreciated ("No one appreciates me, no one," say they as they clutch the Oscar they have just been awarded) make very clear that much as they demand the world's sympathy for their supposed plight they have no sympathy for anyone else, least of all those to whom the world has been far less kind.