An older man might announce to the world via old-fashioned press release or new-fangled media his latest plans, whatever they are, believing he’s about to enter some esteemed upper echelon of self-appointed demi-gods. He thought Mount Olympus was a real place, with marble seat cushions and an abundance of white light. He found his head in the clouds and looked forward to measuring Zeus’s handshake alongside other red-carpet acquaintances he’d met over the last eighteen months. Instead, he found himself in a rather human fraternity. And in this fraternity, even though it was in corporate America, people were not rated by their job titles, CEO, CFO, CMO, CMOFO, president, or whatever. This world was divided into those who had it and those who did not. This quality, was constantly muttered by yes men and staffers, racing between buildings carrying not coffee or doughnuts, but vegan smoothies and saline solution.
As to just what this idiotic quality was…well, it obviously involved stupidity. But it was not stupidity in the sense of eating paint chips and salsa on Saturday afternoon watching the Jets lose by double digits. No, the idea here seemed to be that a man should have the financial ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and then have the naivete, arrogance, inexperience to go once and say that’s enough. Never going the next day or the next day. There was no single test to show whether or not this man had this moronic quality. Instead there was a series of tests, most involving seeing zeroes ballooning at the end of his net worth, following the crawl on CNBC.
A career in joyriding was not like being an ordinary rich man, with his apartment on Central Park West and his home in the Hamptons. No, this man had to not only possess an island or two, but an entire chain of them in case an unexpected weather event should doom one or two to the ocean floor. Saudi Princes were a good start, but more to the point, was the image of Babylonian Kings and Egyptian Pharaohs. The leaders who built buildings in their own image with millions of diligent worker bees baking in the unforgiving sun. Apollo’s a friend, so he could even get a deal on sunscreen, distributing it to the hardest working employees among the ranks. It’s all about one day constructing a tower or pyramid that reaches the stars, showing the man as someone who had the trite stuff* and could move higher and higher surpassing even God’s starry penthouse to the very top, where that same elite group of men met for drinks. The men who had the power to take other men’s breath away – since the air is quite thin up there. Oxygen be damned.
Most rich men don’t have the trite stuff. They have lots of stuff, true. Art, furniture, ex-wives. But this is not about people who own a Picasso, but rather, those who buy entire museums on a whim. These are people who instead of doing something new or different, they do more of the same, only with a different colored space suit and a floppier cowboy hat. Those who had the trite stuff weren’t interested in time travel, teleportation or even creating an avocado that never loses its green sheen. They didn’t have time to imagine something new. They went with what everyone who’s ever done mushrooms and passed out on a beach staring at the stars thought. Why not go up there? This was fine, unoriginal and trite.
They hired people who really knew what was going on, never taking the time to study telemetry or learn about gimbal lock. This was about photo-ops and future memes. But they had it. Now, whatever they did in boardrooms or on company retreats was imbued with whatever they learned for the two minutes they were up there. They were experts in their own minds. They were casting the movie of their lives and they were playing the starring role every night. All because they each had the trite stuff.
*apologies to Tom Wolfe
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