Ilse and I are on a vacation swing, having started on Sunday with dinner with her parents, Joseph and Jesusina, at an ostentatious meat palace in the capital of the Confederacy. We stayed at a modest (in American terms) hotel, and continued the next day, driving our gas-guzzling vehicle (at a high rate of speed, guzzling extra gas) on to North Carolina, where we spent two days visiting my mother, the She-Nurse of the SS, and her boyfriend. We ate modestly, but we ate, and we stayed in a slightly less nice hotel at my mother's expense (she and her gigolo just moved to a smaller place that doesn't have really room for overnight guests, not American ones anyway). We drove on, again at a pretty high rate of speed, to Asheville, North Carolina, a beautiful place, where last night we ate a seriously fat-ass meal and stayed in a hotel of the same chain we stayed at in Richmond.
So why am I so pissed off at what I visited today? A ginormous emblem of excess and rapacious capitalism, Biltmore House is a serious candidate for the capitol of capitalism. Rife with pillaged treasures and the produce of years of exploitation of Americans who couldn't afford it, the mansion is a vomitorious display. BFF characterized it as "amazing and appalling;" he's right, but I'm having trouble getting past the appalling part.
I'd like to think I'm not just pissed off because I just don't have the balls to be that fucking evil. And I wish I were sure that would be intellectually honest.
3 comments:
Face it, you just have too much of a moral conscience to be a Vanderbilt.
Think about THAT for a minute!
The key question for me has always been, is it just that I'm not that evil or that I know in the back of my head I'd peak at Chief of Staff of VPOTUS evil?
The password is - true - goodoee 57. I can find metaphors anywhere.
See you Saturday.
Just stay appalled. It remains as a symbol of what Mitt Romney would build if he were actually rich instead of marginally nouveau riche. It is that to which he aspires.
IIRC it was just a summer cottage.
Here's the thing. Do you think the folks who did the building bore any remote resemblance to Daddy Moneybucks (who I'm sure looked like the guy on the Monopoly card)? Of course not. And whether you're that evil or not, you have friends who would remind you that you were exploiting the .... <--- insert you-know-what here.
There's lots else in Asheville. Cleanse your soul by brushing up against hippies.
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