Wooley: History repeats as the rich party in a dying city
From the 18th century salons of Versailles to the festivities in Venice, it appears that the ruling classes still do not listen, writes Charles Wooley.
Opinion
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There must be moments in history when the ruling classes risk completely getting it wrong and becoming the careless architects of their own undoing. Not immediately perhaps, but over time as smouldering resentment slowly grows to become an engulfing conflagration.
Is it a stretch to think such a spark could have been struck in Venice last week when the third-richest man in the world exchanged vows with his bride in front of all the other richest people in the world?
Guests were flown in on 90 private jets and they booked out all the best hotels in town. Ordinary tourists on their “once in a lifetime” holiday were moved on to lesser hotels to make room for their betters.
But (noblesse oblige) the groom, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, generously picked up their bills.
You weren’t invited to the $50m bash but you couldn’t have missed it. There wasn’t much happening in the news. A few more kids were orphaned or died of starvation in Gaza, the unpleasantness in Ukraine continued unabated, Trump dropped a cluster of bunker busters on the atomic bomb factories in Iran and 800 million people around the world went to bed hungry.
Nothing to see. It was a quiet week.
Much more interesting was what the rich were eating and wearing on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore which along with the rest of Venice is slowly sinking into a muddy lagoon. Not that Leonardo DiCaprio, Andrew Garfield, Mick Jagger, Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian, Eva Longoria, Ivanka Trump, et al, were worried about what might happen in 20 years’ time.
They were only there for a good time. In their conspicuous overindulgence were they there to be seen or obscene?
Or are they simply as out of touch as the court of Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, who when told the poor of France had no bread, allegedly said, “Then let them eat cake”.
I’m not going to torture you with the details of the wedding feast. Suffice to say the Bezos wedding was a latter-day Versailles. The bride wore a $300,000 dress. It was a floating festival of plutocracy. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez sailed in on a $500m yacht bearing a bronze figurehead in the bride’s likeness.
But you know all that. What strikes across time from the salons of the 18th century’s Ancien Regime to the festivities in Venice this week is not just the inequality of wealth but its visibility. The pre-revolutionary French aristocrats also devoted their lives to parading their privilege, seemingly unaware of the greater undercurrents of suffering and resentment.
On July 14, 1789, the day the Bastille was stormed, King Louis was out hunting on his estates at Versailles. The idle and trivial monarch was unaware of the unrest in Paris and when the news reached him he completely discounted it.
The hunting had been poor and that night when he sat down to enter the events of the day into his dairy, Louis could think of nothing worth noting.
So, he wrote the word “rien” (nothing).
Your columnist is no self-abnegating Old Testament prophet. I have always enjoyed good times, sometimes even while reporting bad times.
We must recognise that Bezos is not an entitled a fop like the vapid King Louis. He might be a form of modern emperor, but he is very definitely a self-made one.
At school he worked the breakfast shift at McDonald’s. He studied physics and electrical engineering at Princeton. His dream had been to become a theoretical physicist but on a trans-
American road trip he got the idea of founding an on-line bookstore which he called Amazon.
He is, despite the apparent fripperies in Venice, what the French would call an “homme serieux”.
In a week beset by armed conflict, the threat of nuclear war and other disasters, at the end of his voluptuous wedding day, what might the world’s third-richest man have written in his electronic diary?
“Today I married Lauren. The press kept asking about her dress and how much it cost. I’m not a Bourbon monarch; I built my business from nothing. I didn’t inherit a throne so what’s really wrong with excess if it is my excess?
“Donald would have loved it, but he was busy with something in Iran.
“I admit it was not a simple ceremony but how can it be when you have a $500m yacht and
Leo aboard sipping wine and DJ Cassidy playing the music.
“My wedding was all over the news. But there were other stories coming in on satellite: Ukraine, Gaza, strikes and heatwaves. Some might think that an odd contrast with the spaghetti alla Nerano and the champagne bubbles here in Venice.
“I’m not feeling guilty. But I do feel all that negative data is something I would rather not be reading on my wedding day.
“Bill Gates was here. He’s giving away his money and trying to save the world. I might do that sometime. If it’s not too late.
“And so to bed.”
Charles Wooley is a Tasmanian-based journalist
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