Chuzzlewit in Namibia

Last updated on: August 2, 2006 at 10:46 am by Fred Clark

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Chuzzlewit in Namibia 2006-08-02T10:46:02-04:00 Fred Clark

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It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy …

Some very interesting discussion below about the meaning of the globalrichlist calculator ("How rich are you?").

OK, so there I am in the top 6.57 percent of the world's population, income-wise. I'm richer than all but 394,655,173 of my felow humans. But so what?

Much of that income is spoken for before it gets to me — by Comcast, Working Assets, PECO, State Farm and my landlord. The last of those is the biggest chunk, of course. The place is nice enough, for a one-bedroom, and the neighborhood is very nice (not everybody can afford to live in "Everybody's Home Town"). It's the kind of place, I suppose, that 93.43 percent of the world wishes they could afford. The most luxurious aspect of it is somewhat intangible — the luxury of Not Having a Roommate.

But the question I'm stumbling toward here is what does it mean for me, and for the millions of Americans like me, to be a part of the top 10 percent, to be among the 400 million or so wealthiest people on earth, when it's also true that missing our next paycheck could be financially disastrous?

That globalrichlist calculator also got me to thinking of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and of their apparent decision to live as expatriate royalty of a sort in Namibia.

Namibia is not one of the poorest nation's in the world. Plug their per capita income of $7,000 (US) into that grl calculator and it would appear that the average Namibian is still far better off than the average earthling (the top 13.96 percent, it says). Then again, since Namibia ranks 124th in income equality, per capita income probably isn't a very useful measurement of the average Namibian.

Suffice it to say that, compared to me and to people like me, the people of Namibia are very, very poor. And compared to me and to people like me, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are very, very rich. If I got fired tomorrow and were unable to collect unemployment, then I might not feel like it, but the truth is, big-picture-wise, I have more in common with Pitt and Jolie than I do with most people in Namibia.

It certainly seems that Pitt and Jolie have been heavy-handed in using their privilege to leverage more privilege in Namibia. I can't really argue with much of what Brendan O'Neill writes here in "Brad, Angelina and the rise of 'celebrity colonialism.'" They have no business conscripting public officials into private service, and certainly no business using those officials to keep "undesirable" reporters out of that country.

But some of the criticism that has been directed at these "colonial" celebrities, I think, arises mainly because they have created an explicit case of something that is implicitly true, globally, even for those of us who are not multimillionaire movie stars. By relocating to Namibia, Pitt and Jolie have simply provided a more geographically compact example of how much of the world works much of the time.

And for all the criticism the duo is due, it also seems to me that they've done some good with their Namibian exile. Movie stars shed money the way most of us shed skin cells, so why not shed it in Namibia, where it is needed more desperately than it is in Los Angeles?

That sounds, perhaps, a bit like the "trickle-down theory," but I'm not speaking here of public policy, but of private policy. Supply-side Reaganism has never worked except to redistribute wealth into the hands of a concentrated few while bankrupting the public treasury. What I'm trying to get at here isn't structural, but personal. Not Reagan, but Dickens.*

Here, again, is a snippet of George Orwell's appreciation of Charles Dickens:

The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. … His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent. … Hence that recurrent Dickens figure, the good rich man. …

It seems that in every attack Dickens makes upon society he is always pointing to a change of spirit rather than a change of structure. It is hopeless to try and pin him down to any definite remedy, still more to any political doctrine. His approach is always along the moral plane, and his attitude is sufficiently summed up in that remark about Strong's school being as different from Creakle's ‘as good is from evil’. Two things can be very much alike and yet abysmally different. Heaven and Hell are in the same place. Useless to change institutions without a ‘change of heart’ — that, essentially, is what he is always saying.

If that were all, he might be no more than a cheer-up writer, a reactionary humbug. A ‘change of heart’ is in fact the alibi of people who do not wish to endanger the status quo. But Dickens is not a humbug, except in minor matters, and the strongest single impression one carries away from his books is that of a hatred of tyranny.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are rich people. And, provided the paychecks keep coming in, so am I (just ask the 5.6 billion or so people I'm wealthier than). One question, then, given the current shape of the world, is what does it mean to be, in Dickens' terms, good rich people?

Most of the world is more like Namibia than it is like Los Angeles, and Namibia will still be there whether or not we go over in person to stare it in the face. Pitt and Jolie provide a case study, of sorts. Theirs may be an extreme case, but it's not wholly different than mine, or perhaps yours.

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* Part of the problem with supply-side trickle-down theory is that, unlike Dickens, it sees no virtue in virtue. It sees no need for "good rich men," only for rich men. Provide enough of those, it suggests, and goodness will, magically, take care of itself. The ideal rich man, according to this theory, is not Scrooge on Christmas morning, but rather Scrooge before his transformation. Dickens, like Orwell, regarded such theories as instruments of tyranny.

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