What are we even doing here?

I was looking at a copy of the original Forbes 400 list from 1982, and here are some not very fun facts:

(1) The number one person on the list — the very richest individual in all of America at that time — was a guy named Daniel K. Ludwig. Daniel, or “Dan” as I came to know him, was born and grew up in South Haven, Michigan, which is 38.3 miles down a rural highway from my parents’ home. We went to South Haven a lot in the summer because it was and is on Lake Michigan, there’s several nice beaches and long pier, etc. The relevance of all this is that, in 1982, which is when I graduated from college, I had never heard of Ludwig, even though the richest man in America came from a small town where we summered, although at the time I didn’t realize summer could be used as a verb.

I learned the latter fact many years later, when I sat next to a perfectly pleasant young woman at a law school faculty recruiting dinner — we had made the woman an offer and were wooing her — and she asked me where I summered. We did end up hiring her, but a few years later she left for a better law school, and I ran into her at 7:30 in the morning outside the lobby of hotel in Boston, where the Law & Society conference was being held that year. We had another perfectly pleasant conversation, and only afterwards did I realize that the street in Boston we were standing next to had the same last name as hers, because she came from the family for whom the street was named.

Anyway . . . Dan Ludwig was per Forbes’s scientific calculations worth two billion dollars U.S. in 1982, which was the most vast private fortune in the nation at the moment, and I, a highly educated person very interested in current events and politics and economics and things, who grew up hanging out in Ludwig’s small home town, had quite literally never heard of this person. This reminds me that the very top SES category in Paul Fussell’s very amusing little book Class, which was published almost simultaneously with the first Forbes 400 list, and chronicled the American class system at the exact moment when it was about to be transformed in this respect, was labeled by Fussell “Top Out of Sight,” precisely because the Daniel K. Ludwigs in our midst had learned a thing or two from growing up in the same world as your Lenins and your Stalins and your Hitlers and your Maos, and what they had learned, forsooth, is that if the Lords of Capital get too big for their britches, they may actually end up getting expropriated, or even lined up against a wall and shot, and that ain’t too cool. Hence “out of sight.”

(2) The richest person on the current Forbes list is Elon Musk, who I’m pretty sure every single person graduating from college in America this year is very familiar with, so that’s different. Also different is that Musk is worth per the Internet $413 billion, which after we adjust for inflation with the government’s handy CPI calculator, is 62 times more than Danny boy’s net worth in my younger and more vulnerable years. Now it just so happens that if you multiply Elon Musk’s current net worth by 62, you get just about the entire current annual gross domestic product of the United states of America, since that figure is around $25 trillion, give or take. Which is pretty interesting if you ask me, or even if you don’t, as it’s my blog and I’ll cry if I want to.

(3) Speaking of which, this sentence appeared in the otherwise excellent bit of curated reporting about Donald Trump, president, pedophile, and rapist, statutory and conventional, that Scott blogged about yesterday:

But behind the tabloid glamour, questions have lingered about what Mr. Trump’s long association with Mr. Epstein says about his judgment and character.

I continue to stare at this sentence in wonderment, and ask myself, well, how did I get here? And what are we even doing here?

All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz; and by and by I learned that, most appropriately, the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs had intrusted him with the making of a report, for its future guidance. And he had written it, too. I’ve seen it. I’ve read it. It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung, I think. Seventeen pages of close writing he had found time for! But this must have been before his—let us say—nerves, went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites, which—as far as I reluctantly gathered from what I heard at various times—were offered up to him—do you understand?—to Mr. Kurtz himself. But it was a beautiful piece of writing. The opening paragraph, however, in the light of later information, strikes me now as ominous. He began with the argument that we whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the might of a deity,’ and so on, and so on. ‘By the simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practically unbounded,’ etc., etc. From that point he soared and took me with him. The peroration was magnificent, though difficult to remember, you know. It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence. It made me tingle with enthusiasm. This was the unbounded power of eloquence—of words—of burning noble words. There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ The curious part was that he had apparently forgotten all about that valuable postscriptum, because, later on, when he in a sense came to himself, he repeatedly entreated me to take good care of ‘my pamphlet’ (he called it), as it was sure to have in the future a good influence upon his career.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness