Monday, September 05, 2005

The Culture of Affluence



Via Eschaton, I learned about this little interview with Barbara Bush, the mother of our fearless leader:

In a segment at the top of the show on the surge of evacuees to the Texas city, Barbara Bush said: "Almost everyone I've talked to says we're going to move to Houston."

Then she added: "What I'm hearing is they all want to stay in Texas. Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality.

"And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this (she chuckles slightly)--this is working very well for them."

The silver-foot-in-the-mouth disease appears to be herited.

I don't usually blog about the family members of politicians, because they are private individuals, not politicians, and it seems wrong to me to expose them to the harsh limelight of my viper tongue (what an idiom!). But I'm going to make an exception this time. Barbara Bush is such a good example of the consequences of "the culture of affluence", that dire disease that makes its members phlegmatic, smug and self-satisfied, despite the fact that they know nothing about how the rest of humanity lives.

Perhaps for her everything about life is money. Else how to interpret her assumption that individuals who have been forcibly separated from their family, their friends and the place they called home should be happy because now they are somewhere like a football arena? After all, their houses could never have been that big! And food is just being carried to their cots!

It is funny, for someone who suffers from the "culture of affluence" syndrome. Too bad that we can't help Barbara. We don't have the resources for that.