Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Wheel of Misfortune


Today I am shedding some "lyte" on whining. I hate whining, just ask my kids.  But I find it even more repellent in adults.  In Conde Nast's "Portfolio" there is a classic example of whining titled "Confessions of a TARP Wife".  I am warning you, if you read it, your blood pressure will rise and you will have to stifle a strong desire to hunt this woman down and beat her senseless.  I think she must have realized that would be the reaction of most readers, so she doesn't give her name, her byline is Anonymous.

She laments not the loss of her lifestyle so much as the necessity of having to camoflage it.  She still buys her friends presents at Bergdorf Goddman, but she has them sent to their homes instead of the carrying the bags on the street.  The poor thing had to downsize her husband's birthday party.  She refers to all this as a "complex algorithm".  What's that red stain on my shirt?  My heart, bleeding for this unfortunate victim of the economic downturn.

Never mind that her husband helped create it.  I guess I should be thankful that she is at least self-aware enough to recognize that her "problems" are of a different tenor than the rest of us.  But apparently she isn't smart enough to shut the f*@k up about it.  Excuse me for sounding bitter, but her bemoaning her lack of cooking skills and having to stay in and watch "Law and Order" strikes me as a stunning example of the very attitudes that got into this mess in the first place.

Maybe it has escaped her attention that there are people who are dying because of this meltdown.  The CFO of Freddie Mac was found dead this morning, an apparent suicide.  Every week there is another story of a family found dead, usually due to a murder/suicide that had its roots in true monetary distress.  These are real problems, not buying a new spring wardrobe is not.  I think even Marie Antoinette had more empathy than this person.

I could hope that she will use some of her husband's TARP money to buy a clue.  But I doubt it.  The kind of entitlement that you would have to possess to think about writing such a tone deaf article, let alone actually publish it, could easily withstand any onslaught of mere empathy.  No, once again, I will have to rely on the old karmic wheel.  I just want it to roll over her, stop, reverse, and roll over her again.     

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