Wealth and moral vacuity
Michael Carolan calls out the parallels between Queen Victoria’s flaunting of wealth during the Irish Famine and Donald Trump’s Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago:
President Donald Trump’s recent Great Gatsby–themed party at Mar-a-Lago shimmered with all the excess of a lost empire: champagne towers, roaring twenties jazz, guests dripping in pearls and self-congratulation.
Outside, a different story: millions of Americans were about to lose access to food assistance — their average $6 a day, roughly the cost of one McDonald’s Big Mac — after the president cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
The Mar-a-Lago bash was an imitation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of hollow glamour, a book that doesn’t celebrate wealth but condemns it.
Trump’s Halloween fête became a modern version of an ancient ritual: the privileged enacting pageantry amid deprivation.
It brought to mind, for me — a student of Irish history —Queen Victoria’s feast in the middle of the greatest humanitarian disaster of the nineteenth century….
Tone-deaf extravagance, it seems, is a constant companion of inequality. In America, we have long equated wealth with virtue and dismissed poverty as failure. What F. Scott Fitzgerald saw as tragedy, modern America treats as aspiration.
The Gatsby myth has been reborn — not as cautionary tale, but as campaign slogan.
Meanwhile, millions who rely on food stamps — working parents, veterans, the elderly — now face impossible choices between groceries and rent.
The good news: across our region, people are responding.
Read more here.
