“The world doesn’t make any sense to me any more. What’s going on? There are babies lying around in the streets. There are people living in boxes. There are people ready to shoot you if you look at them. And we’re getting used to it. The world is so nuts, it makes me wonder about all the choices that we’ve made.”
The year after I moved to Los Angeles, Lawrence Kasdan came out with his film “Grand Canyon.” It was a movie that meant a lot to me, both then. and now, although a lot of people saw it as too much of a bleeding-heart story.
In the first 10 minutes of the movie, we see two of the main characters sitting at courtside seats at a Lakers game, the seats where celebrities sit that now go for a minimum of $4,800 a game.
And that’s the price for midweek games against mediocre teams.
In that same 10 minutes, we see one of the characters sitting in the middle of Inglewood, his car broken down and surrounded by gangbangers.
One of the points the movie makes is that Los Angeles is a city of contrasts, maybe the American city where fabulously wealthy people and desperately poor people live closest to each other.
And of course there are also the young people who came to California with big dreams and wind up as the secretaries, personal assistant and valet parkers for the folks on top.
My country tis of thee, income inequality. Of thee I bling.
Things have become exponentially worse in the last 30 years. If I remember correctly, when this movie was made, court-side seats at the Forum went for $250 a game. That’s still incredibly high, but if you could get tickets, you could save up and take a date to the game for $500 plus parking and refreshments.
I actually have an experience to compare it to. In 2002 and 2003, I was able to get four tickets for a ballgame at Dodger Stadium that were in the first row of field level, just past the third-base dugouts.
If you know baseball, those are pretty much perfect seats, and each year I got four tickets and a parking pass for less than $200.
A couple of years later, they added field boxes that started at $250 per ticket and I would bet they are a lot higher now.
I guess the point of that is that while luxuries have pretty much always been beyond the means of the poor and the working class, the upper-middle class could save up and have some wonderful luxuries once in a while.
Not anymore.
If you want to stay at the most expensive hotel in the world, lodging at Lover’s Deep Luxury Submarine in St. Lucia is $150,000 per night.
That’s right, per night. It’s like the quote often wrongly attributed to J.P. Morgan more that a hundred years ago, if you have to ask how much it costs to keep a yacht, you can’t afford it.
If there’s anything shocking about that sort of wealth, it’s that the 70 percent of the people who can’t even imagine that sort of wealth don’t rise up and take it away.
Of course there’s the quote attributed to robber baron Jim Fisk:
“I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”
The modern robber barons don’t even have to do that. They use television and talk radio to keep the working class separated. Look at the debate over increasing the minimum wage. You’ll hear someone say they make $15 an hour doing secretarial work or something similar and they don’t think a burger flipper should make as much as they do.
They never ask why the CEO of the burger-flipping company should make $18 million a year.
I hold no brief for the domestic terrorists who attacked the Capitol two months ago. I think some of them are purely evil and others misguided and/or tricked by the former president.
Clearly, though, something is very wrong.
There are babies lying around in the streets. There are people living in boxes. There are people ready to shoot you if you look at them. And we’re getting used to it.
That’s the worst part of it.
We’re getting used to it.