Honolulu Hypocrisy Beat: “But BW, what do these lousy plutocrats like Pam Omidyar have to do with me?”

May 6th, 2010

Every day, folks

come in like this person did

yesterday and wander around reading about

hypocritical billionaires like Pam Omidyar and her

untesticled husband Pierre Omidyar and then

contact me to wonder what ‘zackly is the

point. The filthy rich always act

filthily, they say.

The point is that

we likely share Pam Omidyar’s hypocrisy

in some respect.  While it seems breathtaking that a woman

would tweet about signing save-the-whale petitions who could — without

breaking a sweat — fund the actual complete saving of the whales,

what about us?  Do we accept complete responsibility,

each of us, for what’s happening

on this planet?

Earth is treated

as a grocery store, outhouse, and disco,

and plainly nobody is minding the state of the restrooms

or where the fish comes from or who’s paying the band.  Because

the fish are, like the redwoods, near gone.  The drains are full of petroleum sludge.

The electricity that powers the disco ball comes from a plant that is choking

people to death.  I’ve been an ardent environmentalist for over thirty years,

and I can tell you that the rate of waking-the-fuck-up-and-acting-like-it

is nowhere near the rate at which the oceans are being fished out,

the once-in-a-blue-planet resources like oil are being

burned, and the carbon is being crammed

into the atmosphere.

Pam Omidyar is an

extreme and grotesque example

of greed and selfishness and devil-may-care-ism —

not quite like Larry Ellison or Jeff Bezos, perhaps, but somehow

more appalling for all her faux do-gooderism.  But what’s the Walkscore of my

house?  Are you driving a car or riding a bicycle? What do we buy,

eat, support, fund, oppose? How intent on simplicity are we?

What are we doing to redirect Mr. Obama’s

wholesale shoveling of the

Treasury into wars

that don’t work?

That’s the utility

of a plutocratic hypocrite like Pam Omidyar:

to make us all realize how little we’d like to be like that,

and to look to see where we are, and

to act on what we see.

Chapters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 of

“Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”