Surfing the hedonic treadmill with Her Royal Hiney the Baroness and Grand Panjandrum Pam von Omidyar, Emperor Barack Hussein Obama, and Wee Lord T-Cruise

June 28th, 2010

The hunger strike continues: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Human psychology is

fascinating, if often appalling, stuff.

On one end, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Bob Marley,

Muhammad Ali, and Richard Pryor raise an entire race’s

understanding of itself in a generation; on the other, Ted Bundy

leaves little girls’ bodies in hog sheds covered with bite marks, and

George W. Bush — a man who should have spent his entire life wearing

short pants and a propeller beanie and playing in a padded backyard

under the watchful eye of his governess — roosters about

in a cod-pieced flight suit at the foot of a “Mission

Accomplished” banner.  Humanity

offers up a lot at which one

can stare in horror

or fascination.

One of the interesting notions

in modern psychology is that of the hedonic treadmill,

which posits that however rich a person’s life becomes, she becomes

accustomed to each successive level of comfort, grows progressively less

happy, and lusts again and again for more.  This is why lottery winners enjoy

a bump in happiness for a spell that lasts barely a year, then find themselves wondering

where the next great rush is coming from.  It explains how a person who starts out in

a cubicle feels anointed when given an office, then soon thereafter begins plotting

for one with a window, and then for the corner, and then for the company

Bentley/helicopter/Gulfstream.  If you’ve spent a few years as a partner

at Goldman Sachs, it becomes hard to put on your game face

in the morning without first sacrificing a teenage

virgin from Scarsdale and drinking

the blood of an octoroon.

The hedonic treadmill

is what took Tom Cruise from a boyhood

as little more than a foundling

to behavior like this:

“You should be ashamed of yourself!” —

har. The hedonic treadmill explains as well how

brother Barack Obama, whose campaign was centered

around a cool outrage at George W. Bush’s murderous

wars, can now be found whining that people have

“a lot of obsession” about ending the same

child-and-Treasury-consuming

bloodbaths.

So it is with Her Royal Hiney

the Baroness and Grand Panjandrum Pam Omidyar.

Born a poor black child and working her way through Tufts as a

chargirl and in the information booth in the student union, she impressed the

future Baron von Omidyar with her humanity:  ”And she was so warm to strangers.

She really believed that people are basically good. That’s what impressed him.

That’s what attracted him even before he knew he was attracted.

And he wasn’t even looking for that then. He wasn’t thinking,

Gee, I need to find someone who lives these values.

But looking back, that’s what it

was. ‘She connected with

other people.’”

Oh how a fortune

the size of Saturn will change a girl!

Once committed to connecting with people,

to giving their Ebay billions away to change the

world, to their reputation for being “cheerful, idealistic,

and aggressively democratic”, the Baroness and Baron

now collect luxury resorts like Pez dispensers

and party in tax havens with

fellow plutocrats.

The legendary warmth

of the waif that was Pam has given way

to the steely refusal of the Baroness to lay out

a few grickles to save all the world’s whales from being

murdered by exploding harpoon, backward dragging to drown,

rifle shots to the head, and flensing with heated knives.  That’s what

the hedonic treadmill is good for — one day a sweet young girl is telling you

where the school nurse can be found, the next you’re twelve days into

a hunger strike on behalf of Earth’s most beautiful mammals

and she’s too busy hollering silver-polishing commands

at a vast army of servants and underlings

to be bothered to chat.

Some of you

who know me well remember that

once upon a time ago, when I was writing a bunch

of books and screenplays and giving speaking tours to address the

koyannisqatsi time in which we live, an esteemed worldwide cable TV network

approached me about doing a weekly show.  They flew an executive vice president

and a senior producer back and forth between my home and their offices in New

York, we contemplated and palavered and negotiated, and in the end we

agreed we weren’t quite right for each other: they slightly too staid

as the child of the nation’s biggest media company, me probably

more than a little too radical for the CEO’s taste.

The slot went to a very funny man whose

show has succeeded magnificently.

We’ve stayed in touch,

though, the VP and the senior producer

and me.  I just heard from one of them, the one who

controls the purse strings over documentary production

at the network, and she’s interested in a film about the cruel

and heartless Baroness von Omidyar, her collection of giant golden coins,

and how the hedonic treadmill has hardened her to the point that a man can be

starving to death, her servants monitoring his progress all the while, while

she collects centi-million dollar baubles and knowingly allows

impoverished young ballerinas to have their legs amputated

for lack of a simple sulfa drug.  ”This is a story for

the ages,” she said to me on the phone

yesterday, “It’s Dickensian!”

I can’t say I’m not tempted.

I can say I’m hungry.  And I’ve heard it said

that The Grand Panjandrum Pam Omidyar has a sable-lined

and climate-controlled full floor closet in at least one

of her many palatial homes. How could it hurt

to turn some cameras

on all this?

Well.  Investigations and

discussions are underway, and I’ll keep you

posted. In the meantime, I marvel at the traffic here

since “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth” has taken the fore.

I rather preferred the days when we read Rumi, Hafiz, Lalla, and Lao Tzu

together, and listened to Richard Pryor as Mudbone doing “Little Feets”,

and peered at pretty naked people making each other happy

in all the ways they do.  In the spirit of the old days,

then, I close today with a little spiritual

and musical offering by way

of Tom Waits.

Mojo is a wonderful

music magazine from the U.K. which

often brings in a musician to guest edit an issue.

Waits, whom I revere, did a bang-up job with the current

issue, not least with the CD that accompanies it.  The songs are all

by other artists, but for one on which Tom shares vocals, and they are too fine

for words.  Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, Royal Hineys in Hawaii

and everywhere, here are Hank Ballard & the Mountaineers

singing “Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Let’s Go!” — which,

come to think of it, is probably what

the whales are saying.