Omidyar Celebrity Billionaire Reality Show Armagedda-extravaganza-catastrofuck! (Chapter the Eighteenth of “Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth”)
July 19th, 2010
To: Your Royal Hineys The Baron Pierre and The Baroness Pamela von Omidyar
From: Brian Browne Walker, lowly taoist poet
re: Reality show proposal
Date: 19 July 2010
Hi Pam, hi Pierre, happy belated Bastille Day!
If it’s okay,
I’m gonna just write all my
emails to you in public from now on.
You’re all for openness and transparency, right?
At least when you’re not hiring goons to send plainclothes cops to my house
to warn me not to ever write about you again (which, in addition to being in poor taste,
and showing a paucity of sack, is — har! — against the law). Plus, you haven’t
been responding to my private invitations to tell your side
of this awful story on film. So, big hug, and onward
and upward with transparency — let’s show ‘em
how the sausage is made!
Mileamne, via Sex in Art
Been working hard
on the documentary of “Eat the Rich”.
Had someone get some terrific footage this week
of a couple (okay, three) of your mack-daddy rich resorts.
(There’s nothing quite as ubiquitous or unremarkable these days
as a couple strolling around with a palm-sized HDV camcorder,
is there?) Also got a fun little document from one
of your law firm’s investigators; more on
that another day, hmm?
Anyway, as things evolve
and we write and plan and shoot and edit
the film, new ideas constantly come up. I was thinking
after seeing the Montage Resorts footage how cool it would be
to interview your kids for the film. Nothing crazy or intrusive, no
“60 Minutes” treatment, just one simple question, really: “If you could
choose one of two paths for your family, which one of these would you pick:
(a) Mommy and Daddy surround us with billions of dollars, private jets, real estate
baubles out the wazoo, and the ever-present Omidyar Security Teams necessary to
keep us budding little Donnie Trumps and Paris Hiltons safe from the unwashed
hordes; or (b) Mommy and Daddy save the whales and use our family’s power,
billions, and internet brilliance to organize the people of the world against
the cancers of war and greed and economic injustice and environmental
degradation, thereby integrating us with our fellow humans,
thus giving us a future more “Cousteau
grandchildren” than
“Doris Duke”.
Wouldn’t that be
a fascinating bit of film? Children
of the obscenely wealthy chart their own future,
plead with Mommy and Daddy to spare the whales from
exploding harpoons, call off the bodyguards! People have always
been fascinated with the crazy rich, and not least with their poor miserable
treasure-twisted children. We’d have to tread carefully, of course, one must protect
children — not the little girls that your friend Barack Obama is drone-striking into
cinders all over Southwest Asia, not the little ballerinas you yourselves gifted
with anesthesia-free amputations in Haiti, but your children, anyway,
certainly, above all. Those children are sacred. So we’d want
to do this tastefully and carefully, if
we’re going to do it.
Thinking about that,
and about extending this exquisite
oceanographer-versus-resort-developer choice
to your lil’ billionaires-in-training, made me realize:
this whole dang thing is a brilliant reality show! Hypocritical
billionaire refuses to break off a few bills, save whales! Lowly scrivener
records it all, turns spotlight on Omidyar hypocrisy! Law firms are scrambled,
“security networks” set into motion, chiefs of police seduced into running strongarm
errands for rich folk! The fingers of accountants fairly fly, keeping track of the
money you spend on investigations, psychological profiles, etc. of me!
Wee bairns cry out plaintively, “I wanna be a
Cousteau, Daddy, not a Trump!
Paris Hilton is icky!”
Or, who knows,
maybe the little tykes go the other way,
and there’s a “Nip & Tuck” sort of spin-off, where your kids
plead with you for plastic surgery to get their
Trumpian sneers in place, their glowing
Hilton-esque celebrismiles.
Then we watch
as you train them in how to
manage manservants, the proper ex-NSA
or ex-CIA criterion for security personnel, how
to deliver a message to a government
official that their wicked bidding
must be done!
Either way, it’s great television.
Really, you’re the perfect modern family
for a reality show. You’re richer than God, and telegenic
as all get out — hanging with the Dalai Lama, pals
with Barry Magic, the Clintons, all your
celebri-wealthy-peers!
You’re young, sexy, faux-green,
the best of the billionaires. (Okay, admittedly that’s
a bit like being the wisest of the profundities uttered by Glenn Beck, or the
clearest-minded American general, or the most justifiable current American war,
but never mind that for now, let’s do a slow reveal on the show). All those
qualities — and the internet as the source of your staggering wealth –
is why I naively picked you as most-likely-to-fund
EarthNationLive so long ago!
So how about this:
we embed reality show crews
(note to self: Bravo tie-in with Whale Wars?)
with me, my film crew, you, the kids, your lawyers,
your security goons, Chief Mark Beckner at the Boulder
Police Department, and we tell the whole story of “Eat the Rich” –
the web hijinks, the book, the film-as-it’s-being-made, your luxo-resorts
opening left and right, all the whales dying right and left (which of course you
now own) — as a reality show? Where your efforts to suppress the story and
maintain your reputation as humble do-gooding greenies are pitted
against my use of cheap, ubiquitous technologies — internet, Mac,
iMovie, Final Cut Studio, camcorder, social networks, etc. —
to reveal your hideous Carnegie-esque hypocrisy.
Does that sound like some spell-binding
tee-vee, or what?!
We toss in a bunch
of cool sidebar stories on wealth and
privilege and the lack thereof — the knee replacement
surgery I’m about to have for about $75,000 cash-on-the-barrelhead
because we don’t have national health care, writers don’t have health insurance,
and Obama’s health care help arrives, if at all, in 2014! The 1/2 of American children
(yours ain’t in there) who will spend some part of their lives on food stamps, in this
country which produces 1/4 of the world’s economic output! Chief Mark Beckner
scraping DNA off my doormat and planting it to kill two birds with one stone:
shut me up to please your rich arses, and solve the JonBenet Ramsey
case which has been vexing him for lo these 13 years (like that
Susannah Chase case he couldn’t solve for over a decade
until the Bureau of Prisons did it for him)!
The possibilities are endless, and the
crime-and-sex-and-sleaze factor
is over the top!
Wait, it gets better.
Look what I found yesterday
out by the dumpster:
Is that priceless, or what?
I scooped up this magnificent Holy Unicorn
of the Golden Horn and gave it pride-of-place in my home,
right atop the toilet tank (I only have one of those, how many hundreds
y’all up to now?) And looking upon it, swelling with pride as I did, led me to think:
Let’s make this an Omidyar Billionaire Hypocrites vs. Lowly Taoist Poet
Winner-Take-All Cage Match! Eight weeks of riveting reality TV
as the film is being made and you pull every string a
billionaire can pull, legal and otherwise,
to try and stop it!
I’ll have as my
target date for the completion
of the film September 24th, the submission
deadline for this winter’s Sundance Film Festival — ‘cos
wouldn’t it just be awesome as all get out to have a documentary
opening about you at Sundance in January just as you’re rolling out the
red carpet at your new Deer Valley Montage Resort?! What a ‘licious juxtaposition,
even if it is a mad-tight schedule. We’ll let America vote at the end of the next-to-last
show by text message, just like on American Idol! If I win, you hand over your
billions on the last show, and I use them to save the whales, spool up
EarthNationLive, turn the crazy raging ocean liner that is Earth
in another, more hopeful direction. If you win, I hand you
the Holy Unicorn of the Golden Horn, and your
magnificent collection of baubles shines
anew, plus you have something to
distract your kids with when
they say, “Mommy, where
did all the whales go?”
“Look, sweetie,
it’s a Unicorn with a
Golden Horn!”
Or, maybe if I win
you just give Sea Shepherd the dough
for the whales. That’s a few tens of millions — you can keep
all the other thousands ‘pon thousands of millions
you have for lil’ Donnie and
lil’ Paris.
It’ll be a landmark event,
the first reality show that’s really about something,
which is entitlement: how people who a moment ago were as
ordinary as dirt can become as inflated as Caesar — like scrappy Barry
from Punahou, now setting other people’s daughters on fire for political and
monetary profit; like innocent Pam from the info booth, casting the
whales and oceans to the dogs; like George W. Bush,
world’s most accomplished dry drunk, explaining
that God spoke to him directly about
how to run things.
We can get into all
those delicious entitlement issues: What
are humans entitled to on Earth, its wholesale destruction?
What are white people entitled to on the continent of North America,
their own holocaust? What are rich people entitled to? Cops? What about whales,
or Native Americans, or sea turtles? What about the nearly
7,000,000,000 people who aren’t billionaires,
what about them? Are they entitled
to life, or freedom from police
harrassment, or a
sense of self?
Maybe you could talk
on the show about what it’s like to be
exposed as frauds and hypocrites just as your wealthcelebrity
was beginning to really gel — it could be sort of a John Muir “The tides of
meanness and poverty gathered around me, and lo’, creation widened to my view”
moment. Maybe I could work in a side story about Sasha, and how
someone can apparently be sustained on love alone,
even when death was supposed to
have come long ago.
Would a love like that
work for the whales? If one person, or a few,
loved them enough, could they survive? What about the Earth?
Would love and tribe sustain children better than treasure?
Is love greater than a necklace of riches, greater than
a Unicorn with a Golden Horn?
There it is, then.
I’ll reach out to the reality
show producers. You run the idea past
the kids, see how they feel about it, call me. Might want to put
them in touch with Ozzy’s kids to survey their post-reality
show states of mind. Hey! Ozzy’s kids as
mentors to the Omidyar kids!
New wrinkle!!!
I’ll be in touch
in this space again
soon. Peace.
“If one’s life is simple,
contentment has to come. Simplicity
is extremely important for happiness. Having few
desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital:
satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, and shelter to protect
yourself from the elements. And finally, there is an intense
delight in abandoning faulty states of mind
and in cultivating helpful ones
in meditation.”
“Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it.”
When my propane ran out
when I was gone and the food
thawed in the freezer I grieved
over the five pounds of melted squid,
but then a big gaunt bear arrived
and feasted on the garbage, a few tentacles
left in the grass, purplish white worms.
O bear, now that you’ve tasted the ocean
I hope your dreamlife contains the whales
I’ve seen, that one in the Humboldt current
basking on the surface who seemed to watch
the seabirds wheeling around her head.
Eat the Rich & Share the Wealth,
Chapters 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
