I had not seen him in over forty years, a friend from my stairwell at Balliol. I was unsuccessfully caging spare change outside the Nexus Global Youth Summit at the UN, when I saw my former friend entering. He apparently is now the President of a small country whose name I forget, there to talk about selling rain water as a social venture to raise the bottom billion and make a killing too, now that the rhinos are extinct. It is a poor dry country, somewhere among the former British colonies, known for the ivory trade, back in the day, when an earlier group of merchant-venturers brought civilization and profits to the dark continent. Seeing me naked and insane, my remaining hair matted with mud, he exclaimed, "My dear fellow, what happened to you! Have you been sent down, rusticated?" I told him, no Your Excellency,"deported from Paradise."He said, "Well, pip pip and all that," and saluted me with his Excellency hat, like Napoleon's, only with more ermine and a scarlet inner lining, apparently silk.
I have so many younger friends now, through blogging philanthropy, who write me off the record to say that they had lunch with an old college chum who is now at 45 making $3 mil a year in law, or business, or money management. I can hear in my friend's voices the old fear I had - what if outside this closed world of half deserved half lucky privilege, among the strivers and the scamsters, I am just another broken person, another upstart too clever by half, another loser? If I mention "wage theft," or unions, or minimum wage laws, the line goes cold. These are creatures not us. They are what we as preps on the upward path once called "wumps," or "townies," the hired hands who feed us in the food lines, change our beds, or stare at us enviously in the street. The Scouts changing our light bulbs, the Porters at the Gate. The breed apart as we called them once. We are creating or recreating the ranks and dominions of Imperial Britain, let's say, but without the class in social class. We call it meritocracy, but those on the inside know that on merits, if they fall there is no going back. We even say our business is Dynastic Wealth Planning. Are we this bright and this dense? I say we advisedly as I am addressing at the moment what appears to be a snow covered cardboard box, though I believe it is the domicile of another friend of mine, a doctorate in Theology, an Episcopal minister, who could not stay off the Communion Wine, the blood of Christ as he still calls it, toasting the moon. Perhaps he might share a drop.
Comments