...and propel economic inequality to still greater heights, the newspapers are full of stories charting how increasingly, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “the rich are different from you and me.” While the growing distance between the billionaires and the rest of us is challenging art directors to come up with charts that still will fit on the page, the stories, depressingly, often seem as if they could be written on autopilot. Is there any new way to dramatize the rise of the new mega-rich?
Actually, yes. On Sunday, The New York Times ran a story revealing that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was the previously unrevealed purchaser of, at a cool $300 million, the world’s most costly home, the Chateau Louis XIV, just down the road from Versailles. (Bin Salman, it turns out, is also the guy who recently plunked down $450 million for that painting of Jesus, presumably by Da Vinci.)
Its name and neighborhood notwithstanding, the Chateau Louis XIV isn't an old palace but brand new digs, on which construction was completed just two years ago. “To the naked eye,” the Times reports, “it appears to have been built in the time of Versailles … but the 17th-century design camouflages 21st-century technology.” Set on 57 landscaped acres, complete with a gold-leafed fountain and a guardhouse modeled on Marie Antoinette’s cottage at Versailles, the fountains, sound system, and lights can all be controlled by the Prince’s (or the Grand Vizier’s, or the Master of the Hounds’) iPhone.
The Times also notes that, “the moat includes a transparent underwater chamber with sturgeon and koi swimming overhead.”
The moat. Thank you, Mr. Crown Prince. By bringing back the moat, you have resurrected the most precisely apropos symbol—le moat juste, if you will—for our new age of inequality. There’s thems on the inside, and thems on the outs, and what better way to signal that divide than a moat, which commoners will be able to cross only after extensive vetting and security checks?
How about inserting moats into the Republican tax bill? Maximum marginal personal tax rate of 37 percent for the rich, and, say, just 7 percent for the rich with moats? What better expression could there be of Republican philosophy?
