The author of "The Great Gatsby" once said, "Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me."
He was referring to a certain kind of rich, the kind who ooze entitlement. He loathed, and portrayed in his novel's characters, both the clueless extravagance of new money and the clueless self-importance of those for whom life's persistent question was, "What if I lost it all?"
Gatsby, of course, would steal it all back. To-the-manor-born Tom Buchanan would hit up his wife's paramour for a loan. Money does not build character, in other words. Money corrupts regardless of how old it is.
There is a similarly frantic feel to today's excessive spending by the very rich. The barrage of bling feels like a marketing campaign to me, one intended to persuade average Americans that money is a measure of quality, and that therefore the rich deserve every bit of their material advantage, lopsided as it is.
As St. Paul-born F. Scott Fitzgerald also said, "the rich believe, deep in their hearts, they are better than we are." The carelessness of the Roaring Twenties' rich caused the Great Depression, which caused the spread of fascism. We seem to be headed in a similar direction today.
Fitzgerald and his fellow native son Sinclair Lewis of Sauk Centre, Minn., each published his first novel almost a century ago, in 1920. "Scott" wrote "This Side of Paradise" at age 23. Lewis was 25 when "Main Street" made him world-famous and a hometown pariah.
Similarly, Scott was labeled a wannabe by those he fictionalized. Lewis was better-educated (on paper at least) than Scott. Still, some questioned whether Lewis deserved his Yale degree, just as there were those who kept Scott's secret that he never did actually graduate from Princeton.
I hope I don't confuse you by referring to Scott by his first name and Lewis by his last. The reasoning behind this is pure Scott. He loved to play with any tortured notion — Ernest Hemingway would have written "… loved to torture any notion" — and mine is that for a writer whose ear is his instrument, sound matters as much as sense. "Fitzgerald" suggests a kind of sobriety and maturity that Scott himself never acquired — and never really wanted so much as he wanted respect as a writer and a man of principle, and to be thought of as warm, funny and fun.