Hey, do you remember that scene somewhere in the middle of The Great Gatsby when Rodney Dangerfield walked in and shouted, "Hey everybody! Let's all dip our heads into molten gold!"
No? Hmm, me neither. But that's what I was thinking of while watching this tour of Republican presidential ex-candidate Donald Trump's private 757 jet:
All in all, I give it a rating of "horrifying." I'm not sure what is creepiest: the soft-porn music apparently inspired in part by
The Shining, the gold-plated
everything (really, would you ask the man to fly in a plane in which the seat belts were
not gold-plated?) or the overall video production values, which are somewhere between an HGTV special and a wedding video. (You see, Timmy, when a man loves his plane very much ...)
Rolls Royce makes plenty of jet engines, but I've never seen prominent stickers on the side of other planes making sure people on the runway know it. They say the plane will seat forty-plus people, but wouldn't that mean some people had to sit in the dining room the whole time, while others were stuck in the lounge? The aforementioned gold-plated seat belts, because if your ass is going to be saved from possible destruction, it had better damn well do it in style; the home—sorry, "sky"—entertainment system, and the additional one for the guests, and the additional-additional one for the Trump bedroom; the Trump logo—sorry, "family crest"—everywhere; the silk walls ...
You know, I could go on and on about the various features of Trump's lovely airwhale, including wondering whether or not Trump would have put in any of those luxuries in if he didn't intend to make a video afterwards to show them off to people, but instead I can't help of the horrible cruelty involved in making this fellow possibly pay the same tax rates as he might have in the 1990s. And what kind of monster would have government cut the depreciation schedule of this jet from seven years to five years? No, my friends, I say that in such a world the living would envy the dead.
These delicate flowers, the ultra, comically rich, are the people that Eric Cantor and other Republicans are dedicating their entire careers towards protecting from harm. We're supposed to pity them, because without them, we wouldn't have Rich People Porn, in which they get to show off their accomplishments (that is, their purchases) to the rest of us. It's trickle-down, you see: We feel richer just by watching them be rich!
The wealthy control America, but buffoons like Donald Trump, I expect, don't really care about such things. As long as everything they touch is gold plated, they are content enough. Not even the lure of being president is quite enough to call them away from that.