What's the point in being loaded, if you don't splash it about?
Wealth is wasted on the rich. They are no longer up to the task of being affluent; these days they don't even seem capable of putting on a good show.
What's the point of all that money if you can't splash it about, if only to remind us down-at-heels what we're missing?
Maybe the modern rich lack the necessary fortitude and grim determination to flaunt their gotten gains in the face of adversity. It's as if they've lost the will to display their point of difference: money.
What a shame. No matter how wicked life's vicissitudes, it is beholden upon the world's new plutocrats to carry on fiddling, even if Rome burns; especially if Rome burns.
The bigger the conflagration, the more people want to see a show as vulgar as Las Vegas on Independence Day.
Marie Antoinette understood this and is still remembered. She may have lost her head but her name remains on plebeian lips, unlike the anonymous gazillionaires of modern times.
A modern exception is Conrad Black - Baron Black of Crossharbour, if you please - who may have lost much of his former wealth after a spell in jail but who carries on as if he is still master of all he surveys.
As a consequence, we all remember Black's name.
Yet in the face of natural and financial disaster, news comes that the world's uber-wealthy are participating in the spirit of austerity by putting away the glad rags, the tiaras and glass slippers, all out of some misplaced sense of solidarity with their fellow man.
How utterly wrong they are. The ridiculously moneyed may share the same genus as the underclass but that's where the similarity stops. They are different and we expect them to know it.
The Middle East is an Aladdin's Cave of the world's wealthiest, a place where it is actually good manners to ask the price of whatever tasteless ostentation the oil masters care to display. It is also a region in turmoil. Is it too much to ask of the sheiks and emirs, then, to stage an outlandish extravaganza, a display of wealth so immense it makes Dubai look like a bang-up lunch at an Anglican fund-raiser?
But instead of a modern Xanadu, we get these mealy-mouthed remarks from the head of an exclusive premium jet company servicing Middle Eastern royalty and a grab-bag of the region's petty despots: "The crisis is very unfortunate, but it has boosted business for us."
Oh, dear. He sounds almost apologetic. It just won't do.
The rich used to cut an altogether different dash. Turn-of-the-20th-century United States writer Frederick Townsend Martin, who was intimately acquainted with life among the idle rich, knew the score: "We are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it by throwing all the tremendous weight of ... our money, our political connections, our purchased senators, our public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislature, any political platform, any presidential campaign that threatens the integrity of our estate."
Among the plutocrats was newspaper baron Harrison Gray Otis, who used to ride around Los Angeles in a monstrous touring car featuring a mounted cannon on top.
Now that's the spirit. Compare Otis' cannon to Alan Gibbs' armoured vehicles and the Kiwi's efforts to display his wealth look positively impoverished.
Gibbs took his millions and headed for Blighty, accepting life as a small fish in a large pond. He may still sponsor the arts but Gibbs' apparent reluctance to splash out in public means that these days it's mostly business hacks who remember his name.
Marie Antoinette, meanwhile, lives on forever.
