I'm not going to write about how Trump again proved he's above the law by getting barely a slap on the wrist in his sentencing this morning. Instead, I will focus on another wrist. This is the wrist of Mark Zuckerberg who, of course, is in the news having announced that he is ceasing to have fact checking on Facebook and Instagram.
Rather than that, I am going to write about this:
If Zuckerberg thought nobody would notice that he was wearing one of the most expensives watches anyone can buy, he's unbelievably naive about the way people scrutinize the internet. I think he absolutely knew what he was doing.
What we see with Trump and his billionare cronies is worse than an unabashed display of their wealth. There's a malevolence in what they do.
Ho-hum, we expect this of some of the super-wealthy. A goodly number of them were happy to show the public how rich they were in shows like Life Styles of the Rich And Famous. It ran for 11 years. They have pictorial articles about them in glossy magazines. The proletariat eats this crap up.
What the billionaire MAGA oligarchs are doing is rubbing the noses of their adversaries in their privilege. They enjoy knowing they can get away with just about anything.
There's no "just about" with Trump. He thinks he can get away with absolutely anything. I doubt that the likes of Zuckerberg and Musk think that they could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and suffer no consequenses. They probably think the can do everything else, but probably not commit a cold blooded murder in plain sight.
The only one of these billionaires who seemed to have gone a bit too far was Jeff Bezos. He got a lot of negative press when he nixed letting The Washington Post make an endorsement prior to the election. It is a telling observation about the times we live in that he got as much blowback later when he spiked the Ann Telnais editorial cartoon. Of course that cartoon expresses what I am writing about, i.e., that money can buy just about anything. Still, Bezos is not running for anything and he can easily afford to loose some Washington Post subscribers.
The Zuckerberg watch wearing story may seem like a small thing. However, since men, unless they're rappers, generally don't wear jewelry and thus can display their wealth by wearing an expensive necklace. Watches are the most visible way men can demonstrate their wealth by how they look.
Women, oh say let's pick Melania Trump at random, have their own way of showing off privilege. See:
Perhaps Musk, who doesn't collect and wear expensive watches (as far as I know), is a tad bit more secure than Zuckerberg. Who the hell knows? Both seem to have been nerdy kids who may not have been popular. I'll put it simply saying that they may be playing their own script of "The Revenge of the Nerds." Since I am here today to bury these guys, not to psychoanalyze them, I'll refer you to the following which describes them as feeling like nerds when they were growing up:
These two proved to the world that their brains were more valuable in the long run than being a prom king. What both of them have in common with Trump that they like to rub our noses in their privilege.
Update:
