Money & Greed
You know, folks, Don King is the poster child for greed in this culture, but if you look closely, you can see all of our names listed in the fine print.
Now, I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but ever since Midas first discovered that a golden touch precludes masturbation, greed has driven more people than a Bombay bus driver during the opening weekend of Six Flags Over Ganges.
Anyway, with the physical dangers inherent in other forms of excess, greed is the last safe vice. And as we get farther away from the permissiveness of the sixties and seventies, we’ve become way more interested in mutual funds than we are in mutual orgasms.
Look, I’m just as guilty as the next guy. While looking at the video monitor during my last colonoscopy, I asked the doctor if he could run the Dow Jones ticker across the bottom of the screen.
Money in one form or another has always been around, and so have the less-than-noble feelings that money seems to engender. I’m sure the guy doing abstract expressionist smears of pterodactyl dung on his cave wall was pissed off because the guy in the other cave doing schlocky drawings of mastodons playing poker was driving a Jaguar. . . An actual Jaguar.
Look, I’ve gotta tell ya, I like money. It’s neat and tidy and clean. It’s fun to fold and stack and smell and look at. It comes in denominations that are easy to keep track of – fives, tens, twenties, hundreds. Its just plain fun to count money and I often do it in a loud falsetto while wearing nothing but a captain’s hat and a coin changer.
All right, maybe that’s just me, but the point is, it’s not what the money represents or what it can buy, it’s the money itself I like. The harmony of a five, the balance of a ten, the cute toughness of a nickel, those plucky pennies. . . I just like money. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a roll of dimes up my ass as you read this. Not a whole roll . . . Just about, yeah, a dollar ten.
Look, let’s face facts. Greed is a by-product of a capitalist system. This is the land of possibilities, and we are all free to partake of the many possibilities that are open to us. You can want to live well and still hang on to some principles. Why, take me, for instance. HBO pays me a handsome salary and gives me an absolutely open forum to discuss whatever I want, week after week. They have no agenda to advance. Sure, HBO could make me its puppet to disseminate whatever ideas they want, along with the high-quality programming that you’ve come to expect from HBO. But they won’t do that. So remember, it’s not TV. It’s HBO.
Given that money is a national obsession, I think we need to take our head out of our assets once in a while and share the wealth. Now, people show their philanthropy in different ways. Ted Turner once gave $1 billion to the United Nations. And last week I donated an Entertainment 2000 coupon book to my kid’s school. But not the half-price carnuba wax ticket. Oh no, that’s for daddy.
And folks, why not give your money away? Not only does it make you feel good, but trying to accumulate the most cash is futile because the game’s over, people. Bill Gates has won. Don’t even try and beat him. You can’t do it. Bill Gates is a white Persian cat and a monocle away from being a villain in a James Bond movie. I mean the man is worth $90 billion! Apparently a good haircut costs $91 billion.
Hey look, the general consensus is that what moves man the most is the quest for money. But I happen to believe that man is also moved by a deep sense of honor and an even deeper sense of doing good.
And once you’ve achieved that selfless dedication to your fellow man, that cognizance of the fact that we are all interdependent members of the same grand family, well then you can hit the lecture circuit and start raking in the cash like a clean whore in Saigon.
Anyway, here are some signs that you might be a little too obsessed with money:
- You refer to intercourse as “the Horizontal Audit.”
- When in the midst of a dire emergency, you call 911 collect.
- During a private audience with the Pope, all you can think of is “I wonder what this cat’s pullin’ down?”
And finally, your net worth has more zeros in it than a Star Trek convention.
Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.
From “I Rant, Therefore I Am” by comedian Dennis Miller – 2000.
Managing IA's 