Sick of "important" people

Leon Wieseltier is nauseated by the privileges claimed by the wealthy. Excerpt:

I am tiring of very important people. I never saw the owl of Minerva fly through Harvard Yard. In a society as wounded as our own, there is something repellent about the assertions of elitism. Its most awful expression, of course, is the acquiescence of almost everybody in the dynastic ambitions of the Kennedys. I can almost not imagine a more obvious mutilation of the meritocratic ideal than the appointment of Caroline Kennedy to the United State Senate. A Senate seat is a fucking valuable thing, you just don't give it away for nothing. But of course it will not be given away for nothing: the princess and her family will be delighted to pay for it. Ever since this democratic indignity was broached, the really smart talking point has been that she has the money for her eventual campaigns. In Michael Bloomberg's city, this is all you need to know.

Wieseltier goes on to observe that we're all learning -- or ought to be -- that wealth and power and position does not protect us from suffering:

Its insulation does not work. It holds back the imagination of misfortune, which diminishes the scope of natural sympathy-so that, say, Caroline Kennedy is only now discovering Syracuse-and inculcates the illusion that fate has an A-list. The result can be quite poignant. In The Year of Magical Thinking, the document of a struggle between the sense of mortality and the sense of privilege, Joan Didion recorded her humbling discovery, at the bedside of her dying daughter, that even "the very successful" are helpless before their finitude. "They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at Justice or State. . . . I had myself for most of my life shared the same core belief in my ability to control events. If my mother was suddenly hospitalized in Tunis I could arrange for the American consul to bring her English-language newspapers and get her onto an Air France flight to meet my brother in Paris." Her mother was lucky in her daughter, but the belief in social class must never be allowed to reach so deeply into one's understanding of life. In these days of dread I prefer to linger over all the people who have never been able to facilitate a favor. The media that used to be fascinated by the pleasures of the rich is now fascinated by the pains of the rich, but the fascination is the same, and it contributed to the bubble that burst in all our faces, and it interferes now with what we really need to know.

We are being humiliated and chastened -- but we must strive to make this an occasion for spiritual growth. One recalls this passage from Psalm 90 (Psalm 89 in the Orthodox Bible):

Lord, Thou hast been our refuge in generation and generation.

Before the mountains came to be and the earth was formed and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting Thou art.

Turn not man away unto lowliness; yea, Thou has said: Turn back, ye sons of men.

For a thousand years in Thine eye, O Lord, are but as yesterday that is past, and as a watch in the night.

Things of no account shall their years be; in the morning like grass shall man pass away.

In the morning shall he bloom and pass away, in the evening shall he fall and grow withered and dry.

For we have fainted away in Thy wrath, and in Thine anger have we been troubled.

Thou has set our iniquities before Thee; our lifespan is in the light of Thy countenance.

For all our days are faded away, and in Thy wrath are we fainted away; our years have, like a spider, spun out their tale.

In God's eyes, most of us are "important" people -- that is, proud, and in need of learning humility. It could be that years from now, many of us will look back on this time as a gift that helped save us. Or not. It depends on us.