Cold Shower Camelot, The Auction Volume I, Article XXX
Dr. Fisher, I am a working stiff with a mortgage on my house, along with a second mortgage on one kid’s braces, a college tuition loan for another kid, a car loan on one car to match a lease on another, seven credit cards which are close to maxing out, in which I can barely pay the minimum due on them each month, and I read Sotheby’s is having its umpteenth auction on the “Kennedy collection.” President Kennedy is gone, as is Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, as well as John F. Kennedy, Jr., but the auctions go on. My reaction is why, is there no shame? Do we Americans have no dignity at all, no sense of grace?
Sotheby’s is a business, and a very lucrative business, indeed, in selling what people value. It is the whole idea behind the success of the Internet’s e-Bay. As for the “Kennedy collection,” America claims political independence from Great Britain, but not necessarily cultural independence from the British aristocracy. Great Britain insists the aristocracy was dissolved as an aftermath of WWII, but not in the minds of many Americans that cling to wealth as an expression of it.
The Kennedy’s brought Camelot to the American consciousness, mainly through the efforts of Jacqueline Kennedy. She had been a Bouvier with a French ancestry, and a natural haughtiness that could rival French president Charles De Gaulle’s whom, incidentally, she knew rather well.
With a touch of Boston Brahmin, a dash of French sophistication, and a complement of British mythology of the Knights of the Round Table, the White House of President Kennedy was a stage setting that father Joseph Kennedy, who had been in the movie business, couldn’t have constructed with more cunning. It was not real but the Kennedy presidency was not real, which proved the delight of the media and its paparazzi entourage.
Forgotten are the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the seeding of what would become the Viet Nam War, the Cuban Missile crisis, the provocation of the mafia, the obsession with Cuban president Castro and an even greater obsession with Jimmy Hoffa of the Teamsters Union, not to mention the administration’s early ambivalence toward the Civil Rights Movement.
For a brief moment in American history, appearance meant something if not everything. Pomp and circumstance were important to the Kennedy clan. Glamour and image were marketable ploys. Leadership was defined as charisma, and the Kennedys -- John, Robert and Ted – had presence, and knew how to orchestrate the press with consummate flair.
From Kennedy’s earliest days in the senate, where even his greatest supporters must concede he was lackluster, JFK was made a performer on a stage choreographed by his father. As a student in Great Britain while his father was US Ambassador, he was credited with writing While England Slept, and as a senator he was acclaimed as the author of Profiles in Courage, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Historians now claim that his good friend Ted Sorenson had more than a little to do with the construction of both.
Joe Kennedy determined that Profiles would be a national best seller, and assured that it would by buying up the first edition around the country. He was awarded for his efforts as the book made The New York Times bestseller list. He also engineered the book’s winning the Pulitzer Prize.
Jacqueline Bouvier had a father, who was not wealthy, but lived as if he were. The Kennedys and Bouviers epitomized a time, when what you saw was not necessarily so, and what you were meant to think was more a mirage than reality. It is no accident that Hollywood loved JFK, and that he and his brother Robert loved it in return. It was a celluloid age and we were drawn into the Kennedy make believe world treating it as if it were the real world we were experiencing. We are still in a state of withdrawal from Camelot nearly a half-century later.
When costume jewelry worn by the Kennedy clan worth $65 is auctioned off at more than $200,000, you have what Lewis Lapham calls a demonstration of America’s civil religion, which is money and class. Again, what works at home enterprising Americans believe should work even better abroad. So, we see this pretend psychology and this phony culture being exported to the world-at-large. The evidence is at Sotheby as some of the most enthusiastic bidders on these Kennedy trinkets are foreigners.
These trinkets are being sold as a “piece of history.” I wonder. My sense is that once the novelty wears off of the extravagant price paid for these baubles that their purchasers will be embarrassed, echoing the sentiment, “Isn’t this ridiculous?” Wealth, especially ludicrous wealth, is by definition, giddy.
But for Americans, wealth is not enough. Wealth, alone, is not a satisfier to the American wealthy. Wealth must be flaunted, but tastefully so. Wealth must be envied in an atmosphere of televised charity benefits where wealth in all its majesty can smile and curtsy as if at the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. How else can the wealthy generate distance from the hoi polloi?
I sense that wealth is less a predilection to greed and more a quest for identity, a valiant attempt to belong where manners, social connections, civility, and sophistication count for something. Alas, the quest for wealth is so time consuming, and few generate it through inherited wealth that it leaves little time to acquire a cultural patina. Therefore, it must be purchased. Herein the Sotheby’s of the world come into play with a vengeance. They know their clientele to their finger size.
We have a class and caste system that rivals India’s. No one will acknowledge it, but everyone dutifully treats it as sacrosanct. We are a measuring universe. We are forever obsessively competing and comparing, ever trying desperately to get a leg up on the other guy. Why else would Forbes 400 wealthiest Americans be an annual best seller? Many on the list try frantically to inch their way up to the next level each year. Others try just as frenziedly to remain on the list as verification of their authenticity. Being rich is not enough. You must belong. Americans may be generous to a fault, but we are just as crass. Otherwise, I don’t get the whole phenomenon of the middleclass rooting for rich people who make the Forbes 400 by purchasing this annual issue.
I have seldom met any American interested in history that was not teaching it or writing about it; in music who was not a performer or a culture vulture who delighted in punishing me with his knowledge, or in literature who read for the simple pleasure in the reading who was not writing a book or planning to do so.
In every instance, the activity had to have an end beyond the activity itself. We are obsessed with the utility of our passions. They must have a productive end. Seldom is anything an end in itself, but a measurable means to an end.
College has become job training. You go to college to earn more money, why else would you go, right? Newspapers publish how much you will make with a high school diploma, a college education, and even more with advanced degrees. Who goes to college today to enrich their mind for no other reason than the enrichment? The answer is, not even the idle rich. There must be purpose behind loving opera, delighting in symphony concerts, or in reading literature. Otherwise, why would you do it?
What an auction allows is a moment of frivolity amongst equally uptight class-conscious pretenders.
Billy Rose, the late Broadway entrepreneur, acquired a substantial portfolio of AT&T stock when it had value. When asked why he so vigorously followed the stock market, he replied, “Money is how an American knows who he is.”
With the United States having such a short cultural history, identity is important, and that identity is associated with wealth. Wealth, in turn, is associated with happiness. Happiness is associated with class. And class is associated with having more couth, coin, and culture than your neighbor.
So, the Camelot auctions perennially conducted at Sotheby are consistent with the American character and not a departure from it. We import international sophistication and export vulgarity. The Sotheby auctions demonstrate how truly democratic a nation we are for those at the top of the socio-economic pyramid share a common level of banality with the rest of us. The affluent collect art rather than produce it. They build mansions that mimic classic designs of the originals elsewhere. And we in the middleclass in turn, build replicas of their designs in affordable housing and cover our walls with cheap prints of original art that the rich purchase in the original.
Perhaps one day we will become a society less self-conscious, less self-congratulatory, less self-indulgent, and much less ostentatious. How will we know?
We will know when a Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis mother-of-pearl necklace of glass again has a street value of $65, and its Sotheby purchaser will brave the world with his six-figure loss. People will be judged on who they are, not what they have. And we as a people will sever the umbilicus of cultural dependence with the anachronism of the British Crown and its make believe world. But don’t hold your breath until that happens.
Meanwhile, I would get rid of your seven credit cards and have one debit card, which means living within your means. Currently, you are creating new members of the Forbes 400 with the interest accruing on these credit cards, which is nothing short of usury. I would keep the braces on the one child because she or he is entering a cosmetic world, but I would expect the other child to work his or her way through college, if college is what he or she truly desires. You are doing no one a favor, including yourself, by being a beast of burden to everyone else, and lamenting the state of Sotheby’s when your world is not a whole lot different. You were not meant to be a knight in shining armor. You were meant to have a life, which means to be able to get off the carousel and smell the flowers while you still can.
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Copyright (1996) see Dr. Fisher’s books and articles on the Internet.
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