Thoughts in a Haystack

I've been reading, first, Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and, now, her The Proud Tower. The first was about the first month of World War One and how, based on the decisions of individuals, it turned from a war of vast military maneuver that could have been, as every supposedly sophisticated ruler, politician, pundit and average man in the street, the latter about to become cannon-fodder, thought, over in a month, but, in fact, became a four year abattoir.

The second book is about the societies in the late 1800s and early 1900s that let that tragedy happen. In her section on Anarchists (who I have no sympathy for anymore than their bastard stepchildren, Libertarians) there is one account that resonates:

The poor lived in a society in which power, wealth and magnificent spending were never more opulent, in which the rich dined on fish, fowl and red meat at one meal, lived in houses of marble floors and damask walls and of thirty, forty or fifty rooms, wrapped themselves in furs in winter and were cared for by a retinue of servants who blacked their boots, arranged their hair, drew their baths and lit their fires. In this world, at a luncheon for Mme. Nellie Melba at the Savoy, when perfect peaches, a delicacy of the season, were served up "fragrant and delicious in their cotton wool," the surfeited guests made a game of throwing them at passers-by beneath the windows.

Our own over-wealthy, governmentally over-pampered, elite, such as the Koch Brothers, have, at least, learned not to pelt the proletariat with the Peach Melba. Instead, sanctioned by the courts, they throw billions of dollars at them in the form of commercials to convince the prols to vote against their own interests.

Will the disaster be any the less? Certainly, whatever disaster comes will almost completely skirt the new elite. We can only wish us prols the best.