The Battle of Style Over Substance

I was reading Briane Pagel's NCAA basketball tournament preview and this part here really stuck in my mind:

I'm always ranting about how we're cutting government services even though there's more than enough money to go around; we just have our priorities mixed up. Why on God's green Earth would the City of New York build a golf course? And if the City is going to build a golf course, shouldn't it be free to taxpayers, the way (most?) parks are? And isn't building a golf course and charging money to get into it just a regressive tax, transferring city tax dollars from poor to rich? Everyone pays the same tax rate, but people who can afford $125-per-round golf just got a huge $(##&%^#$ subsidy from New York City...

...a city that voted, just 3 weeks after approving the "Let's Give Trump Some Money to Subsidize the 1% Deal", to lay off teachers, close fire stations, and eliminate day care subsidies because there wasn't enough money.

I want you to compare and contrast these two paragraphs from two stories:

In another attack on the poor, $192 million is being eliminated from the Advantage rent subsidy program, one of Bloomberg’s signature programs designed to help homeless families leave public shelters.

And this one

On January 18, New York City officially approved a deal for Trump to manage the course, which will be located at Ferry Point Park and open in 2014. Under the agreement, the city (in other words, taxpayers) will be responsible for the estimated $184 million construction of the course.

I mean, Jesus Christ, America.

Jesus Christ indeed.  This is the kind of problem we have in America right now.  Our priorities are all out of whack.  We could help homeless people get a home...or we could build a golf course for the rich to hang out in.  Gee, what ever should we do?  Oh, right, let's build the fucking golf course.  This kind of shit happens all the time.  A city will say it has to lay off teachers, police, and firefighters to make ends meet and then will blow hundreds of millions building a new football stadium for a billionaire to charge hundreds of dollar so middle-to-low income people can watch millionaires play a child's game.  Or in Britain they're closing hundreds of libraries while you know they're spending far more money than that on the opening and closing ceremonies to the Olympics this year.  Not to mention how much they're spending in Afghanistan and so forth.

Closer to home, I was driving through Troy the other night and noticed all these fancy new halogen street lights they installed on one area of the road.  Yet this same city last year said it was so poor it had to close the library without a tax increase.  And don't even get me started on Detroit, where they're on the verge of being taken over by a financial manager (Dictator) while I'm sure there are still all sorts of sweetheart deals being handed out.

A lot of it is your plain old corruption, the kind of graft that's been going on for as long as democracy has.  But especially in cases like the golf course, there's another element to.  People love displaying their wealth.  That's why you drive a Maserati or Ferrari or wear a Rolex or wear a couple million in gold/jewels on your body.  It's the need to show not only that you're rich, but that you're important.

Even poor people need status symbols, something I mentioned in a depressing November entry.  All the time I see rusty piece of shit cars that nevertheless have an expensive stereo you can hear thumping away from two miles away.  Then I think, "Shit, for as much as you spent on that stereo you could have bought a real car."  But the point is to show off how cool you are, even if your car is a piece of shit.

The point being that when it comes to politics, no one gives a shit about the guy who does a capable job and keeps the trains running on time.  That guy is BORING.  It's a lot better if you can point to a fancy golf course or football palace and say, "I built that!"  Think of it this way:  who gets his name in the history books, one of those Roman emperors who kept the chariots running on time and the barbarians from the gates or the emperor who built the Coliseum and staged huge, bloody gladiator fights?

It's the Coliseum guy because STYLE is always more important than substance.  That's always how it's been since the emperors and the Egyptian pharaohs trying to outdo each other with their burial pyramids.  Alexander wouldn't have been so great if he'd just stuck around Macedonia keeping things running smoothly.  In other words, being a politician isn't just being a good administrator; it's about being a good showman.  So you build the golf course and you can say, "Hey, look, me and Donald Trump are building a golf course!  Isn't that awesome?"  And years later that golf course will still be there so you can crow about your legacy.  That a bunch of homeless people have probably died or families burned up in a fire is something no one will remember in the long term.