The Let-Them-Eat-Cake Moment

It’s prob­a­bly a bad thing that Pam and I are both home, watch­ing CNN.

The lat­est stun­ning drop of the Dow Jones Indus­trial Aver­age has us both upset (her more than me, I think). Now, we’re in that ‘Can’t look away from this car crash’ mode.

This morn­ing, we saw the head of Lehman Broth­ers, Richard Fuld, tes­ti­fy­ing to Con­gress. They brought up a slide, detail­ing the nearly 1/2 bil­lion that he made in the last 7 years or so in salary, stock options, and who knows what else. Later, they showed heli­copter fly­overs of 3 of his homes in Florida, Col­orado and Cal­i­for­nia, as well as his $22 mil­lion Man­hat­tan pent­house. I kep think­ing of the line “It’s good to be the King”, said by Mel Brooks when he’s play­ing Louis XVI in ‘His­tory of the World, Part 1″.

How­ever, it was another French­man (or French­woman) who came to mind a bit later in the broad­cast. Wolff Blitzer had a call into Don­ald Trump. He asked the multi-billion dol­lar busi­ness mag­nate, socialite, tele­vi­sion per­son­ality and John McCain sup­porter what Amer­i­cans can do at this point. “Dream”, he said, “Dream of when things will get bet­ter.” He also spoke of how well he was doing, hav­ing closed a deal sell­ing sev­eral prop­er­ties to ‘The Rus­sians’ and chuck­led with Blitzer over the fact that he got his money before their mar­ket tanked as well. Ear­lier in the morn­ing, I saw this comic, thanks to Dar­ren Bare­foot.

Marie Antoinette could not have put it bet­ter, Mon­sieur Trump.