Rembrandt could not afford a Rembrandt.

Back in the autumn of 2008, I was listening one evening to the KGO talk-radio show of the late Gene Burns, when a woman called in from Marin County, California, to state that while she admired many aspects of the Kenyan, she and her husband, they just could not support him. Because the Kenyan, he had vowed that, in his administration, taxes would rise for those earning more than $250,000 per year. And this woman's family’s income, it was roughly $360,000. And yet they were at the very door of the poorhouse. There was simply no way that these people, they could afford, to contribute any more money, to the government.

As the call continued, it became clear that they were really scraping by, these people. While each of the three children had his or her own car, one child was mortified, because his car was nearly a year old. Some days, he was too embarrassed to leave the house, or even his room, because of the car situation. The kitchen-remodel, it had been put off for more than three months, and the wine collection, it was not growing: thus, in good conscience, they could no longer entertain friends. The husband, he was under great strain, struggling to pour sufficient sums into the various civic, sports, and fraternal organizations that required his membership. They had recently had to wait several weeks, all of them, before outfitting each member of the family with the latest Apple product-releases. The situation had actually grown so dire, that some nights, they now had to eat dinner at home.

Burns eventually exploded, lighting into the woman like he was a Leveller. There was some irony in this. As for much of his adult life Burns had been a libertarian; indeed, at one point he sought the presidency as standard-bearer of the Libertarian Party. But then Burns was struck gravely ill while vacationing in Tahiti. Months, he spent, in a Tahitian hospital. When it was time for him to be discharged, Burns was presented with an accounting of costs, that was completely beyond his capacity to pay. But there was nothing to pay. Because Tahiti remains yoked to France, and thus Burns had been, over those long many months, a guest of the French health-care system. The bill simply itemized the costs of the care he had received, but he himself would pay nothing. His life had been saved, and his medical care paid for, by the people of France.

This experience caused Burns to question everything he thought he had known. Because, according to his own crusty libertarian creed, he should have been treated, in that hospital, until his own modest American insurance was exhausted, and then he should have been dumped into the street, to die. But that isn't what happened. And so, ultimately, out of his own experience, Burns concluded that "libertarian," it is simply shorthand for "selfish healthy comfortable ignorant first-world white man." And thus, he changed.

It can often proceed in that way. For "libertarians."

People like that Marin woman, they were greatly a-feared that the Kenyan, he would "redistribute the wealth." And dang if their fears weren't justified. Because under the Kenyan presidency, the wealth of the world, it has shifted in favor of people like the Marin woman. So that 1% of the humans on the planet now hoard more wealth than all the rest of the humans, combined.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ge9UWMPmIE]

Burns had no sympathy for the Marin woman. I, on the other hand, did. Because I know Marin County, and the people who live there, and I know that, for the people who live there, it is not easy to live there, on any amount of money. Because Marin is a yawning bottomless hole that can easily swallow all dollars thrown into it. I have no doubt that to this woman all of her family's expenses were absolutely justified. She spoke completely without guile: she truly believed there was great "need" for all her children to receive a new car each year, to spend on a kitchen remodel more money than is the GDP of Burundi, etc.

Money induces in those who possess it a sort of special relativity: the more that is accumulated, the more "needs" arise on which it "must" be spent. Robin Williams famously observed that the first and most essential message one receives from a hit of cocaine, is to take another hit of cocaine. In this cocaine is simply mimicking money. Which is forever whispering that there is not enough of it, that more money must be obtained, and midas-piled.

But the midas-pile, it never grows high enough. Because eternally monies must be scraped off the top to satisfy various "needs."

Take the encounter that occurred between John Travolta and Steven Spielberg, at Robin Williams' 40th birthday party, up there in Napa.

Steven [Spielberg] and Kate [Capshaw] were hanging around with John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and a few others. Travolta is licensed for multi-engine jets. Somebody asked, "So John, you flew your own plane up here? What kind?"

"A Learjet."

Steven broke in, "Oh yeah, a Learjet. Do you have the kind where you can just walk into it, or do you have to duck your head?"

"You have to duck your head," replied Travolta.

Steven turned to Kate and said, "We don't have to duck our heads on ours, do we?"

Truly a bummer maximus, for Travolta. Publicly, his penis, it had been shown to be, in a significant way, smaller, than Spielberg's. Travolta would now have to go to his midas-pile, and there scrape off enough monies so he too could get hisself a Lear jet, where he too wouldn't have to duck his head, when he walked into it. Otherwise, all his money, in vain.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQAjQjfXRrA]

Humans in the future will cast the stink-eye at the very notion of airplanes. But "private jets"—these they will regard as evidence of an actual brain malformation.

The entire era: it is very strange. All the world disordered, in service to the extraction and employment of the subterranean liquified bodies of creatures who lived and died millennia ago. What a mad rushing about, everyone, upon these corpses, embarked upon. But it'll soon be over now.

I thought about the Marin woman when I read about "luxury watchmaker" Yvan Arpa creating a timepiece fashioned of dinosaur dung. It sells for $11,000. For although I am sure the Marin woman would not "need" such a watch, somewhere out there is somebody who does. Somebody also, I have no doubt, "needed" Alba's "Crisis Tourbillon" watch, which was created as a "crisis-defying" response to the 2008-2009 world financial meltdown, and which retailed for $175,000. I myself am intrigued, for the sheer absurdity of it, with Arpa's timepiece wherein he "created the first 'watch' which does not tell time. That piece, which costs 300,000 [Swiss] francs, only tells day from night." I don’t happen to have 300,000 Swiss francs, also known as $295,834.58, at the moment, so, for the present, I don't "need" this watch.

The watch I most recently "needed," it does actually tell the time, and it depicts a cat emerging from a galactic cloud. It cost $15.

In Burundi, where the average annual income is $251, buying that $15 watch would be like me buying a new car. Out of reach.

Arpa had previously infused dust from the moon, and rust from the Titanic, in his timepieces; with his dinosaur-dung watch, "I decided to take it a step further and use the forbidden material—coprolite." Arpa maintains that the $11,000 price-tag is "reasonable." For it is "unique," he says, and "contains a piece of history."

Dinosaur parts had previously been placed in watches by Jean-Marie Schaller, who turned out a timepiece featuring fragments of bones from a 150-million-year-old herbivore that once snuffled around North America. Schaller asks about $293,000 for his watch, which comes with a certificate authenticating the bones.

Schaller and Arpa seem to be in some sort of competition. Schaller has used meteorites, and pieces of the Rosetta Stone, in his watches. In response, Alba has taken to blasting the casings of his watches with lightning strikes, or electric blasts of up to one million volts.

In the future, these men will insert in their watches tiny little bio-engineered humans, who will run on a sort of hamster wheel, to keep the clock ticking. Kind of like the little children, thrust down into the bowels of the machine morass, who keep the train running, in the true-life documentary film Snowpiercer.

Fortunately, such will not occur in this universe.

Divorce trials can provide an interesting window into the nature of human monetary "needs."

Back in 1983, when he was covering the Florida divorce of Roxanne and Peter Pulitzer, Hunter S. Thompson

spent a lot of time poring over copies of the Pulitzers' personal tax returns and financial ledgers submitted as evidence by the Pulitzer family accountants, and I have made a certain amount of wild sense of it all, but not enough. I understood, for instance, that these people were seriously rich. Family expenditures for 1981 totaled $972,980 for a family of four: one man, one woman, two four-year old children, and a nanny who was paid $150 a week.

That is a lot of money, but so what? We are not talking about poor people here, and a million dollars a year for family expenditures is not out of line in Palm Beach. The rich have special problems. The Pulitzers spent $49,000 on basic "household expenditures" in 1981 and another $272,000 for "household improvements." That is about $320,000 a year just to have a place to sleep and play house. There was another $79,600 listed for "personal expenses" and $79,000 for boat maintenance. "Business" expenditures came in at $11,000 and there was no listing at all for taxes. As for "charity," the Pulitzers apparently followed the example of Ronald Reagan that year and gave in private, so as not to embarrass the poor.

There was, however, one item that begged for attention. The figure was $441,000 and the column was "miscellaneous and unknown." Right. Miscellaneous and unknown: $441,000. And nobody in the courtroom even blinked.

When Frank and Jamie McCourt, former owners of the Los Angeles Dodgers, were in the midst of divorce proceedings, Jamie McCourt informed the court that she "needed" $988,845 in spousal support. Per month.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE5KdedrOkY]

Louis XV of France would certainly have purchased and worn a $282,000 watch that did not tell the time—he might have even worn one on each arm. He would not at all have regarded $988,845 per month as an exorbitant amount to lavish on a favored mistress. And Louis himself definitely spent far more each year on "miscellaneous and unknown" than a mere $441,000. Like people who live in Marin, Louie, he had a lot of "needs."

This is the guy who famously remarked, "Apres moi, le deluge." Or, "After me, the deluge." There seems to be some controversy as to whether he was uttering a prediction—the French Revolution broke out 15 years after his death—or simply observing that he didn't give a shit what happened after he exited the planet. Considering the way that he lived: perhaps the latter. Louis could have everything he wanted in life, and so he took it. He broke his country in the process, but that mattered little to him. Eighteenth Century France was still somewhat a place of faith, but it is not unlikely that Louis assumed he had nothing to answer for in any afterlife: he certainly outranked everyone on earth; maybe he figured he could pull rank on any god, too.

Still and all, with all that he had: was the guy happy and hopeful? That's his portrait, below. See what you think.

Louis XV was carried off by smallpox, a disease respecting no rank, which struck him on April 27, 1774, while he was dining in Versailles with mistress Madame du Barry. Within two weeks, Louis' entire body had become one big black scab. No one would go near him. When finally he perished, his "pestiferous remains" so spooked the court that he was not embalmed, as was royal tradition, nor was his heart cut out and separately encoffined, as had been the hearts of his ancestors before him. Instead, alcohol and quicklime were liberally poured over him, and one lone courtier hauled the boxed monarch to the Saint Denis Basilica. And thus, the deed, it was done.

Smallpox is a disease, unique to humans, that humans succeeded in eradicating from the earth. Almost. Samples of the virus persist to this day, in two laboratories. One in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, and one in Koltsovo, Siberia, Russian Federation. Because the two biggest mad-as-hatters bullies of the time, the United States, and Russia, just couldn't bring themselves to pull the final plug. Just in case. They might, someday, "need," to use it. Smallpox. Make it alright.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIcmk8WA10A]