“Whatever else you may want to say about me, Elie, I want you to acknowledge that I always kept you and your sister free from want.  You never knew hunger or any other kind of physical deprivation when you were kids.  All that stuff on the physiological and safety strata of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid, I always took care of all that,” said the skeleton of my father.    

You always kept my sister and me free from want.

“I might have missed a few beats on that safety layer at the foundation of Maslow’s pyramid, since you two were never safe from my rage, but for the most part, I gave you and your sister freedom from want.  

“I realize now that when I was fuming at you two for being fucking spoiled middle class whiners, that your feeling of entitlement to decent food, and nice clothes and a warm place to sleep, was not unreasonable.  Why would you not expect those things, things that everyone you knew had?  

“On the other hand, it would probably be impossible for you to understand how crucial those things you took for granted were unless you’d experienced not having them.  How can you appreciate getting enough good food every day if you’ve never been hungry?  Clean drinking water, even, if you’ve spent years thirsty.  Or how can you not take for granted your right to select the exact clothes you want to wear if you’ve never been humiliated by the other kids making fun of the shabby clothes your parents sent you out into the world in?  Safety in your home?  You can’t appreciate the importance of that if you’ve never lived in a house that wasn’t safe, if you never had to sprint in terror in the middle of the night to wake up a tough guy cousin to come over  and strong-arm the drunks who were about to beat up your old man.  Unless you’ve suffered want, something most of the world experiences every day, you’ll have no idea how important it is to be kept free of want.”

I grant you all of that, every word of it.

“Heh, there you go again,” said the skeleton, making air quotes with bony fingers over the word “you”.  

“Good of you to grant me what you just had me say, but let’s go one step further. My brother and I were not safe in our house, not safe from our mother, not safe to eat, shit, walk down the street.  I didn’t tell you much about this when I was alive, and so necessarily you are speculating here, but my brother and I were very often hungry.  You see how skinny we were in those pictures, it’s not because we were on gluten-free diets and doing Pilates.   We were skinny because we got barely enough to eat.  

“So you and your sister always fasted on Yom Kippur, and you still do.  One day a year you get a taste of the feeling my brother and I knew on a daily basis.  Every day was Yom Kippur for us, and at the end of our normal twelve or fifteen hour fast they’d dress us in our synagogue clothes and drag us down to First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill, that narrow white church-looking building not far from 1123 Howard Street.   We’d sit in the synagogue for three or four hours, our stomachs rumbling, enduring an endless service in a language we didn’t understand.   We were forced to praise God for his limitless kindness and mercy even as we had no breakfast or lunch.  

“I never mentioned it to you guys because it would have sounded like the typical bitter self-pitying whine of the father cursing his kids who complain about a mere a five mile walk to school, when he had walked twenty miles to school every day, barefoot in the snow and ice, after six hours of chores in the little cabin he was born in, a cabin he’d built with his own hands.  

“You know, everybody had it worse than everybody else.  I grew up in the Depression, in the deepest part of it, in a godforsaken town that was a magnet for local anti-Semites, as far as we could tell.   I was five when the stock market crashed.   My father was already out of work when the world economy went into the toilet after the World War and ten roaring years of reckless profiteering.  We were the poorest of the poor.  You cannot have a clue how much damage that simple thing, being poor, does to a child.  

“When FDR was talking about his second Bill of Rights, the right to be free of want was the biggest of them.  Essential things no American child should find herself wanting include the right to not be hungry, the right not to be afraid, the right to have a decent shelter, and clothes, and a quality public education, along with the ability to go immediately to a reasonably priced doctor if you had a health concern.   These things seem beyond dispute as minimums for all citizens in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but we have to remember that this has always been a slave nation, too.  

“You’ll have your well-meaning post-racial racists point out the cold fact that slavery was abolished over 150 years ago.  However, the values of a nation that had no problem building its wealth based on slave labor, and mass murder of the locals, have not really changed.  45,000 unneccesary deaths in Emergency Rooms every year in America?  Part of the price of freedom, Elie.  There are people who can afford to not be treated essentially like slaves and the rest, who can afford nothing but being kicked in the nuts, powerless as slaves.  

“America has always been an experiment in democracy based on the consent of the governed subject to what was in the best interests of the the owners of massive slave work forces.  You had brief periods of social mobility, I was lucky enough to be born in one of those, as shitily unlucky as the first few decades of it were for me.  Millions of us in those years moved out of poverty into the middle class, we achieved the American Dream.  

“That Dream is largely an opium hallucination now, a poor person in the USA is less likely to emerge from poverty than a poor person in most other wealthy nations.   Not that the poor anywhere have easy access to an escape from poverty, but part of our American Exceptionalism is that it is, in fact, exceptionally hard for an American to climb out of poverty, no matter how tightly he grasps his bootstraps.  

“Now I know what some people who are reading this ms. on-line are thinking now– Widaen is just ranting with his ventriloquist dummy, a smart, likable, sometimes cruel skeleton, using this crude literary device to vent and rant about current events.”  

Not an unfair charge, I suppose.  

“Unless, of course, you consider the deeper implications of this part of my life story.   I was hungry, raised my status enough that my children never knew hunger.  I can say that, or you can have my skeleton say that, or however you want to put it.   Few people alive and poor today can have the same expectation in America.  Do you get this?  Do you truly grasp how fucking bad and fucked up this is?   People in poverty are fucked, their children, who had no say in the matter, are almost all doomed to be fucked in perpetuity.

 “The only people who prosper at this moment in American history are the wealthy, the investor class, most of the richest of whom got the bulk, if not all of their great fortunes, the old fashioned way, by inheritance.  Talk about a right to feel superior.  Their life, in a wrongful death action, is worth thousands, or millions, of times the value of the life of a poor person who dies in identical circumstances.  You can tell them about the value of the life of that busboy who died in Windows on the World compared to the lives of the millionaire financial guys who died with him.

“And it has always been thus, it’s only that now it’s been smoothed into a so-called ideology, justified.  A rich person, no matter how shiftless and dissolute, is still respectable.  A poor person who takes any form of government assistance is a lazy parasite, an immoral taker, someone who feels ‘entitled’ to the lavish $600 monthly benefit for their ‘disability’ that the rest of us have to pay for, or the monthly $150 some of them get for food.

“You’ve always been, or often been, a hyperbolist, so let’s set out your hyperbolic formulation of this.  Leaving aside the terrible failings of Communism in practice, the mass-murder in China under Mao and the Soviet Union under Stalin, the corruption of the party aparatchiks and so on, Capitalism and Communism are always posited as two polar opposite philosophies of the world.  

“In the war between Capitalism and Communism, Capitalist ideology accepts as a cost of individual freedom that a certain number of people, a large number, maybe most, will be fucked, some a gently, others roughly, so that a few of us can own everything.  The Communist ideal is more collective, based on the right of every person to enjoyment of basic dignity and freedoms, a just society being more of a social priority than concentrating fabulous wealth in the hands of a tiny group of modern day aristocrats and the perpetuation of a huge, impoverished, permanent underclass. 

“Then you introduce fascism which, in its German form, actually brought back good old slave labor on a massive scale.  Corporations that did business with the Nazis were given access to a slave labor force, an unscrupulous Capitalist’s wet dream– no minimum wage, no health insurance, pensions, sick pay, work ’em to death, toss ’em, order replacements.  

“You go so far as to argue that the Nazis actually won the war, ideologically, in that America moved much further toward their philosophy, governing subject to the demands of a ruthless unelected clique, its methods of mass propaganda and management of public opinion, business and political supremacy over citizens rights, than it ever did toward Marxism’s meritocratic from each according to their ability to each according to their needs.  

“After the war you had Nazis like fucking General Reinhard Gehlen, and his handpicked SS and Gestapo contractors, drafted into what would become the CIA.  None of the SS or Gestapo cronies were tried at Nuremberg, they became wealthy Americans with new false identities instead, because they were rabid anti-Communists.  Gehlen and his entire team got immunity, citizenship, nice houses, got in on the ground floor of the Commie fighting CIA — it was more important to win the Cold War, even if it took actual Nazis to help us do it.

“So, I suppose I have to agree that you live in an increasingly Nazi-like country, Elie.  Suck it up and try to make the best of it.  It’s unlikely that this clown, the petulant, bullshit-spouting cancerous orange chicken come home to roost, will actually carry out his hate threats and build detention centers and torture and killing facilities.   Most likely he’ll just make it easier for his friends to enjoy endless forced sex on the rest of you powerless bastards.  Nothing to get all pissy about.  Nobody likes a whiner, Elie.”  

Then, the skeleton winked, got comfortable and went back to sleep.

Eli told me with pride, more than once, in the context of a story of what a tough son of a bitch he’d always been, what his father had said about him.  

“My father used to say ‘he would have been a gangster, but he don’t hev it in the blutt’,” and he would laugh, possibly at the thought of how much wealthier and more powerful he might have been if he’d had that criminal gene pulsing in him somewhere.  

I never knew if the pride was because his father recognized his basic goodness or because his father saw what a bad ass his first born was.

“Interesting question,” said the skeleton alertly. “hard to say which he would have been prouder of.  You know, as far as you, I always said you were extremely ethical, and had a good, if idiosyncratic, character.” 

Yeah, I remember that.  Didn’t help much when it came time to have your rage discharged on me, but I do recall you saying that I was a highly moral person and all that.   Strikes me about the same now, years later, as the remarkable chat we had during your last night on earth.  

“Think of it like this, Elie, you were a much better instrumentalist that I ever was (I didn’t play an instrument, after all), and as good an improviser, and you stood by my bed as I expressed my regrets and didn’t indulge yourself to play even a single note of a solo.  That’s called restraint.  You kept the beat and adjusted the accompaniment to whatever mood I struck, backed my vocals seamlessly.  The mood was the blues all the way, but sometimes very dark.  And you were like Django’s rhythm section, just pumping that heartbeat of a pompe, as the frogs call it.”

What the fuck, man?  I know what you’re saying, but you would never talk like this.   

“I know, Elie,” said the skeleton.

“You know, Elie,” said the skeleton, “in a way, the more compelling you make this manuscript, the more aggravating it’s going to be for you as you try to find an agent to help you find a publisher so you can both get paid for it.” 

I’ve thought about that, obviously, but I’m not going there right now.  One of the big themes of this story is your tireless and exhausting insistence that people cannot change their nature in any fundamental way.  Intimately related: your belief that, once a line is crossed, one can never forgive.

“Well, there are times never to forgive.  You’ve done the same thing yourself, numerous times, you know where that line is, you know exactly where it is,” the skeleton said quickly.  

There are times not to forgive, we learn through aggravating experience, but there are also, most importantly, times to forgive.   When someone truly repents, we should forgive.  As we grow and change we learn the difference.  

“Well, I’ll grant you that this argument was a major theme of our relationship, and one I was pretty much on the losing end of, as it turned out. It really did make me feel like shit as I was dying.   I have to tell you, I was surprised and impressed by how you stood by my deathbed and heard my confession like a compassionate priest.   I had still been a little afraid of a fight,” said the skeleton.

 There never was a point to all the fighting.  

“You had every right to be angry at me, God knows I did enough damage to you and your sister’s lives,” said the skeleton.

Pointless, truly.  

“Well, at least you got to hear, right before the buzzer, that you’d been pretty much right all along and I’d been the intractable asshole, not you,” said the skeleton.  

Yes, very comforting, as you can imagine.  

“Well, not ideal, I’ll grant you that, but, as they used to say when I was alive ‘better late than never,'” the skeleton gave a smile that could also have been a silent scream.  

One more conversation would have been nice, I suppose.  

“Well, that’s true.  Now you’re stuck writing this book.  I guess the joke is on you,” the skeleton turned his head.  “I’ll get to have the last word after all.”  

Sure you will, dad.

The skeleton sat back up, burning with a few thoughts to add.

“You remember me telling you how I felt I never had enough money to make sure mom would be taken care of?  She’d look at the statements, our monthly expenses, the Social Security and pension checks, and tell me I was crazy, that we had plenty of money.  To me it was never enough.  I was always trying to somehow get more money for her so she’d never have to worry about anything after I died,” said the skeleton.

“Turned out she didn’t have anything to worry about, except for loneliness and the cancer that was eating her from the inside out.   But leaving aside the deeper question of what humans ultimately really have to fear, versus what we spend our time worrying about, is there an amount of money that we can say is enough for our every need?  You know, once we have X amount we stop worrying about our physical safety and comfort?

“Poverty is growing in our country, the richest country the world has ever known.   The income for a family in poverty is kept artificially low, for statistical and ‘entitlement’ purposes.  You don’t want to say 45% of the country lives in poverty, if you can define poverty very precisely and have the number come out much lower.  

“If your family tried actually living on that poverty line income they would either be hungry all the time or eating as many empty calories as they could swallow at emporiums of fat, salt and sugar like Mickey D’s, as black customers nattily rebranded the international fast food mega-chain.  A diet of junk food and a shortened life of obesity, heart disease, diabetes– or delay gratification and save your fucking tofu marshmallow so the experimenter will give you two as a reward.    

“We’re programmed to believe that someone who has a billion dollars is literally worth more than someone who has a few thousand dollars, is worth infinitely more than a person who has no dollars.  This programming happens in many ways.  You have, for example, the occasional high profile billionaire philanthropist, like the current pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.  She got her billions the old fashioned way, she married the son of the founder of Amway, a guy worth 5.1 billion dollars.  

“Her baby brother, by the way, is described in Wikipedia as an American businessman, philanthropist and former Navy SEAL.  Erik Prince is the philanthropist’s name.  His primary philanthropy appears to be founding the benevolent outfit formerly known as Blackwater, the expensive private mercenary army that protected our troops and diplomats in Iraq and also patrolled the streets of flooded New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to make sure there was no looting.

 “Anyway, his big sister, Betsy DeVos, is a firm believer in the right of people to choose the schools their children attend and an advocate of vouchers, transferring tax money from public schools to the private ventures that compete with the failing public schools.  What is her expertise in education?   5.1 billion dollars and unflagging support of her party’s political campaigns and their freedom agenda.  

“It’s like Bill Gates and his initiatives in the same direction– the arrogant monopolist never set foot in a public school as a student.  But he knows best, look at how much money he made!  Could the best principal of a public school ever do anything like that?  No, not if their life depended on it, so shut up.”  

Jesus, dad, calm down.  

“Or, what?  I’ll have a heart attack?  You know you want me to lay this out here.  Somehow you feel it will carry more force, coming from a dead man, than from a live man.  If you can call what you’re doing living,” the skeleton approximated a wink.  

“Best I can do without an eyelid, Elie,” said the skeleton.  

“The question of how much money does even the greediest person need is rnever asked.  It’s an American right to have unlimited wealth, it’s the American Dream.  Nobody but an angry class-warrior crank would suggest that a billionaire is greedy, or selfish, or in any way not praiseworthy, just for trying to double their fortune, as any rich person would naturally try to do, as anyone has the right to do.  

“Your new president, the richest in history, if not also the most selfish and childish, is proposing a cabinet whose total wealth is over $14,000,000,000, that’s fourteen billion, with a ‘b’. The best cabinet money can buy, you might say,” said the skeleton, through gritted teeth.  

Really, dad, you have to calm down.  

“As he has every right to appoint, as the president who won three key swing states, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and their 46 deciding Electoral College votes, by a total of 40,000 votes, or 1/30th of 1% (like him and his cabinet) of the total votes cast in an election he lost by 2,700,000 votes.   They keep adjusting these numbers, and it appears the final tally may be closer to 76,000 votes in those three states– or 1/15 of 1%.   A victory ‘mandate’ he calls ‘historic’ and a ‘landslide’.  America, America, God shed… whatever.   He said the election was rigged, and that America is a laughing stock.  Right and right.   You’re the one who has to live with it, Elie, I’m just sayin’….”  

I don’t say you’re wrong, but Jeez.  

“Jeez, indeed.  How is it you’re not hollering, snarling and howling?” said the skeleton.

I am, it’s just that, like in a horror movie, my mouth is open, but no sound is coming out.

“Acquisition and hoarding are human instincts that go back to our earliest forebears,” said the skeleton.  “The ones who survived acquired and hoarded as a hedge against the terror of want. Relative abundance meant survival in dark, cold days when other humanoids were willing to kill you to take the haunch you were about to eat.

“Longing for luxury was tied in to that, the physically bolstered illusion of being rich enough not have to worry about your security. Those who were best at acquiring and holding on to things became rich and lived the easiest lives.

“Life, which is frequently a tightrope walk under the best of  circumstances, is eternally fearful in poverty, like the insecurity of the cave in  a world of hungry predators.  The constant press of needs you can’t meet goads you to a hopeless, gnawing desperation.  Hoarding isn’t an option when you’re poor.   Picture the terror of night time in any favela, ghetto, inner city, rural area.   The least principled will never hesitate to bash your skull for that $300 that might be in your pillow case.  No point saving a cookie when it will only be stolen from you as soon as you let your guard down.

“Your sister told you about that experiment where they demonstrated that the ability to delay gratification was the biggest single predictor of future success.  They’d give young kids a marshmallow and tell them that if they waited five minutes, and didn’t eat the marshmallow, they’d get two marshmallows.  The experimenters then left the room and watched from behind a one- way mirror as many of the kids ate their marshmallow.  

“When the scientists went back into the room, a lot of the marshmallows were gone.   The kids who’d had the restraint to not eat the marshmallow all got another.  Some kids now had no marshmallows, others had two.  They gave each kid without a marshmallow another one and repeated the process.  

“After the second five minutes the kids who’d been able to save the marshmallows the first time each had four.   A couple of the kids, having seen it done in the first round, managed not to eat their marshmallow in the second round and they each now had two.   The rest of the kids had eaten two marshmallows, had none, and were done. 

“They tracked these groups of kids through school, the best gratification delayers versus the kids who needed instant gratification.   As one might expect, across the board the kids who’d had the discipline to not eat the marshmallow, for the sake of future gain, avoided self-destructive behaviors, did better in school, went on to get college degrees and better, higher paying jobs.  

“So some of this is hard-wired, Elie, a part of survival.  Those better able to strategize, and roll smartly with contingencies, always have a better chance to survive and thrive than those who are at the mercy of their immediate needs.  That’s one of the true horrors of poverty, how it bends the will toward instant gratification.  The children of the poor are rarely taught how strategically important it is to delay gratification sometimes.  Their parents and grandparents have no idea how it’s done, have no wisdom in this regard to impart to their offspring.

“After a childhood like mine, and my brother and I were hungry a lot, believe me, being in the Army was like being at a great buffet for every meal.  I couldn’t believe how much food there was.  There’d be signs over the counter that said ‘Take All You Want but Eat All You Take.’   So I did.  I must have gained thirty pounds in the army, and none of it was fat.  It went on from there, eating whatever I wanted was a sign of my freedom from poverty, from want, from hunger.  

“I had mom buy steaks for dinner every night, we usually had steak, if you’ll recall.   I didn’t care for chicken that much, so when you guys ate chicken, or lamb chops, or fish sticks, mom would broil me a steak.  Eating steak was a sign of my success, it was, literally, the taste of success.  A chargrilled steak from my barbecue under the cherry tree in my own grassy backyard there on a quiet, tree-lined street in suburban Queens?  Man, oh man!  

“As a kid in Peekskill, I never allowed myself to dream of such wealth.   I used to resent you and your sister as spoiled little middle class fucks complaining about nothing while I was busting my ass working two jobs to give you, compared to what I was given, a castle to grow up in, and a steak dinner every night.  Do you know how many times I had steak before I went into the Army?  

“Which made it all the more traumatic when I shoved that raw chopped meat into Paul’s mouth.   That was our equivalent of steak, and we’d have it almost never — chopped meat served in a patty.  You can be sure Paul’s drool was wiped off that meat and it was cooked.  I didn’t get to eat any of it that night.

“But anyway, Elie, the point I was making is that everyone knows if you’re working for money, if you’re getting a check at the end of the job, whatever else you may be doing, you’re not wasting your time, you’re being productive.  Everybody understands working for pay. It’s a necessity and, besides, there’s morality attached to making an honest living.

“Let’s leave aside for now soul-fulfilling work people truly love to do, or work that saves people’s lives, or does something equally important, most people don’t get that.  I’m talking regular, stinking work.  But, whatever the work, while you’re doing it for money you have nothing to worry about except for the job you’re doing.  It all makes sense, focuses the mind away from the self to the demands of the paying work.  It’s the most reasonable possible way to spend your time.

“I know that’s part of why this is bugging you so much now, how long and hard it is trying to write this book with no assurance that, however good it might turn out to be, you’ll ever see a dollar for these hundreds and hundreds of hours of work.  You want to get paid already.  I get that.  But here’s something else to think about, and it ties into our longtime historical and political conversation– two areas where we have virtually no essential disagreement.  

“We are given opportunities sometimes, even ones that may be impossible to see at the time, and they either make it or break it for us, depending on how they shake out.  You recall when your mother and I forbade you to go see Fail Safe with Michael Siegel when you were about eight?  It was a controversial adult movie that ended with the nuclear destruction of the world, in gritty black and white.

“You were a kid who had nightmares about the natives from Tarzan movies and were terrified of dying in a flood like all the people Noah didn’t allow on the ark.  You’d just vomited from seeing those Nazi clips of the death camps.  I think your mother and I made a reasonable call on not letting you see a movie that was going to give you nightmares.  

“But, of course, our opinions didn’t mean anything to you, you always knew best, and Michael Siegel had the money, I guess, since your allowance wasn’t enough to afford a ticket to the Utopia, and you said ‘screw you,’ and left the house to go across the street to Michael’s.  Then you two walked down to the Turnpike and went to the movies.  

“I guess it was a double feature, and you lost track of the time, and by the time you got home for dinner, dinner was long over.  Your mother and I were furious.  Your mother was actually in a rage.  We punished you harshly.  Do you remember the punishment?  

Yeah, it was the best thing you and mom ever did for me: no TV for a year.    

“Well, you turned the lemons into a lemon pie, then.  At the time the year-long TV ban really was the equivalent of a torture, as far as we could see.   With no TV you spent more time in your room, more time throwing a ball off the side of the house, more time outside, more time reading and drawing.  I guess it taught you that TV is mostly bullshit.  Very addictive and sometimes compelling bullshit, but mostly bullshit really.  

“You soon discovered that nothing happened to you if you missed Gilligan’s Island, or Mannix, or My Mother the Car, or Ronald Reagan as a maudlin Grover Cleveland Alexander on the Million Dollar Movie, or whatever precious must-see, advertising-laden gem was being broadcast at any given time.”

It was like a year off the grid.  It taught me a lot, now that you mention it.  One thing it instilled in me was the conviction that I have the inner resources, and love of things like drawing and writing, to engage myself almost all of the time.  A side note: I never had a bad dream about the nuclear destruction of the world after Fail Safe.

“Good for you, then.   Here’s the point I’m trying to make.  Most of us have to work, it’s a simple fact of life.  In addition to the need to earn a livelihood, a lot of people are terrified of not feeling ‘productive’, which is how they feel if they’re not making money.  They don’t feel right, even if they can otherwise afford it, indulging their imaginations instead of buckling down and taking care of real paying business.  

“Some work well into their retirement years to avoid their dread of all that leisure time, idle hands and all that.  I was like that to a large extent. My brother put on a suit every morning years after he retired, sat in an office chair in front of his computer reading the paper.   Some people win the lottery and still go to work every day.  They need it, and it’s seen as virtuous to work, even if you have millions of dollars in the bank.  Others, usually mocked as lacking ambition and character, are content to live their life without making a living, if they can manage to.

“You fall into the latter camp, and you stay busy, I’ll say that for you.  It could have still gone well for you.   You could have inherited a half a million dollars when your mother and I died, if things had gone differently on Wall Street in 2008.  Of course, you could also have inherited a million, or, like some of your friends, three million or twenty million.  Your unhappy friend Friedman probably got two or three million when his mother, your friend Sophie, died at 98 a couple of years back, not that it made him any happier.

“On the other hand, Florence Siegel, artist, intellectual and Leftist, one of your big role models, didn’t leave her daughters anything– Mike had never made much money, he worked for his father-in-law then taught people how to play Bach– they didn’t care about money.  They had a reverse mortgage at the end, but continued to live into their late nineties, so they outlived their money.  Poor people never leave any kind of inheritance, they’re lucky to have a burial fund when they die.

“Most middle class people in our ruthless capitalist system are driven, not unreasonably, by fear of a desperate future.  Many are obsessed with, or at least very disciplined about, making, saving, investing and maximizing the interest earned by their money.  For a variety of reasons.  

“The point is, if you feel like you have things to do every day, you’re willing to live modestly, aren’t envious of what others have, and you have life-sustaining values beyond making money and acquiring the things money buys, even a fairly modest inheritance can make you feel rich.  You may not be secure from a horrific wipe-out on the crooked roulette wheel that is modern financialized capitalism, but then, neither are your friends who have ten times more.

“I’m not setting this up as the old Philosophy 101 trick hypothetical– which would you rather be a pig satisfied or Socrates dissatisfied? If you choose the pig, in that moment of satisfaction, as the question suggests, you lose.  How about if we take away all the things a pig loves?  With Socrates, he has his amazing mind to keep him occupied, even transfixed, even if he was locked alone in an empty room.  The pig, with fewer inner resources, is screwed without the things that make him happy.  It’s catnip for twenty year olds looking for wisdom.  It’s not my point here, though.  

“There is, I think you’d agree, a talent for happiness, like there are talents for all sorts of thing.  The source is mysterious, some have claimed recently that there’s a genetic component, what you refer to as ‘the fucking happiness gene’.  Talent is always a mystery.  A talent for conversation, for example, which comes largely from being a good listener with a wealth of empathetic, sometimes humorous, ways to respond — where does the ability to listen well and empathize come from?

“The talent for happiness, I suppose, can be cultivated, like other skills, or it may be mostly innate, or instilled– or not– early in life.   You see some people have it to a larger degree than others, the ability to be excited about life, engaged with the people and things they love.  With a talent for happiness, a small gift can make a deep impression.   Without that talent, even the largest gift will never do much but increase the emptiness, most likely.

 “As the last part of this thought experiment, and to illustrate the limitations on wealth as a solution to any fundamental human problem, outside of hunger, shelter and medical care, let’s imagine that when you turned twenty-five your mother and I had released a ten million dollar trust fund to you.  

“We would also have appointed a smart financial advisor to work with you on managing the portfolio.  You’d visit this guy periodically and get whatever you needed for your living expenses.   Think of how you would have lived.  Not that much differently from the way you live now, most likely.  You might have a nicer guitar, a couple of fine calligraphy pens, a nicer winter coat, a couple more pairs of good shoes, but I’m certain you wouldn’t suddenly crave a life of luxury.  I’m also sure you would be generous with charitable contributions.

“You would’ve hired a couple of experts to get funding for your non-profit and seen your student-run workshop alive in the world as a sustainable program.  You might have started writing a far inferior version of a book like this thirty years ago, if you hadn’t been scrambling to pay the rent, repay student loans and so forth.

“Now imagine you’d grown up with a grandfather who made many millions of dollars in a bare knuckled way.  Your father had taken his modest fifty million dollar inheritance and, with a single minded focus on increasing his wealth, parlayed it into a billion dollars.   You were born the son of a billionaire and grew up in an elite world with other very rich kids.   Would you have any reason to understand any of the things you know now, the understandings you value the most?   You would understand only one thing for sure: you had done very wisely not to have been born to some poor fuck and you were very wisely living accordingly.”  

“You can take that to Goldman Sachs, Elie,” said the skeleton, collapsing back into his dirt bed.