The Queen of Versailles

Before the crash in 2008 David Siegel was the king of the time share business. “Everyone wants to be rich; the next best thing is to feel rich," was his mantra. He sold glamour to people who were used to staying in motels. You purchased a mortgage not on a house, but on an “as if existence,” comprised of say one week a year in a Westgate resort. Lauren Greenfield’s film The Queen of Versailles recounts the building of the largest house in the United States. In place of their 26,000 foot residence in Orlando, Siegel and his third wife Jackie, a one time model, used the proceeds from Siegel’s fabulously profitable business to build a 90,000 foot structure which would be larger than The White House which would include such toys as a baseball field, a bowling alley and a children’s theatre. Come to think of it, this doesn’t sound all that outrageous considering the ubiquity of home entertainment centers with their oversized flat screened televisions and bazaar of bizarre electronic gadgets. But then the market fell and it was plain that Siegel merely epitomized the condition of his customers, who like him were purchasing their dreams with cheap loans from banks. In one segment from the pre-crash era the pitch is explained. Most of the modest clientele are mooches who visit the properties to get freebees. They’re the kind of people who have to be made to feel they have gotten over on you. So it’s a vicious cycle with the con man and the conned all becoming dupes of something out of their control, an economy in which the cards would turn out to be stocked against them. In his The Theory of the Leisure Class, the  sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term "conspicuous consumption." But what Greenfield documents is something far more extreme than mere materialism. It’s like realpolitik. Nations and individuals tend to be selfish, but then there's real evil, which is fundamentally inexplicable. David and Jackie Siegel are not just conspicuous consumers, their massive fall is fueled by an almost addictive drive to excess, resulting from a “trickle down” economics that was poisoned from the bottom up. 

The Age of Acquirius

This could very well be the beginning of a new age! If China revalues the renminbi, the two-state solution finally gains traction in the Middle East, Google acquires the rights to most of human thought, and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il finally acknowledges his polymorphic perversity and stops trying to silence critics of his dictatorship, then we can only assume that the problem of cold fusion will soon be cracked. Imagine a world in which energy is no longer something that major powers fight over. As Freud once said about analysis, once it’s over, the real problems begin. If we accept Marx’s analysis, the drive for economic hegemony infuses international politics. Without the struggle for resources, life will lose its meaning and many world leaders will walk around with sunken eyes, like Max Von Sydow losing his game of chess with Death in The Seventh Seal. 

   

What will this new age be called? The Age of Acquirius. When Wall Street is battered as it was in the past year, analysts say that the market is making an adjustment. Wasn’t Period of Adjustment the name of a Tennessee Williams play, later made into a movie starring Jane Fonda? But what is this new age? Thorsten Veblen’s conspicuous consumption is still an apt description of the overarching materialism that has spread exponentially in our time. Our economies have grown from the horse drawn chariot of supply and demand to the nuclear powered rockets of computer-generated algorithms. Profits of some hedge funds exceed the GNP of modest countries, while England is referred to as Iceland on the Thames and the entire country of Greece faces the equivalent of a massive foreclosure proceeding. An explosion of information has awakened whole continents of knowledge, yet newspapers are defunct and the democratization of truth via outlets like Wikipedia has crushed the notion of a moral center. Is this the paradigm shift that Thomas Kuhn was alluding to in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions?  Yeats’s oft-quoted lines ring true once again: “The best lack all conviction and the worst/ Are filled with passionate intensity.”