Eating the rich? We’re barely tweaking the rich | Canada Voices

Adrian Lee is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.

This weekend, Jeff Bezos enjoyed a very Amazon Basics wedding – not because his nuptials spared any expense, but because they somehow seemed cheap all the same.

In a monument to nouveau riche gaudiness, one of the world’s wealthiest men spent more than $63-million to be wed in front of hundreds of their nearest and dearest celebrities in Italy’s iconic sinking city. Even Thomas Mann couldn’t have imagined a Venice holiday this depressing.

Predictably, social media had a field day with whatever scraps were tossed our way. There was an ugly wedding invitation that looked inspired by Microsoft Word clip-art; an office-grey carpet lining the ceremony; a fratty foam party held on a superyacht; a shrink-wrapped bride wearing gems the way the rest of us wear sunscreen.

What do you get for the oligarch who has it all? Maybe a wedding that wasn’t planned by algorithm.

If this sort of snideness comes naturally or feels delicious to you, that’s because it’s the postmodern condition. You have to get your jokes off, you gotta post through it – what other option is there, when you feel powerless?

What does a bride wear at the most talked about wedding of the year?

Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s extravaganza dubbed ‘wedding of the century’ kicks off in Venice

Our popular culture has mirrored this, dominated as it has been by comforting critiques of monstrous wealth. The White Lotus may be the signature TV series of our times – a glamourous soap opera exploring the greed and pettiness of the one-per-cent – but it feels like just about every other show is grappling with, making fun of, or at least displaying the moral vacancy of the very monied: Your Friends and Neighbors, The Righteous Gemstones, And Just Like That, Loot, Big Little Lies. So many people are trying to skewer the rich, it’s a marvel that Canada’s economy hasn’t been fixed by all the demand for lumber.

But the Bezos wedding’s brazen extravagance is precisely the signal that ridiculing the wealthy and powerful, who seem to have immunized themselves from shame, isn’t having its intended effect. And while The White Lotus earns plaudits for its social commentary, its only measurable real-world impact is driving more demand for the luxury tourism it lampoons. When pop culture is telling us that it’s good enough to generate nothing more than a “Ha! Got ‘em!”, satire and sarcasm feels increasingly like an impotent response.

Take, as a more recent example, the HBO movie Mountainhead. Written by Jesse Armstrong – whose show Succession made him the poet laureate of disaffected wealth – the manic parody of Silicon Valley overlords succumbs to the growing instinct for erecting and knocking down paper-thin caricatures of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg.

Calling Mountainhead a send-up of tech billionaires is like saying Sharknado contains subtle wisdom about ocean safety. Unless you weren’t aware they might see themselves as demigods – the hopped-up uber-rich accessing geopolitical power? Could you imagine? – the movie plays like a reaffirming smugness generator for the already-converted: A couple hours where you get to feel a little superior amid the bleakness, letting you think that knowing winks are sufficient.

Satire should expose absurdities through art, but when the real world is even more absurd, it’s no wonder that modern institutions of political commentary have felt defanged. The Onion has lost its bite. Stephen Colbert, once at the vanguard of sending up the right, has since become a smiling valet to the A-list. The Daily Show and John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight are pulpits for their own flock. Comedy in these contexts was meant to make emperors feel nude; Today, it feels like just another doughy offering amid all the bread and circuses.

As David Foster Wallace said in a 1993 interview: “Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, then what do we do?”

We’re no closer to answering his question, three decades later. We scramble for the cheap calories of quick catharsis against easy villains, or for yet another self-protective layer of detached irony, when the braver place to be is in uncomfortable conflict with the world as it is.

It’s easy to mock the cartoonishly wealthy Bezos’s garish tastes – but that doesn’t sit with the hard question of how, exactly, one person could get so rich in the first place. Class critiques miss their mark when people can decide they’re always about other, richer people – no one is more other than Jeff Bezos – so our culture’s most facile ones often fail as a result.

“Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own,” said the Gulliver’s Travels satirist Jonathan Swift, “which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”

So let’s dare to offend more, or at least resist the easy laugh. Making fun of Bezos’s taste level might be fun – but it’s not doing anything.