Help is out there

Almost everyone I know has had a horrible week and is looking for both allies and positive moments that will re-energize them. So rather than list all the terrible things from this week—from the truly heinous to the ridiculous (Gulf of America, anyone?), I want to be positive and point, first, to some allies, and then to the incredible embodiment of hope that is the Right Rev. Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington.

I’ve never understood the ethics of being a billionaire, but one thing I’ve always believed is that if you are one, you don’t have to submit to anyone. So I was really surprised when all the tech bros bent the knee for Trump. Yeah, he could affect government contracts, but loss of contracts won’t affect billionaires’ lifestyles, etc. They have the option that someone whose livelihood is threatened by not being ‘loyal’ doesn’t have—that is, they can tell absolutely anyone to fuck off.

I was talking to my friends and family about this because I still don’t understand it. I saw last week in Paul Krugman’s post “The Pathetic Billionaires’ Club” that I’m not the only person wondering about this:

Why is this self-owning by billionaires so extraordinary? Well, ask yourself: What’s the point of being rich?

Past a certain level of wealth, it can’t really be about material things. I very much doubt that billionaires have a significantly higher quality of life than mere multimillionaires.

To the extent that there’s a valid reason for accumulating a very large fortune, I’d say that it involves freedom, the ability to live your life more or less however you want. Indeed, one definition of true wealth is having “fuck you money” — enough money to walk away from unpleasant situations or distasteful individuals without suffering a big decline in your living standards. And some very wealthy men — most obviously Mark Cuban, but I’d at least tentatively include Bill Gates and Warren Buffett — do seem to exhibit the kind of independence wealth gives you if you choose to exercise it.

My favorite political cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, wasn’t allowed to criticize that billionaire self-owning in the Washington Post. And then one of my favorite columnists, Jennifer Rubin, left. So I left, too, canceled my subscription. Rubin, along with Norm Eisen started The Contrarian on Substack, so I got a paid subscription. (They have a lot of free posts, FYI.) And Ann Telnaes also has a Substack that I subscribed to. (I still subscribe to two newspapers, both of which have done some crappy stuff, too. Ugh.)

The Contrarian has many writers and guest writers. Here’s a good example of what it offers from the article “How to Drink from a Firehose” by David Litt. Litt discusses how not to despair and to work for the good. One of his suggestions is not to weigh in on Trump (don’t ask people who disagree with you to discuss his character), but rather to use specific examples of what is going on.

For right now, if a total stranger asked me to sum up this week, I’d say something like this:

“There’s a guy named Daniel Rodriguez. On January 5th, 2020, he texted his friends ‘There will be blood.’ On January 6th, when he Back to Episodes