5/9/2014

As he was leaving, he got on one knee and he looked at me with a very respectable imitation of intimacy.   “Look,” he said, “these are some very wealthy people who have the potential to help the university out in a number of ways.  If it felt like I was using you as a prop, it’s because I was using you as a prop.  You were good at it, too, so thanks.”

The associate vice-president of rich person handholding gladhanded away through the live auction portion of the dinner, the part where wealthy alumni proved to one another how truly wealthy they are but shouting out larger and larger numbers for less and less valuable things.  The signed volleyball was not worth $1000, but the right to yell, “$1000” in response to a signed volleyball certainly was.  Besides, it was for a good cause, it’s contributions like these that ensure that the university has enough money to continue to send its administration on such important trips as this one.  You make them feel important for having gone to your school and in return they make you feel important for going there.  $3200 dollars for a wine party it is, then.

I found myself smiling around the punchlines, laughing at and not with people.  The transparency of the whole thing was incredible to me.  We pretend that the wealthy are classy, that’s where we get the word even, but there’s nothing especially civilized about a dick-measuring contest, whether the units are inches or thousands of dollars.  This devolved into that so quickly, though, before they even got to the auction, with every introduction featuring vacation homes in Vermont and first-class flights to Europe.  Above the urinal there was a sign saying this was one of the best ten steakhouses in the nation, with the asterisk leading to a list that lacked its name.  This didn’t feel like an accident.

The financier I sat next to was transparently unhappy.  He paid an awful lot of money for the right to sit at the table he was sitting at but it really didn’t seem to be bringing him joy--instead he told an undergraduate about how annoying it is to commute in from New Jersey and how colleges really ought to teach kids how to think.  That’s what he’d paid for, really--for someone to pretend that his Hallmark graduation card advice was beautiful and life changing.  He got what he wanted, I guess.  But I was the knife with the blade that retracts into itself, I was the static television of an IKEA kitchen, I was the plastic piece of fruit with a bite already taken out of it:  A pretty good prop, maybe, but let’s not pretend it was the real thing.