Let Them Eat...Fancy Feast

I was going to entitle this “Whatever Happened to Compassion,” but a moment’s reflection made me realize there probably never was much in the way of compassion. There certainly wasn’t much in the days of Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun or Ivan the Terrible or Hitler or Stalin. And there certainly was none to speak of during the Colonial Period. Of course there have been rare moments of individual compassion, but I believe in general compassion is rare indeed. Given the widespread existence of the Golden Rule and other equivalents found around the world, this strikes me as strange. I once saw a photograph that I believe summed up, at least for me, the horror of the absence of compassion. This photo appeared, I think, in the well-known book, The Family of Man (a collection of Edward Steichen photographs put out by The Museum of Modern Art). It showed a sort of plump, well-fed Chinese shopkeeper sitting at her shop, and in the foreground was a naked and obviously hungry (probably starving) crying boy. I can’t say the woman was smiling, but I think she was, and the picture has haunted me ever since. I tried to find it in a first edition (1955) of this book that my wife has, but it doesn’t appear there. Either it is in the revised 1986 edition or I am wrong about where I saw it.

In any case, I was stimulated to recall it when listening to all the fuss about AIG and the obscene bonuses they recently awarded some of their employees. Most everyone is outraged at this because the company has been the recent recipient of billions of taxpayer money to bail it out, and given the dire straits of the middle class at the moment it seemed entirely inappropriate, and to me, lacking in compassion. It is as if these hot-shot traders and brokers, or whoever they are, have no understanding of the world outside of Wall Street, and thus apparently no compassion either (of course you might well think they had little in the way of common sense or decency either). As I began to think about this I was drawn also into TV commercials that also seem to lack any feelings or sense of compassion. The one that always sticks in my mind has to do with cat food. It shows someone coming out of a very fancy and expensive kitchen, where presumably the chefs have cooked up marvelously delicious meals that are then compared to Fancy Feast cat food (that, to add insult to injury, is served to an all white fancy long-haired cat in a crystal glass). It is a rather disgusting commercial at best, but I wonder how it appears to the thousands of people in the U.S. who go hungry much of the time. Then when you begin to think about it, you realize that virtually the entire world portrayed on TV has nothing to do with the lives of the poor or downtrodden, or even the middle class. I believe this results a great deal more in animosity than in stimulating envy. I recall once being in a roadside tavern where the regulars were watching some event in which everyone was dressed in tuxedos or formal gowns (it might have been the Oscars). Every time the camera would focus on someone new the bartender (a 300 pounder named, of course, “Tiny”), would growl, “look here comes another one of them assholes.” Perhaps there was some repressed envy involved, but I think not-so-repressed-hate would be more accurate (why I was in this tavern is a story for another time).

I doubt that anyone with a brain larger than a pea expected any compassion to come out of Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism.” And certainly none did. American culture, it seems to me, is shot through with the lack of compassion. This probably helps to explain the runaway greed that we have seen in the past few years (not that there was not always greed, but it seems to have become more widespread, more acceptable, and, indeed, even culturally prescribed). Think of “shop til’ you drop,” “he who has the most toys wins,” $5000 shower curtains, million dollar weddings, and so on. Conspicuous consumption has become the rule rather than the exception. Even the size and scope of the scams and thefts has grown, who previously would have even considered stealing 95 billion dollars, or paying CEO’s a hundred million a year (especially as a reward for failure). Marie Antoinette would seem to have personified the ignorance (or disinterest) of those in power for we commoners, when she famously exclaimed, “let them eat cake” (there is some doubt that she actually said this). But in any event, it eventually cost her, her head. It doesn’t appear likely that our current crop of high-level thieves, with their equivalent lack of understanding or compassion, will suffer much of anything. Even if they are forced to return the money, they will no doubt remain healthy, wealthy, but probably no wiser. What they have done is apparently legal. It’s the American way. In the meanwhile, there are probably thousands upon thousands of ravenously hungry people who would be happy to share a can of Fancy Feast , and they wouldn’t need a crystal bowl. Perhaps Congress could prescribe a week-long diet of Fancy Feast for these happy millionaires, a lesson in compassion.