Rich Are “Odious,” Says Column in Newspaper Owned by Billionaire John Henry

Complains ultrawealthy are insufficiently charitable

John Henry owns the Boston Red Sox (who play at Fenway Park, pictured here) and the Boston Globe. Is he disgusting too? Photo: The Editors.

One of the pleasures of living in Boston is the opportunity occasionally to grab a lunch or a coffee with Alex Beam, whose book reviews you can sometimes read in the Wall Street Journal. He’s gracious, good company and a stylish writer, and he can also write funny, usually intentionally, but sometimes, as in this instance I’m about to tackle, maybe not so intentionally.

I speak of Beam’s latest, which appears in the Boston Globe under the headline, “In the Gilded Age 2.0, the rich aren’t just different — they’re intolerable.” The subheadline is “The ultrawealthy used to leave legacies. Now they leave middle fingers.”

The column begins, “The rich are different from you and me. They are far more odious. In our lifetimes we have seen moneyed Americans retreat to gated communities, plant their fannies in private jets to avoid the indignity of airport lines…”

It goes on, “There was a time when the ultra-wealthy burnished their legacies with extravagant museum donations (e.g. Frick, Whitney, Guggenheim), university endowments, or massive gifts of land. Did you enjoy bicycling along the carriageways in Acadia National Park last summer? Don’t forget to thank the Standard Oil monopoly and its inheritor, John D. Rockefeller Jr., for his gift to the nation….I see that the Trump family’s collective net worth has topped $10 billion. So far, their legacy to the nation has been an oligarch-funded ballroom and the raised middle finger.”