Culture

What Old Money Looks Like in America, and Who Pays For It


There’s a term that has fallen out of fashion which was once used to describe the consequence-free decadence that afflicts America’s more unruly heirs: “Wasp rot.” Two decades ago, it was used to describe the wayward son George W. Bush, before he failed spectacularly upward into the Oval Office. It’s also a fitting description of the scene in Ellison’s “Dick, Dan, Doug, The Everglades Club, Palm Beach, Florida, 1990” (2019), in which we are shown the title’s alliteratively named bros kitted out in golf gear and reverently contemplating a putt, while an unnamed figure, another young blueblood with his back to the camera, insouciantly pisses on the putting green. It’s a small transgression, innocuous really, and yet the picture reeks of the kind of boys-will-be-boys entitlement that is used to excuse the worst excesses of the overly privileged. The work is taken from Ellison’s series of imagined vignettes of the lives of the DeVos family, whose eldest son, the pictured Dick, married Betsy (née Prince), the famously underqualified future Secretary of Education. Of course, what is passed down is not just money, or the keys to luxury automobiles and fine Swiss timepieces. It’s power, too. This tradition benefits a lucky few, but the rot is inherited by us all.



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