Money can't buy everything. Can it?
by Mad Dog

    A few years later we discover there’s still a little room way in the back, right between where we stored the image of our third grade teacher’s face—which we’re saving just in case we run across her on a dark street and still want to seek revenge for “dessert has two esses because we always want seconds”—and the place where that charmingly useless tidbit has been taking up room for way too many years.

    In middle age we find that we’ve actually overfilled our head and start having trouble keeping its contents organized. Names get accidentally filed with geographic facts, the multiplication tables splinter into pieces and scatter into dark recesses we forgot we had—and would prefer to keep that way, and your social security number starts to look like the drug store’s telephone number. Or maybe that’s your phone number. It’s hard to say.

    Not long after that it all starts to dribble out like so much cerebral incontinence in need of a Depends until one morning you wake up and suddenly your head’s as empty as the day you were born. Luckily it’s so empty you don’t even realize it’s empty, though you do keep wondering where that strange echo is coming from.

    They also told us “Money can’t buy everything” and they were wrong about that too. True, maybe it can’t buy love, happiness, or peace of mind, but it can buy a political office, and once you have that the other pieces fall into place.

    Take Jon Corzine, the political newcomer who picked himself up a nice little New Jersey Senate seat by spending $60 million, an all-time record. True that sounds like a lot of money, especially for a seat from a state like New Jersey, but it’s not. Amazon.com lost that much in only ten days during the last quarter of 2000.

    This shows both how smart Corzine is and how bad the management is at Amazon.com. If they had any brains at all they would have spent the last quarter’s loss on a political campaign instead of trying to get people to buy, well, everything. The money still would have been spent, but at least nine of them would be sitting next to Corzine as we speak.

    Of course if they had any ambition at all they would have pooled the money so one of them would be president. So what if they have no experience, they have money, and that worked for George Bush. He popped up out of nowhere, flashed a resume with less political experience than any presidential candidate in the last hundred years, and managed to raise more money in the first four months of his campaign than anyone before him had been able to do in two years. Now, thanks to those donations, he has a new job and house. The management at Amazon.com may end up with the same things, though at the rate they’re going it won’t be voluntary.

    Now before you go getting your jock strap in a knot over the huge amount, keep in mind that Rodriguez will be paid that money over ten years. And it’s not like he’s getting it for doing nothing—he’s going to have to play a fun game he loves a couple of times a week to earn it.

    If he’s smart, and I suspect he is since anyone who can extort—I mean, negotiate that kind of money must be, he’ll sock most of it away. After all, a baseball career can’t last forever. If he plays his cards right he should have enough money when he retires to buy himself, oh, as many as four Senate seats.

    The question begs: Can money buy happiness? Apparently many women think so. A recent poll found that 57 percent of those surveyed said their dream in life is to be rich. They probably figure that with enough money they wouldn’t have to work, would have more clothes than they could ever hope to wear, and could afford to buy all the bluefin tuna they want. And if they’re shopping for it in Tokyo they’re going to need it.

    It seems someone in Tokyo recently bought a 444-lb bluefin tuna at auction for $173,200. This comes to $390 a pound, or too damned much in metric. Lest you think this is an anomaly, in Singapore a prize-winning discus fish was recently stolen from a shopping mall and its owner says it’s worth $58,000. Since discus fish only weigh a few ounces, this means it costs about 595 times more than the bluefin tuna, and you don’t even eat discus fish, you just throw them across a grassy field during the Olympics.

    There are definitely things money can’t buy. If you’re Anna Nicole Smith it can’t buy respectability. If you’re Pee Wee Herman it can’t buy a second chance. Or the answer to why Hugh Grant got one and you didn’t. And if you’re Bill Gates it can’t buy your way out of the Justice Department’s antitrust suit. True, he consoled himself by buying the three South American countries he didn’t already own, but that’s just not the same thing.

    The other thing money can’t buy is more room in your head to store all this information. But that’s okay. It would probably just be stashed next to something else They said, like “Everyone’s wearing them this year.” And we know where that got you.

 ©2001 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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